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Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back is a book I wrote as an evangelical, by which I mean, as someone who cares about communicating the good news (gk. evangel) among those who have not heard good news.  Right here, for example, where I live.  It is based on a certain reading of the culture in which I live.   We who have received and therfore have a responsibility to be and share good news, also have a responsibility to face up to the cultural context we operate in.  Here’s the challenge: we have a branding problem.  We who love, admire and seek to follow Jesus of Nazareth, must acknowledge that the Christian brand in America has sufferred something very like trademark infringement.
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Many pastors I know are subject to the mental cruelty of their own rumination.  Oh, it’s the bane of pastoral ministry! Rumination, like a cow chewing her cud, swallowing, regurgitating to chew some more, ad nauseum, pun intended.  It’s as unpleasant as it sounds when it happens in your head: going over and over the same thought, the same problem solving inner dialogue, the same rehearsed conversation for extended periods, ad nauseum, no fun intended.
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Phyllis Tickle, in her latest and greatest, The Words of Jesus, writes in the introduction about an “actualist” reading of the canonical gospels. Typical Tickle: lay it out and let the readers make sense of it themselves. Or perhaps lay it out as if she needs the readers’ help figuring out what she’s written. Well it hit me like a ton of basement block and I’ve been trying to make sense of it ever since. Not a “modernist” reading of the words. Not a “literalist” reading of the words. But an “actualist” reading of the words.
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One of the reasons you don’t pray more has nothing to do with your dedication to God or your capacity for self discipline or your forgetfulness in matters spiritual or your busy life. It has to do with your need to learn how to calm your praying brain. Too often you close your eyes to pray and it’s an unpleasant experience. You become more aware of your underlying anxiety. You become more subject to your grinding thoughts. You put up with it as long as you can, then open your eyes and move on to the next distraction. There are ways to calm yourself. Thankfully many ways. Here’s one: a way to present your embodied self to God, and it goes like this….
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There is a grinding inner world behind our eyes and between our ears.  Our thoughts being grist for some mill whose operator we only seem to be.  The thoughts themselves are often wrapped in anxiety, born along by fear, an unnamed and therefor wild dread, or thoughts that seem to suck the beauty out of life into the wormhole of boredom.  And this is why we pray and why we avoid prayer.  We seek to pray because of this, to escape it, or move beyond it; but when prayer simply leads us deeper into this grinding world, we avoid it.  Ecstasy is what we seek, to stand outside of all this, or within it, to peer beyond it.
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As a younger believing pray-er I got it into my skull that sensory input during prayer was somehow verboten. Even though I read the Bible through my eyes, uttered words that I could hear with my ears, nevertheless, somehow the use of the senses was restricted, or so I assumed. But life beats you up, and it either softens or hardens you, and either way it tends to wear you out, until you’re ready to loose your grip on some unexamined assumptions. So several years ago, I began to “cheat” in prayer by using my senses more intentionally. Lighting a candle, and, looking at the flame. Playing some background music that lifted my heart or calmed my nerves. Don’t make fun of me, but I found a bar of soap with myrhh and some of the other biblical oils in it. And kept it nearby for prayer. Because we’re permitted to be human while praying.
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Amy egged me on, so here’s more. The brain is where the God action is; if the body is the temple the brain is the holy of holies. The part of the brain that causes so much stress, burn-out, pre-occupation, is the overdeveloped fear-fight-flight response of the autonomic system, the amygdala, and associated structures. It’s the warning-alert system key to survival, so it’s been super-charged, but it goes overboard often. Hands get cold, heart rate increases, blood pressure rises. So much of our “ruminating” our overthinking is a response to this part of the brain doing it’s job too well. You get the nasty email from the co-worker on Friday at 5:30 and it sets you off, and you write and re-write your response to that email all weekend long in your head.
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Talking to experienced blogger Garret who suggested I distinguish between”praying brain” blog entries and  “lectio” entries.  Makes perfect sense.

On the praying brain: I love reading science, especially on the emerging understanding of what is happening in the brain during prayer, especially of the mystical variety.  Prayer is something everyone does but few people understand or have a vocabulary for what’s going on when we pray.  Much prayer is experienced by the person praying as a kind of pious anxiety: a mulling over one’s problems or the problems of those for whom we are praying with a vague sense of aiming the mulling in God’s direction.
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Psalm 7 this morning, and something accumulating or dawning already in this slow motion walk through the prayers of these psalmists. When it comes to content, how polite my prayers are in comparison to theirs.  All these years of skim reading the psalms doesn’t  do  the difference  justice.  But the discipline of lectio lets you slip into the mindset of the  psalmists.   And you realize these lads are praying  straight from the amygdala, the reptilian complex, the limbic system, or some of the most primitive parts of the brain.
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Of course it figures that I’m a U2 fan. Went with daughter Grace and two other friends to the IMAX yesterday after a funeral, the dear brother of a dear friend. So the heart was already well pummeled over and tenderized. The movie is about as close to the concert experience as is possible. The sound was enormous. And again, as at every other U2 concert (four live ones under my belt, hoping for more) there is this liturgical quality in the best sense–a joining with others to experience one’s self beyond the borders of one’s self, which is, so far as I can tell, the quivering nerve of mysticism. (You may drop out from this post now if you’re in a cynical, or even a sober-minded mood, because this will only get worse…..)
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