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By Andrew Dreitcer
I begin with a story. It's a story of neuroscience, a brain, and Christianity. It may be a story of the Christian brain on God. Or maybe not.
In any case it's about my late wife, Wendy, who died of brain cancer six years ago. She was a Presbyterian minister and a brilliant preacher. During the ten months of her cancer she lost her short-term memory, much of her ability to organize her world, and much of her vision. She was unable to follow the action of the beloved musicals she kept trying to watch. She could not track time or dates. But she kept preaching -- right up until a couple of weeks before her death. She kept preaching, even when she was virtually bed-ridden.
Each week I researched her sermon topic for her with her guidance and read aloud to her what I'd discovered. Then she would construct a sermon in her thoughts alone, unable to write. And every Saturday evening she'd ask me (as she did every evening), "What day is it?" "Saturday," I'd say. "Am I preaching tomorrow?" she'd ask in some panic. "Yes," I'd say. But by that point she had no memory of her sermon topic. No memory of it at all. And Sunday morning she would wake up with no idea of what she had planned to preach. We would go to church and still she had no memory of what she had meant to say. And that would be the case right up until she sat down in front of the congregation to deliver her message.
And then, as she opened her mouth to speak, she would remember. And she would preach for an hour. Lucidly. Brilliantly. Beautifully. Profoundly. During that hour her short-term memory ability returned. During that hour she could see and recognize faces that had been all but invisible to her minutes before. She packed the church Sunday after Sunday. The church members said, "It's the Holy Spirit." The neuro-oncologist said, "There's a tumor in her occipital lobe."
Was Wendy's brilliance in those final days a result of her brain on God? Or on cancer? Or both? And who was she in those ten months, really? And who am I in any moment?
So many questions flow from this story -- about the nature of life and meaning and love, and about the identity of the self and the divine, and about how all of that comes together in a life. These questions are versions of the same things I've always been interested in (and teach about): the nature and workings of our souls. But over the past years, as I've considered these questions in the context of the misfiring brain of someone I have loved, they have pushed me toward something I never expected to care about: the understandings of science -- neuroscience, to be exact. And I discovered that there is a very rich conversation among neuroscientific researchers that has the potential to transform how we Christians practice our faith. More specifically, the findings of neuroscience can help us shape spiritual practices that have new power to help us transform the world for good. What does this mean for our lives? Let me explain.
Over the centuries, spiritual sages and theologians such as Origen of Alexandria, Hildegard of Bingen, Thomas Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, Ignatius of Loyola, George Fox, and many others, have attempted to work out the details of living a Christian life by developing their own descriptions of how to engage in spiritual practices. They have probed the movements of the soul, the dynamics of what they experienced of the Spirit at work within them, in order to fine-tune spiritual practices for the transformation of their lives and the world. That is, at least part of what contemplatives have always done is track and describe what is happening in the interior life. They have traced and named thoughts, emotions, intentions, attentions, images, kinesthetic events, no-thing-ness, and, as the Apostle Paul put it, "sighs too deep for words." They have used all the data of interior human experience available to them to deepen and expand their own spiritual lives and to help heal the lives of others and the world by developing spiritual practices that seem to "work." But now, in the 21st century, new data are being gathered about those interior human experiences. And neuroscientists -- not Christian spiritual sages -- are the ones doing this gathering.
