You guys! Today is launch day for The Hope in Our Scars!! Buy it, leave a review, talk to your friends about it! Here is another excerpt. This one is from Chapter 3, Holding onto What Matters:
God isn’t only after our brains. He’s beckoning all our senses as embodied people, igniting our imaginations and sense of wonder, connecting our confession of who he is with the cloud of witnesses that have gone before us, and teaching us about his gift of true freedom in belonging.
These truths have been reinforced by my friendships and through learning. It fascinates me how the advances of science are revealing how amazing the mind is—and so vastly different from the computer model that our minds have been characterized as. As it turns out, our senses and emotions fuel the whole enterprise. Thinking doesn’t merely happen inside our skulls, inside our brains. Our brains and our minds are not the same thing. Our minds need “extra-neural resources.” One fascinating read about this is Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. She postulates,
As it is, we use our brains entirely too much—to the detriment of our ability to think intelligently. What we need to do is think outside the brain.
Thinking outside the brain means skillfully engaging entities external to our heads—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of other people around us—drawing them into our mental processes. By reaching beyond the brain to recruit these “extra-neural” resources, we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively—to entertain ideas that would be liter- ally unthinkable by the brain alone.
In other words, we need story. And our minds, which are the narrating self, need a setting, a cast of characters, plot, point of view, and even conflict and resolution. “The literature on the extended mind suggests” our intelligence and expertise correlates to our “learning how best to marshal and apply extra-neural resources to the tasks before them.” We think better, smarter, when we are attuning to our senses, environment, and the minds of others.
Daniel Siegel, who first introduced us to the expression “interpersonal neurobiology,” calls it “the neurobiology of we.” Our minds were designed to interact with other people’s minds. We cannot “know” ourselves without the witness and story we sense others sharing with us. And that is just it. We all want to be known, to be seen, and to be loved. As Curt Thompson shares in The Soul of Desire, “We need others to bear witness to our deepest longings, our greatest joys, our most painful shame, and all the rest in order to have any sense of ourselves. This process begins at birth—no newborn ‘decides who he is’ apart from the presence of others to whom his little mind desperately looks to be seen and heard.” This is how we know ourselves, how we grow, and how we love. It’s often how God “shows up” as well. It’s where love shows up.
My testimony is still unfolding. The last three years of disillusionment with the church have shaken me up pretty good. I’m learning so much about friendship through this longer disruption to my story. I’ve learned something so profound and yet so simple: one of the most meaningful acts of love and friendship is simply showing up.
And that’s really it. We can present our propositional statements of faith, but even they can be found wanting. I hold fast to my confession of faith, and it anchors me. These statements about who God is and what he is doing are like guardrails that help us more fully know God and to tell our stories. But they are empty without our embodied presence. Mere words. What have we really learned about love in the church? Isn’t the mission of the church to prepare our souls for love? What does that look like? Why does it seem that Christians are more attracted to power than love? Often, when our lives are disrupted, we can choose to pursue one or the other. We can let our fears lead us to grasp for power and control, or we can be vulnerable and look for love. In these times of affliction and disruption, we are faced with an underlying question of what really matters. So are we going to hold on to what matters, no matter the cost?
Love matters. It’s the greatest commandment:
“Teacher, which command in the law is the greatest?”
He said to him, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.” (Matt. 22:36–40)
All Christians would affirm this. But in practice, what is our greatest commandment? There’s so much ugliness in politics, in debates, in social media exchanges, and in our own minds and hearts. We quickly label those who disagree with us as a repugnant cultural other. “At least we’re not like them.” We are living in a polarized time, aren’t we?
Let me ask you this: If your life were full of affliction, would you still love God? Would he still be good? Here’s another question: If there were no such thing as a literal hell after death, would you still love God? Do we love him just so he will bless us with comfort and security? Do we love him because he will save us from hell? Or do we love him because he is beauty, goodness, and truth, and we want to be with him to be filled with his fullness?
Beauty matters. Truth matters. Goodness matters. Because Love matters. And this is who God is in his triune self and for us. This is the kingdom we are invited to walk into. We need a theology saturated in love that is embodied, shared, and storied. As partners in Christ’s kingdom, helping one another see what’s real means we are hunters and sharers of these treasures. One word used about how the faith has passed down through the centuries is tradent. We don’t use that word much anymore. As the canon of Scripture was being written and formed, the stories within it were passed down through male and female tradents of the faith, meaning they orally passed down the faith from one person to the next through their testimonies and stories. And we behold the life-giving beauty that has divinely unfolded!
Interpersonal neurobiology, that sounds like it could be a definition for the church. Beautiful.
Congrats on the release today Aimee! My wife and I both ordered a copy months ago without knowing the other had, so we are expecting 2 copies today!