It's often suggested in our culture today that religion and faith have little relevance and don't contribute much to our lives.
Well, if you believe it's not important to have a healthy brain, then I suppose you're right to pour contempt on those who can feel God's presence in their lives. But there's a cost to scorning faith, as so many today are discovering.
If you want to have a life filled with love and meaning and purpose, you need a healthy, balanced brain. And in order to have a healthy, balanced brain, you need faith.
Faith -- which I'm defining as a relationship with God that endures in the absence of sacred texts -- is nothing like the superstitious mumbo jumbo it's claimed to be by those who have never felt faith. Faith is a deeply enriching emotional experience that adds clarity, common sense, patience, and humour to our otherwise confusing human lives.
Faith changes the brain. It calls on the brain to wire itself in ways that promote the best and most mysterious aspects of human existence, aspects such as empathy, creativity, openness to change, and the quest for meaning -- in other words, what we call the "heart." Faith tells your brain you want to be in relationship with God and with all Creation. This in turn prompts your brain to spend time, energy, and biological resources on the task of building the networks that let you feel these life-changing connections.
As it turns out, these are the same brain networks you depend on for feeling good not only about God but about yourself and other people in your life. Same brain, same networks, same feelings of empathy and love. Jesus has said to me, "Love is love is love." This seems to me an apt way to understand how the brain actually processes the remarkable experience of agape -- the selfless and transformative love we feel when we set aside our fear and narcissism and choose relationship with God instead. It's all mushed together into certain brain networks that we can't separate no matter how much we'd like to. You can certainly try to separate them -- many people have been certain they can overcome the brain's natural Dual Process blueprint through the application of logic alone -- but you'll eventually start to feel dissociated from your own empathy and sense of meaning (if you can still tap into your heart at all).
Herewith is my updated version of the well-known (but sometimes not so well-loved) Christmas carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas." It's all about the ways in which faith can give you a lasting set of gifts -- not on the outside but on the inside, where nobody can take them away from you. These gifts of faith are all part of the brain package you need if you want to be able to love God and love your neighbour with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, and all your courage. Please sing along if the spirit strikes you!
The Twelve Days of Faith
(presented in reverse order to minimize the torture):
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true faith gave to me:
Twelve shades of Meaning
Eleven kinds of healing
Ten ways o'giving
Nine ways o'learning
Eight ways o'hearing
Seven tales a'reading
Six songs a'singing
True Empathy
Four mysteries
Three deep dreams
Two hugs from God
And a Heart and a way to be.
May God bless you and may God's loving presence light your way this day and always.
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