Category: Brain

…there are aspects of humanity that are not reducible to particles, chemicals and rational analysis.

In my last post, I reflected on the interesting work of Oliver Sacks on memory.  A few further thoughts about the whole notion of science, faith, and humanity.

Sacks has been criticized roundly for his “anecdotes” that don’t meet all the rigor of some scientific requirement, especially by the radical reductionists.  Some believe that  “there is no self or soul.  We are merely the product of our acculturated experiences and brain physiology and when it’s gone, so are we.”

But there is something instinctive that we know—that there are aspects of humanity that are not reducible to particles, chemicals and rational analysis.  Beauty, humanity, value abide somewhere beyond all our curiosity about mechanisms.  Even when the mechanisms are explained, there is yet Something.

I once asked a group of scientists with whom I meet from time to time to talk about religion and science (none of whom are six-day creationists, all but one of whom are yet theists and Christians), “My question for you is not why you believe in evolution or why even intelligent design is not logically necessary from the perspective of scientific method.  It is this:  you are committed scientists, are convinced of its methodology, humble about what we can know.  And yet you still worship, believe in God, go to church. I am much more interested in that than boring college-dorm debates where someone has to knuckle under at the end and say, “You’re right.  I give up.”  Why do you do this?”  What is it that you DO believe?

Then I heard something fresh.  “Even when you understand these things, it causes wonder.”  There is Something underneath that can be alternatively explained but it seems vulgar to do so.  Wonder.  Amazement.  Delight.  Joy.  They can be explained as neurons, nerves, responses, brain centers, blah blah blah.  But why do they exist at all?

On December 27, 1992, I did a funeral of a real character in the town where I lived in South Georgia.  Mr. Earl “Tige” Pickle (short for “Tiger,” a peculiar name for such an outgoing man!) was a newspaper columnist, leader in the community and local radio personality.  Everybody who was anybody in Early County eventually was asked to be on Mr. Tige’s radio show. Since our paper came once a week, people depended on Tige to get the day-to-day necessities.  He kept us up on things like the funeral notices and what the coach had to say about the big game and how the peanut crop might do this year with the lack of rain and that terrible fungus the county agent had just identified.

Since I was the new preacher in town and he had more or less run out of interesting guests, Tige invited me to be interviewed.  He was particularly interested in the fact that I was from Texas and, as people usually do, assumed that I knew all about things Texana.  I didn’t know these things, of course, but like any good Texan,  what I lacked in fact I simply invented, added and padded.

He was a wordsmith who appreciated a good story and a well-written sentence.  He often came up to tell me how much he appreciated some joke I had told in a sermon or some point well-made. Of course, as in all lives, the day came when life began to take his gifts away, and it took them in a most cruel fashion.  This dear man with a sly grin and quick wit began to lose his words.  They said it was Alzheimer’s.

One day, long after the ravages of senility had begun to take their toll, I went out to the nursing home to lead a worship service.  As always, Tige was present, sitting in a rocker at the back. By now he had become silent and unresponsive. This particular day I invited the residents to join me in singing “Amazing Grace.”    As we began to sing, something came over Tige.  He got up as though moved by an invisible and ancient force of habit and moved toward me.  Now he was no longer in the day room at the nursing home.  I believe he was sitting again in his mind in the pews of First Baptist Church and worshipping in his regular place.

He sang out loud and continued to make his way forward until he stood shoulder to shoulder with me.  There he continued to sing as though he were leading the congregation itself until we finished the song.   When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun; we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’ve first begun.

Then he went back to his seat.  When nearly everything else had left his memory, the power of a lifetime of faithful worship and faith had marked his life.  Though he rarely spoke those days, something raised him out of that chair and moved him to sing every word of that great old hymn.   Religion has just about lost its soul in America trying to control the culture, run politics and come up with glib answers to everything.  We’d do better to settle back into mystery, in my opinion.  Humility is not such a bad place to be, not if you really believe in something.   Especially if you think there is Something that comes from beyond us, beyond death, beyond decay and Alzheimers and suffering and loss.

Oliver Sacks’ work may also remind us that the practice of faith is deeper than what we “feel” or “decide” or experience.  There is something entirely worthwhile about the practice of faith that resides at the level of gestures, behaviors and trusting actions.  Liturgy, devotions, singing, and prayer become habits of a life.  Theologian Greg Jones once wrote:

Two of the most powerful intellectual and social forces in our culture are the hard sciences and capitalist economics. Together they have conspired to produce images of personhood that undermine Christian understandings. According to these images, persons are defined by their rational capacities and their productive contributions.

 The loss of reverence and respect for human life and human bodies, whether they retain capacity for memory or not, is the result of our obsession with reason and the GNP.  But institutional religion can commit the same sin.  People can be valued only for being young, for the contributions they make to the community or for their sameness to us.  This is as far from the religion of Jesus of Nazareth as can be.  The One who welcomed lepers, outcasts, children and the sick reminds us that pragmatism is a useful tool but not a way of life adequate to all things.

I find it frankly puzzling to meet conservative Christians who effusively praise Ayn Rand.  In the words of Liz Lemon, “What the WHAT?”  We can love, value, care for people poorer than us, less fortunate, weaker or damaged.  This is not misguided but actually a humble bowing before mystery.  There are yet things in a silent woman sitting in the activities room of the nursing home unknown to us.  And so we care for her, not only for her past, but for the simple fact of respect and care for her deep fellow humanity.  That is enough.  To learn this is the beginning of wisdom.