I went to mass early Saturday morning. TMIY challenged me to go every day this week. I set the alarm but was up before it went off. I arrived at the church about 20 minutes early. I had a bit of fear in getting there. I used to do that more in my single days. I would arrive early for an event and often find the church doors locked. Sometimes just the leader were there trying to prepare. It was awkward. I wondered if I had done it again.
The difference is now I am Catholic. I got there and were 6 or 8 people who had also arrived early and were praying. People do that in a Catholic church. Catholics believe there is something about the church building. Jesus is there is the blessed sacrament. If you go to church you come early and just spend time. I guess you forget that a bit when you have a big family and don't end up coming early for much. I guess I still knew that but somehow this morning I was fretting about the awkwardness of those protestant experiences so many years ago. It made me feel at home.
It is just a small thing but it got me thinking. Frank Weathers calls his blog Why I Am Catholic. I can see why. For years after you convert you get little things that strike you about how wonderful the church is. It makes sense. Jesus' Church should be wonderful in a million amazing ways. Yet when it happens it still strikes us. There is another example of that here.
Lent is a big time for that. There is just so much. Connecting with God through fasting and contemplating Jesus' passion. So powerful and yet we rarely did it as protestants. It is the sort of thing that only really makes a difference after a few years. It is the long term, slow burn transformation that Catholicism does well. Protestants are much better at the big life-changing moment. Catholics can learn a lot from them there. Yet so many of our sins go very deep and healing them is long and slow.
I was at a seminar about parenting children with Downs Syndrome. It was taught by a psychologist. Lots of great information. At one point she was talking about out brains. That we have one section of the brain that controls our fight/flight/freeze type response. It kicks in when we experience stress. She called that the lizard brain. Then there is the other part of the brain where we have reason and logic and language. Now the tendency modern people have is to think good brain/bad brain. Logic is good. Emotion is bad. Right?
She didn't go there. She encouraged us to learn how to connect the two parts of the brain to apply the wisdom of the left brain to the emotional issues of the right brain. I am sure there is nothing inherently wrong with the lizard brain. That is why I don't like the name much. Yet why do I know that? It is rooted in creation. God made us and would not give us such a powerful part of our brain if it did not serve some important function.
Certainly many religious conversions come from the lizard brain. Atheists scoff at those. People making a decision to follow Jesus based on an emotional crisis. They would be much better off being purely rational. Would we really? I wonder what a purely rational humanity would look like. Emotions are indicators of a deeper reality. It is a reality that the modern mind looks down on but that is where we find the deepest truth about ourselves.
I know the lizard brain is good based on my faith. How can one know it based on logic and science? I don't see how. It appears that there is much time and energy wasted in dealing with people hurting each other's feelings. What is the payoff? We don't need the fight/flight/freeze thing nearly as much as we used to. Physically we are pretty safe. Could we not assess risk better using reason?
When you don't start with the belief that creation is good but fallen then you can arrive at many different places. You can start to hate a part of yourself. If we are just products of evolution then there is no reason to think parts of us are just not helpful in today's society. We might have outgrown our emotions.
I think that is a big part of why people who are emotionally hurt often feel the need to talk to someone who has been hurt in the same way. They feel the question in society of why don't you just get over it? It is a question based in pure logic. Why should you let a bad childhood or a traumatic experience ruin your life? It is hard to explain that to someone looking for a rational answer. Sometimes it is hard for such people to explain it to themselves.
That is unfortunate because to some extent or other we are all being influenced by deep emotional forces we don't completely understand. That is rooted in our blindness to the spiritual. Many of our deepest emotional needs mirror spiritual realities. We want authentic sexual intimacy because God is love and we want to be like God. We want good human fathers and mothers because we need to be children of God. We hate violence because we know we are meant to live in peace. If we see these lizard brain longings not as accidents of evolution but as desires for something more then we can love that side of us.
Psychology still gets that but does not admit it gets it from the Christian assumptions embedded in society. We see that being questioned more and more and science cannot arrive at the same conclusions. Science can only say what is and not what should be. So modern psychology has the tendency to assume what is for the majority of humans is what should be. That is they are losing their awareness of our fallen nature. Our hearts desire perfect parents and perfect lovers and perfect peace. In short our hearts desire God. The more psychology loses sight of that the less valuable it will be.
