What Your Body Knows About God

How We Are Designed to Connect, Serve and Thrive

Rob Moll

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830896707
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion et sciences

Have you ever had an experience where you felt particularly aware of God? If God is real, and we are created in God's image, then it makes sense that our minds and bodies would be designed with the perceptive ability to sense and experience God. Scientists are now discovering ways that our bodies are designed to connect with God. Brain research shows that our brain systems are wired to enable us to have spiritual experiences. The spiritual circuits that are used in prayer or worship are also involved in developing compassion for others. Our bodies have actually been created to love God and serve our neighbors. Award-winning journalist Rob Moll chronicles the fascinating ways in which our brains and bodies interact with God and spiritual realities. He reports on neuroscience findings that show how our brains actually change and adapt when engaged in spiritual practices. We live longer, healthier, happier and more fulfilling lives when we cultivate the biological spiritual capacity that puts us in touch with God. God has created our bodies to fulfill the Great Commandment; we are hardwired to commune with God and to have compassion and community with other people. Moll explores the neuroscience of prayer, how liturgy helps us worship, why loving God causes us to love others, and how a life of love and service leads to the abundant life for which we were created. Just as our physical bodies require exercise to stay healthy, so too can spiritual exercises and practices revitalize our awareness of God. Heighten your spiritual senses and discover how you have been designed for physical and spiritual flourishing.

Part One

Spiritual Bodies

1

Prayer—This Is Your Brain on God

Expecting parents love nothing more than attending their baby’s first ultrasound. There before them, on a simple black-and-white screen, science provides a sneak peek at their long-desired child. The white curve of a backbone with a tiny rib cage. A silhouette of a face marked by mother’s nose or father’s chin. And a four-chambered heart, beating strong and steady. “It’s the only time I’ll ever be able to see inside your head,” quipped one expectant father to his daughter, warmly cocooned in her mother’s womb.

We’re fascinated at this intimate look inside another person, the opportunity to see beyond the externals to the inner workings of the body. Because a person is more than just olive skin or blue eyes or slender fingers. It’s what’s inside that counts.

We can often be tempted to think of our spiritual lives as something external—a collection of things we do: church attendance, Bible reading, prayer, service. Or it is a set of beliefs that we hold. However, our relationship with God is profoundly connected to what is happening inside of us, in our bodies.

Experiences of God, ranging from typical feelings of devotion while singing praises to God to the ultimate transcendent union with God, have an impact on the rest of our bodies. These experiences can affect everything from our health to our relationships.

The brain plays a leading role in these spiritual encounters with God. Certainly our relationship with God is much more than a matter of brain waves, but it includes brain activity. Here a distinction must be made. The brain is the physical material that scientists can observe. It is the collection of neurons firing back and forth, the chemicals that lubricate those cellular interactions, and the blood flowing to keep it all working. In contrast, the mind is what can’t be seen on an MRI or through any other tool of science. The mind is the collection of thoughts and feelings carried by those cells and chemicals. It is our sense of meaning and purpose, our desires and rationalizations. The brain is like the apparatus upon which the mind works.

It must not be thought, however, that the brain and mind are like a computer’s hardware and software, as though they could be separated by a computer whiz. On the contrary, the Bible seems to talk about people not as separable parts but as whole beings, with each part affecting other parts. That’s what the latest research is showing too.

It is as though the hardware of the brain can rewrite the software of the mind. Our behaviors and our actions can change the nature of our brain, which can change the content of our thoughts. At the same time, our very thoughts can cause the neurons in our brain to grow and change.

Through cutting-edge research, as we look inside the brain at work we can catch a sneak peek into God’s design of our bodies to commune with him. In doing so we can understand more fully how we connect with God and the ways in which we can grow in our spiritual lives.

An Inside Peek

Using the latest brain-imaging technology available, Andrew Newberg, a leading neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College in Pennsylvania and professor of ­religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has extensively studied the brain and spiritual experience. The brain, says Newberg, is an intricate system that is “uniquely constructed to perceive and generate spiritual realities.”1

What would we then see if we could peek in on our brains while praying or meditating on God? The nervous system is a web, running from the brain down through the spinal cord and out to every inch of the body. Its two basic states, “fight or flight” (sympathetic) and “relaxation” (parasympathetic), are responsible for different automatic body processes, like digestion, blood pressure and sweat. Prayer normally tends to enhance the relaxation response, which is why it reduces stress and lowers blood pressure.2

However, in intense prayer or in communal worship, both systems can be active at once. “Generally speaking, it is rare that an experience both arouses and calms,” says Newberg, “which is one of the reasons why we think spiritual experience stimulates the brain in a unique way.”3 For example, worship can be loud and exciting while also creating a sense of inner peace. Or it may be intellectually stimulating while being relaxing, not taxing. The more that the two systems are simultaneously engaged, the more profound the experience. And when this spiritual circuit is fully engaged, we can experience a feeling of union with God and often with other people as well. In these moments, Newberg says, it is as though “the boundaries between you and God dissolve.” And you experience union with God.4

In prayer there are other brain systems at work, because spirituality draws on every part of who we are. Our frontal lobe is ration­­ally thinking about the experience, understanding it in terms of theology and application. The limbic system helps to provide an emotional flavor to the experience. At the same time, the amygdala, which is often the center of our experiences of fear and anger, might be soothed or calmed.5 Our anterior cingulate would help to translate these thoughts and emotions into compassion and empathy toward other people.6

These structures of the brain are highly active during a spiritual experience. While the brain is engaged in an unusual way, it also seems to be functioning normally. Some have argued that spirituality is a hallucination or caused by epilepsy. But unlike those dysfunctions, spirituality seems to enhance the brain’s capacity in a number of ways, it has healthful effects on the rest of the body, and it is personally meaningful.

Within the structures of the brain run chemicals that play vital roles in spiritual experiences like prayer. The neurons of the brain communicate through neurotransmitters, chemicals that send messages across the synapse (gap) between two cells. Even these chemicals are part of our spiritual experience and play an important role in our body’s ability to connect with God. For example, researchers have found that the neurotransmitter serotonin is typically released during intense spiritual experience. Serotonin is produced by nerve cells in the brain as well as in the gut. The amount of serotonin in your brain can elevate your mood as well as affect memory, learning, sleep and vision. A healthy level of serotonin and you’re happy as a clam. Low levels of serotonin and your physician might recommend taking an antidepressant medication.

In one study, Dr. Franz Vollenweider, director of the Heffter Research Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, found that blocking serotonin in the brain caused his research subjects to struggle with having spiritual experiences. Individuals remarked that they could not experience God.7

Certainly the ability to have a spiritual experience cannot be isolated to a single brain chemical. There is no shortage of Christian saints who suffered depression—and probably low levels of serotonin—and yet were close to God. But research does indicate that neurotransmitters play an important role in how we experience God. And conversely, these studies may help us to better understand times when we feel God’s absence. The “dark night of the soul” may be not simply a form of spiritual depression but a signal that the brain is changing. One researcher believes that spiritual experiences can be so powerful that they knock loose some of the brain’s wiring, creating a sense of God’s absence as the brain rewires the necessary parts to experience God. In these periods of life, we may know cognitively that God exists but find it hard to connect with him. Whether we suffer from chronic depression or have an occasional case of the blues, serotonin levels are diminished, and that can affect our spiritual lives.

More Than a Feeling

If the design of our brain can allow for the lows of doubt or depression, it also provides amazing capacity for powerfully intimate connections with God. Mario Beauregard, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, conducted brain scans of Carmelite nuns while they recalled their spiritual experiences and saw this occurring with startling regularity. In one experiment, he studied fifteen nuns during three separate brain states: resting, then while remembering an intense feeling of union with another human being, and finally as they recalled an experience of union with God.

We might expect that remembering these two kinds of emotional experiences would involve similar brain systems. Yet in Beauregard’s research, remembering an experience of God proved to be unique. Beauregard found that the mystical state involved areas of the brain that orient the body in space. In remembering intimacy with God, the nuns’ brains responded not simply with a feeling of relational connection but with a strong sense of union to something beyond themselves. Several of the women “mentioned that during the Mystical condition they felt the presence of God, His unconditional and infinite love, as well as plenitude and peace.”8 While both kinds of union involved strong feelings, spirituality was a unique experience in the brain.

Intense spiritual experiences cause the brain to work in ways that suggest spirituality is a specific capability of our brains. Beauregard says his studies confirm that spiritual experiences involve far more than the emotional parts of the brain, including “a variety of functions, such as self-consciousness, emotion, body representation, visual and motor imagery, and spiritual perception.”9

Finally, God has designed our brains with the ability to change, to be transformed. The apostle Paul exhorts believers to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12:2). This isn’t just a nice suggestion. Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman write, “Intense, long-term contemplation of God . . . appears to permanently change the structure of those parts of the brain that control our moods, give rise to our conscious notions of self, and shape our sensory perceptions of the world.”10

As our brains change—literally with neurons growing, adapting, knitting themselves together—the brain area that deals with anger becomes less active, and compassion for others grows.

11 Our memory is enhanced, we become more motivated, and our baseline level of happiness increases. We become generally more joyful.

This improved neural functioning can help our general health. “Spiritual practices,” says Newberg, “enhance the neural functioning of the brain in ways that improve physical and emotional health.”12 As we regularly commune with God, we create the neural pathways that strengthen our relationship, eliminating those things that would detract from our growth and reinforcing and developing those habits that lead to our sanctification. This is how God designed us to thrive.

Practicing Prayer

Prayer can look like lots of different things. It can be chatty, meditative, stream of consciousness, or focused. But researchers tell us that the kind of prayer that changes our brains is a specific kind: deep prayer, or focused, attentive prayer. And many of us are not accustomed to this kind of prayer.

Prayer that changes us involves our full concentration. Fair warning: this sort of prayer often doesn’t come easily. Evelyn Underhill, a twentieth-century writer on Christian mysticism, considers how difficult attentive prayer can be. “The first quarter of an hour thus spent in attempted meditation will be, indeed, a time of warfare; which should at least convince you how unruly, how ill-educated is your attention, how miserably ineffective your will, how far away you are from the captaincy of your own soul.”13

This style of prayer is hard because so much of our life is built on distraction. To hear the “still small voice” of God, we need to quiet our minds. And if prayer is going to change us, we need to pay attention, close attention, to God and our own hearts.

Christian history provides us with many methods for attentive, focused prayer. Many Christians still practice the centuries-old method of the spiritual exercises or daily examen taught by Ignatius of Loyola. Others find the contemplative prayer of the desert fathers and mothers and lectio divina from the Benedictines to be helpful methods of prayerful contemplation. Since the 1970s, centering prayer has also provided guidance to Christians looking to focus their hearts through prayer. These guides, and others, all call the Christian to quiet her mind, remove herself from the cares and noise of the day, and simply sit in God’s presence.

In contrast, many Protestant methods are heavy on content, encouraging those in prayer to use the skills often used in classrooms or Bible study. While we ought to be filling our minds with biblical teaching, learning to listen to God requires that we be still and, sometimes, stop talking.

For example, the ACTS pattern of prayer (adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication) can keep our minds too busy, at times preventing us from becoming qui...