The Days Are Surely Coming…
The Rev. William C. Redfield
Trinity Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, NY
The First Sunday of Advent—Year C—November 29, 2009
Three weeks ago for our confirmation class I showed a 20-minute You-Tube clip of Jill Bolte Taylor and her very personal description and lucid explanation of a stroke that she had survived several years ago. A Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist, she watched her mind completely deteriorate to the point where she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. Fortunately, because of excellent medical care and the loving support from her family, she survived. (You can see her short account by going to You Tube and writing in, “stoke of insight.”)
Jill Bolte Taylor has now written about her experience in My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. There, beyond just telling her story in vivid detail, she also shares the insight she gained into the unique functions of the right and left halves of her brain. You see, during her stroke Jill lost the categorizing, organizing, describing, judging and critically analyzing skills of her left-brain. Along with its language centers and her ego center, her left-brain became disengaged. Thus, during her stroke her consciousness shifted away from her normal, everyday ways of seeing and evaluating things. In the absence of her left brain’s dominance, her right brain had the opportunity to become fully engaged, and her consciousness shifted into full present moment awareness, whereby she experienced herself “at one with the universe.”
This kind of language links us to the realm of religious experience and spiritual transformation. And while it doesn’t necessarily mean that spiritual awareness can be explained away by brain function, it does perhaps give us a greater understanding of these two types of thinking and awareness in our own minds. And it does, in other words, remind us of that ever present dividing line between two very different ways of understanding our life in this world—the deliberate focus of the left brain which would have us operate out of a rational and linear understanding of life, and the right brain awareness which senses and intuits things in timeless intensity and opens us up to our inherent connection with the divine.
This, I believe, is the same line that runs through our Christian tradition and separates the more obvious and institutional and historical expression of our faith tradition from the more hidden, mysterious, and contemplative part. Jesus, as the founder of our faith, seemed equally balanced between these two halves of life. While he lived in the world and fully accepted the frailty of his human condition and marched inexorably in time toward his fate in Jerusalem, he also lived in full, deep, and timeless communion with God the Father. In other words, while living fully on the horizontal axis of life, he also and simultaneously lived fully on the vertical axis of life. The way our tradition expresses this is that Jesus was fully human and fully divine.
In the early decades of the young church there seemed to be an effort to express both sides of this equation in the tradition, although some groups and communities expressed one side more than the other. Some groups emphasized a coherent and rational belief structure that would further the institution of the church and bring faith and belief into greater uniformity. Other communities, on the other hand, were more engaged in the mystical side. But in those early years there seemed ample room for various expressions of faith in Jesus without one side having to defend its existence at the cost of eliminating a side that understood things a little differently. Consequently, one could speak more truthfully about various and complimentary Christianities rather than one uniform and thoroughly defined Christianity.
But that all began to change when certain church leaders grew more intent on building uniformity instead of unity. This gradual shift toward getting all Christians in line with one another was accelerated in the fourth century with the dramatic growth of the Church and its acceptance as the state religion of the Empire. More and more the Church became entwined with the State and more and more involved in the worldly issues of power and control. Over time the leaders of the Church became convinced that in order to continue to flourish and succeed, there must be greater uniformity of belief and practice. Sometimes violently, sometimes brutally, the Church at that time rooted out minority opinions and practices in order that the dominion of Christendom could prevail. The minority opinions were then pronounced heretical, and these parts of our tradition were thoroughly and sometimes viciously rooted out.
If we make the analogy of brain physiology, we might say that the Church’s left-brain accomplished full domination of its right brain in order to do what it thought it needed to do to survive. But this “survival” was only the limited vision of what the organizational side of the church with its own resources could conceptualize. The left-brain had dominated. But what was worse, it cut off its mystical side to its own great detriment. It didn’t and couldn’t see the full picture because what it was destroying held the other half of the equation of fullness and wholeness.
I mentioned heresy. Heresy is the term given to the loser of a theological and doctrinal conflict. Orthodoxy, on the other hand, is the term we give to the winner. The problem was that the Church at this time didn’t just consolidate the faith (for that might have been a very legitimate undertaking); rather it set out on a trajectory of power and control in order to extend its influence far and wide. Would this be considered the call of Christ? Is the job of Christianity to convert the rest of the world? These are good questions, but they are hard questions. The institutional and left brain side of our tradition might answer them one way, while the mystical and right brain side might answer them another way.
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OK, enough with brain physiology and function and the development of the church doctrines of orthodoxy and heresy. It’s Advent—thank God—and a time to wait and watch and pray. As the long season of Pentecost has come to a close and the season of Advent has commenced, the Scripture lessons turn to the end of time and the ultimate and final coming of Christ. And so we might think that what we are watching and waiting for is something that is about to take place in time. It seems that we are invited and encouraged to wait and watch for something that future time will deliver.
Oh dear, I’m sorry. I need to go back for a minute to brain physiology and function. Remember, the left-brain operates linearly—that is, it sees the life through the unfolding of the sequential movement of time. It goes from the past to the present to the future. So much are we immersed and even controlled by our left-brain thinking that we don’t even question that. We think that that’s simply the way life moves—through time. Scriptural tradition calls this chronological time or chronos.
But we must remember that there is another, perhaps deeper way of understanding life’s unfolding, and it is measured, not in terms of the linear march of time, but in terms of developmental readiness or kairos. It is only our right brain that can grasp this wondrous sense. Instead of moving laterally across the horizontal dimension of life, the kairos trajectory of life moves toward depth.
So, what are we waiting for in Advent? Are we looking for something to happen in future time? Or, are we looking for the unfolding of meaning in terms of readiness, ripeness, or depth? Well, of course, we mean both. When we say “thy kingdom come,” we mean that the Reign of God that will come in both time and in depth. The kingdom, Jesus said, is around you, but it is also inside you.
Perhaps the best unifying metaphor for this complex reality is pregnancy—which is what this season of Advent is really all about. When a woman is pregnant, she is more than a little aware of her baby’s full term—the nine long months her body will experience these dramatic changes. Because of all of the difficult and demanding bodily changes, most women I know can’t wait for those nine months to be over and done. But at the same time, the movement through pregnancy can at the same time be experienced as something moving toward ripeness and fruition—something that cannot be grasped or measured only by time. There is another scale altogether on which something is forming and building and deepening. And, yes, it takes the full nine months, but there is something timeless in this as well.
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My dear friends: These are the awe-filled days of Advent. We are called to watch and watch and pray. But that for which we wait, watch, and pray is not only coming in time; it is also coming in depth and fruition. The story highlights one woman—Mary—who is to give birth to a special son. Instead of getting all tied up in historical accuracy of this truth, we must remember that its meaning is also timeless. And rather than just something we think about having happened in time way back when, its truth is both timeless and unconstrained. Simply stated, there is a divine movement toward depth and fruition, and it has to do with you, and it has to do with what is happening in you right now, in the ripeness of this present moment. More than life in just Mary’s womb, there is something growing and forming in you—in the womb of your heart. Never mind how irrational that may sound. Even if your mind cannot grasp it, your heart can. This is the call of Advent.
And so we are called to live the full life of historical time (or chronos) as well as the timelessness of eternity (or kairos). We are perched at the point of the cross—the cross that brings together the horizontal axis with the vertical axis. We need both kinds of understanding. The trick is to stay soft and flexible and open. The trick also is to stay awake and present in the moment. But know beyond all doubt that there is a something stirring in the depths. There is something groaning to come to fruition and be born. And it has everything to do with you.
Wait, watch, and pray. Preparation and readiness are imperative. But the time is now.
