Bird Taxonomy

You could smell the earth waking up last Saturday, in a riotous cacaphony of chirps and in the warm breath of the wind. I hadn't realized I had been Next to the meadow, I ran into Grady, who had traded in his watch for a pair of binoculars to go bird-watching.

And somehow, we got to talking about how easy it is to flatten people, and make them one-dimensional. When you first meet people, it's easy to be excited and see them as mysterious, full of promise, fascinating. But when the shininess wears off, it's the in-between time that's hard. You know them, enough so that you can move around each other in the kitchen in a careful dance, how to make passable small talk, how not to step on the other person's toes. Enough to close the folder and file away in your list of useful information. But in sorting and labeling people into manipulable categories, you lose something. You lose the color of a person, the look of vulnerability in their eyes, the sound of their joyous laughter, the shimmering beauty of seeing that person at his finest, the sweat of agony on their brow as they decide between the harder higher path, or the easy lowland one. I am troubled by my flattening of people. It becomes so easy to judge, to condemn or, even worse, dismiss (as in, whatever, he's just like that. ) Sometimes, with some people, you get past the flatlands, and they start to pop back into 3-D, and relationships grow deeper, and sweeter, and you learn to cherish their friendship. But how do you get there?

I've been talking and asking about how to choose between different positions on an issue, like women's leadership in the church, or eschatology, or the work of the Holy Spirit. Drew said that it's ultimately a leap of faith. I like that answer. Deciding to believe in God as revealed by Christianity is like choosing to get married to Adam. Or vice versa. You don't have all the information, and you can't really fully objectively research all the possible alternatives. You ultimately have to take the information you know, the place you're at, and commit. And so, whether or not some may accuse it of heresy or fundamentalism, I like biblical counseling. I like biblical counseling because it seems to be the only perspective that really looks at people and sees people - people with stories, contexts, hopes, struggles, joys, sorrows, people who make choices but also suffer. The Freudian psychoanalysts, the biological materialists, the Christian psychology integrationists, the pastoral counseling camp, and the nouthetic counselors - of all the detectives in the business of taking a magnifying glass to a person, I think it's really the biblical counseling people who get it right.

What troubles me about psychiatry is that it is in the business of quickly and efficiently categorizing people, so that you can assign them their appropriate medication and send them on their way. They develop, like bird-watchers, the ability to pick up on small details that help you to identify and categorize a person. There's an anecdote in the book I'm reading, Of Two Minds, about a psychiatrist who can glance at a patient as they walk through the door and have the disease diagnosed before they speak a word. But unlike bird-watching, the difference between manic-depression and schizophrenia aren't like the difference between a sparrow and a turkey vulture. The y lie on a spectrum of characteristics. But the pressure on psychiatry to act like medicine makes them treat the disorders as distinct diseases. "Understanding how psychiatrists see is also terribly important, because madness is both frighteningly palpably present, and yet elusive. There are no diagnostic tests in psychiatry… You cannot draw someone's blood, stick someone into a magnetic resonance imager, or take any medical reading that will tell you definitively whether that person is depressed or not… To understand psychiatric ways of seeing, we have to proceed knowing that what counts as "fact" is a tinted window onto a world you cannot step outside to see." (10)

I enjoyed the show and tell of the boxes we made for Jordan's art therapy teaching day last week. It captured a second dimension to each of you that I had forgotten - the inside to the outside. There is one more dimension to each of us, however, more than the dimension of who you see me as and who I see me as, and that's who God sees me as.

I need God. I need God desperately. My mentor, Sonya, suggested that the reason I might be struggling with my relationships, why I'm finding it difficult to love and be curious about other people, might have something to do with my relationship with God. I've been running on recycled fumes. Who i know myself to be will spill over into how I perceive others. I know the answer is in here somewhere, a clever turning of the metaphor of bird-watching, people-relating, and psychiatry, but I'm not sure yet what it is. Perhaps you have a suggestion? But I think this is what it would mean to see people rightly:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory)

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Sleep On It

Just sleep on it. I'm sure you've heard that before. But why does it work? I have a theory.

Emotions are strongly related to what's happening bodily. That's what Piper and C.S. Lewis suggest when he says, "When the music of spiritual joy plays in the soul, it gets 'transposed' into physical sensations. But since the spiritual "orchestra" is richer and more varied than the physical "piano," the same piano keys have to used for sounds that in the orchestra are played with different instruments." (When I Don't Desire God, 180)

Piper gives an example of the difficulty between distinguishing love from lust when looking at your lover (which I don't think is a very good example). But there's more than Piper recognizes to the idea that the same piano key must be used for varied spiritual emotions. The interesting thing is that the same 'piano keys' are used for the same physical emotions as well.

For example, how do we know we are afraid of something? Our heart beats faster. Our palms sweat. Maybe we pee our pants. Yup, if all that is happening, I must definitely be afraid.

Wait a minute, you might say. You've got the causality all wrong. It's because we're afraid that our heart rate quickens and our palms get sweaty.

Not necessarily. There's an interesting study that had men perform a dangerous task, I think it was cross a narrow rope bridge over a river. The experimental group had a woman approach them in the middle of the task and offer them a drink of water. The control group had a woman approach them before the task and offer them a drink of water. When the men were asked to measure their attraction to the woman, the experimental group rated their attraction to the woman as significantly higher than the control group. The scientists concluded that the men who were in the middle of the task, who had their adrenaline pumping and sweaty palms, read their physical state as meaning that they were attracted to the woman. So the study suggests that even very different emotions play on the same piano key. Apparently our body responds physiologically to outside events more quickly than our brain recognizes, and our brain has to catch-up and translate one step later. We have to be careful how we read our bodies and translate our bodily experiences into emotions and thoughts.
motions are strongly related to what's happening bodily. That's what Piper and C.S. Lewis suggest when he says, "When the music of spiritual joy plays in the soul, it gets 'transposed' into physical sensations. But since the spiritual "orchestra" is richer and more varied than the physical "piano," the same piano keys have to used for sounds that in the orchestra are played with different instruments." (When I Don't Desire God, 180)

Emotions are indivisible from our physical bodies. That is evident in a study of amputees that measured their emotional states. The study looked at their experiences with depression, phantom limbs, etc. But what the scientists were surprised to discover is that the amputees reported having lower levels of emotion than they did before losing their limbs. They experienced less happiness, less grief, less anxiety - all of their emotions were muted. Apparently, when you don't get sweaty palms, you don't feel as nervous. Isn't that fascinating?

So how does sleep play into all this? Well, say late one night I've thought up this terrific idea to make mountains of money by opening the Five Guys franchise in India, and I'm feverishly excited, and my heart is racing, and I'm imagining my glorious retirement to my magnificent mansion in Mumbai. I go to bed. But somehow, when I wake up in the quiet blue calmness of the morning, I can't remember what got me so excited about the idea the night before. The idea seems pretty stupid. Especially when I realize that a lot of Hindus don't eat beef and Five Guys with Chicken doesn't seem so exciting. I used to think that because I couldn't rouse the same emotion, whether anger, or passion, I must be forgetting the really good ideas. But I'm beginning to think that we put too much stock in our emotions.

So beyond the memory consolidation and 'learning' that occurs during sleep, my theory is that sleep also serves to reset our bodies, and by doing so we are more clear-eyed about our thoughts. And that's why it is often a good idea to sleep on big decisions.

The resetting of each morning is a blessing. The anger, the passion, the despondency which settle like a blight to the soul, may prove to be a passing storm that clears in the morning. And because we aren't hanging on to our emotions , our bodies' forgetfulness may be for us a healing.

Sometimes a light surprises
The Christian while he sings;
It is the Lord Who rises
With healing in His wings:
When comforts are declining,
He grants the soul again
A season of clear shining,
To cheer it after the rain.

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Bodies of Death

I have to confess that I've always found the body, though fascinating in how it works, to also be repulsive. I don't like the reminder that we are just really food processing machines, not so different from earthworms: food in one end and excrement out the other. I don't like that initial slice during surgery, where you cut through the wholeness of the skin and see the stuffing of a person, the messy, squishy, bloody, pulsating mess inside. If only humans could look more like plants, with their neat compartmentalized structures and pretty colors.

So I guess it's pretty ironic that I'm going to medical school, huh? I'm already steeling myself for anatomy. Dissection tresspasses completely on the sanctity and dignity of a person. Curiosity, I think, will be the only motor pulling me forward to cut and examine, while the rest of me grimaces and digs in my heels hard. It's hard not to think that when you cut off chunks of a Bob's pickled body and throw it in a trash bag, you aren't also carving up Bob himself. After all, this was the physical form that Bob's family and friends hugged, shook hands with, and knew to be Bob.

But, we reassure ourselves, this is not Bob we're dealing with. This is simply his physical shell, left behind in this mortal world. It's okay if we take it apart. The real Bob is in a better place. Or, if you're an atheist, Bob, well, Bob is no more.

I was horrified the first time I passed by a body parts shop as a kid. I imagined spare arms piled on the shelves, and extra heads lined up against the wall. But you know, beyond the freaky image (and increasing possibility!) of human body shops, being a doctor is really not so different from being an auto mechanic. You get in there, adjust some valves and pipes, give it a good kick, and send it on its way. And eventually it's not worth it to replace the parts because it's just too expensive, and you might as well junk this car and get a shiny new one. A doctor, however, is a poor man's auto mechanic, who ends up patching up decrepit old jalopies just so they can chug painfully along. The poor man's never going to be able to afford trading in his car until he dies. And unfortunately, people are taking a whole lot longer to die now. All and all, a pretty depressing situation. Bodies that start dying from the day they are driven off the lot.

The resurrection of the body lends a new dignity to the human body, for it means that there is something essential about the body to being human. The body is necessary for us to serve in the role God designed us for, because if we could better glorify and serve him by being simply spiritual beings, God would not have given us bodies in the New Heaven and New Earth. The resurrection of the body means that there is something to caring for the body and providing for the needs of the body here and now, in this world. It gives significance to all of creation. The redemption of all of creation means that our work on this earth isn't just done on old jalopies that will be traded in. If it will pass through fire and not go up in flames, it will last and become part of the New Heaven and New Earth. We can store up eternal treasure.

Yet if we exchange our Platonic view of the body as a shell for the sanctity and importance of our bodies, indivisible from who we are as humans, what does that mean for dissection? Can we in reverence reduce a whole human body down to parts, small scraps of muscle and bone? It's hard not to imagine that you're not fragmenting the soul itself.

If you trace the history of anatomical dissections, unsurprisingly, it reflects the history of thought on the resurrection of the body and soul. Dissection was suppressed by the Catholic church, and it reemerged with the Reformation. How does our reconsideration of the resurrection of the body affect what we think about the practice of dissection?

When you consider that cremation is not so different from dissection, just faster and with less careful observation, perhaps we need to think more carefully what cremation might imply about the current thought on the resurrection of the body and soul. Cremation is growing in popularity: one in four deaths end in cremation today. While it is true that God's resurrection of our bodies is not dependent on our preserving our dead bodies, what does the popularity of cremation reflect about our culture's current attitude towards death and life after death? Cremation is mandated by Hinduism and Buddhism, and in the scattering of ashes, there is a sense that one's life will join in the life of the rivers, oceans, and trees. There is also a sense of final obliteration in cremation - there is nothing more left of the dead person, so why waste space and hurt the environment for the living? Personally, I find the idea of cremation attractive because I don't want to be remembered in cold, still death, and I rather don't like the idea of having my body decay in the ground. Better to hasten the process of nature and go to ashes directly, rather than linger in the ugly in between stages. And I remember one impression I had of cremation, is that the last time you loved ones will see your physical body is when it's shoved into a furnace and goes up in flames. Perhaps you think of a Viking king going out in glory. Curious how the hell-fire imagery doesn't seem to scare anyone anymore.

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