Romans 8:1-11
July 10, 2011
This morning, we continue our series of reading a portion of Paul’s letter to the Christian church in Rome. This is a deeply pastoral letter…Paul is writing on very personal level to a community he loves dearly. He wants to guide them in how to shape their lives and their community in such a way that they can live a new reality – a reality different from the ones they were trapped in. They lived surrounded by war, oppression, and persecution. Paul believed the call of God is to create a whole new world right in the middle of the old one.
In other words, Christians are called to live lives completely transformed from old ways of doing things. But, as we all know, breaking free of the old ways of doing things is not always a trivial matter. We try and try to change our lives, in both small and significant ways, and our inability to do this at times can become the bane of our existence. Our failures tend to produce feelings of guilt and shame, and in turn these feelings make it even more difficult to change.
This is why, as we saw two weeks ago, Paul insists that creating a new life and a new reality in the world must always begin with being steeped in God’s grace. The only way forward is to release ourselves from the limiting forces of guilt and shame.
Last week, we saw that in order to understand and experience this freeing grace, we do, paradoxically, need to understand and own the limitations we face. Paul laments his complete inability to change his own destructive habits and behaviors: “I do not do the good I wish to do in this world,” he says…echoing a sentiment most of us have shared at one time or another. But it is his confession that opens him to God’s grace. Grace comes when we admit we are powerless over many of our human limitations.
Part of admitting this powerlessness lies in understanding why these limitations exist. As I said last week, scientists tell us that we form neural pathways in our brains every time we engage in a behavior, and the more we repeat a behavior, the more ingrained that pathway becomes and the harder it is to change. More than that, all of this happens largely apart from our being conscious of it. These ingrained neural pathways drive our behavior, but they do so from within our subconscious, so we can’t see them. If we can’t see them, if we don’t even know they are affecting our behavior, chances are we can’t change them on our own. If these pathways happen to lead to destructive behavior, we become trapped in behaviors and habits we would so love to change, but just can’t no matter how much we try to will it to happen.
This is where grace enters in. When we understand our limited ability to reroute our lives, we can accept that reality and let go of blaming ourselves. This opens us up to other ways of finding transformation – to forces outside of ourselves. The question we left hanging last week was what are these forces outside of ourselves that can influence us, change us, carry us to new life and new behaviors.
Again, science is helpful here. Recent studies are providing us with incredible information about the human condition and human possibilities.
What researchers have found is that we are not the only ones who affect our neural pathways. Our nervous systems are designed to intertwine with and support each other…and so we are, in some pretty radical ways, vulnerable to others. Other people’s neural pathways can influence and shape our pathways. Another person, if we are close enough to them, can impact where those pathways go and how embedded they become. Another person can even help us out of those deeply tread pathways into new possibilities simply by being close to us. Sometimes just physical proximity has that effect.
Think about what that means: my neural pathways exert influence on yours when we spend time together. And yours on mine. The specific people to whom we are attached control a portion of our everyday neural activity. “Long-standing togetherness,” writes one scientist, “writes permanent changes into the brain’s open book. In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. We have the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love. Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”
The downside, of course, is that we can be affected negatively as well as positively. We see this far too often in how children develop when they are not nurtured and cared for in healthy ways. Let me say quickly, that we also know from studying the brain that how we end up as adults is a mix of nature and nurture. We come with the DNA we come with…and that DNA affects our behavior and our ability to change regardless of the love we receive. Children can be raised in healthy, loving, nurturing households and still find themselves stuck in destructive patterns and behaviors as adults. Not to mention there are other formative relationships in our lives as children and young adults that have nothing to do with family. Peers, other authority figures and even the media have a powerful affect on who we become as adults.
Nonetheless, parents or guardians who themselves have been formed in unhealthy ways almost can’t help but pass that on to a child. These children often grow up and choose unhealthy relationships – because that is what their brain knows and demands – and then the unhealthiness is merely reinforced…and of course passed on to their children.
The combination of our children’s DNA and outside influences can help form an adult that is well adapted or sometimes maladjusted to this world. And if it’s a destructive pattern, it’s a cycle that needs intervention at some point if it is to stop.
Now, I’m going to do something very odd here. I’m going to talk for a moment about therapy. In part because what we see happening in therapy can teach us about how we can change and facilitate change in others. It also has the added secondary benefit of being a little plug for therapy for those who need it. There can often be a stigma attached to seeking help from a professional, but I truly believe sometimes a professional is helpful, even needed – it’s an outside intervention that has the potential to break through cycles we are stuck in – cycles our brains are programmed to be stuck in.
If we lose the DNA lottery – if we come biologically predisposed to things like depression, aggression, addiction – nurture can only do so much. Sometimes drug therapy is called for to offset these biological factors so that, added with nurture, we have a better shot at a healthy life. Medication is not the magical solution drug companies make it out to be, but it can be a life preserver that at least gets someone back in the boat.
In the same way, if we had a rough time as a child, talk therapy can be invaluable in helping us change patterns and behaviors that are harmful. Why? Because it puts us in contact with someone who, if they do their job well, can reset some of our neural pathways. Doing the job well is the key, of course. Which is why study after study shows that the things that determines how effective therapy is are not the techniques used by the therapist – cognitive behavioral therapy fairs no better than psycho dynamic therapy in studies. Neither proves to be successful more often than the other. The two things that most predict good outcomes are the emotional health of the therapist, and the quality of the relationship between the therapist and the client.
Loving, healthy relationships can help change us. We probably know this instinctively, but amazingly this is usually not the first thing we think of when we think about trying to change ourselves. We try to figure out how to do it on our own. We try to convince ourselves we can do it, we can change if we just want it enough, try hard enough. We don’t make the connection between the quality of the relationships in our lives and our ability to change.
So this is helpful. But, where does the ability to love others in healthy ways come from? Paul adds something to all this that is important, maybe essential, for those of us who claim to be children of God. He adds an earlier cause – something that allows us to even love in the first place. He talks about “Christ in us” being the thing that sets us free to love others. This is the source of love – it is the source that can make us feel loved, and the source that helps us love others to change.
I imagine Christ in us as a divine stamp in our subconscious. If our subconscious makes up a large part of who we are, then a large part of that is our identity as God’s children…meaning we have the DNA of God. We are made in the divine image, and that can be as significant a determinant to our behavior as our DNA from our parents or our early experiences of love and trauma.
Now, if our subconscious is a mix of influencers on our behavior – some producing helpful, life-giving behaviors, and some producing hurtful behaviors - how do we learn to let the Christ in us – the divine imprint – be the driving force for our behavior more than anything else.
There was an experiment done by researchers named John Bargh and Paula Pietromonaco. Subjects were told to say whether flashes on a computer monitor occurred on the left or right side of a screen. Unbeknown to them, the flashes were words shown for very brief durations and followed immediately by a line of X’s. Because the words were flashed so quickly and were effectively masked by the X’s, people were unaware that words had been presented. For one group of people, the words that were subliminally flashed had to do with hostility: “hostile,” “insult,” “unkind,” etc. For another group, the words were neutral: wall, pencil, chair, and the like.
Next, people took part in what they thought was an unrelated experiment on how we form impressions of others. They read a paragraph describing a man named Donald, who acted in somewhat ambiguous ways that might be construed as hostile, like “A salesman knocked at the door, but Donald refused to let him enter.” Those who had seen flashes of hostile words, even though they didn’t know they had seen the words, judged Donald to be more hostile and unfriendly than did people who had not seen flashes of hostile words. It was completely unconscious.
This experiment shows the concept of “accessibility”. Parts of our subconscious can be stimulated or energized by something and the more energized it is, the more likely it is to influence our judgments and behaviors – it is more “accessible”. The concept of hostility was accessible in people’s minds because of the words that had been flashed a few minutes earlier.
As you can imagine, one determinate of accessibility, in addition to how recently something has been stimulated, is how often the concept has been used in the past. People are creatures of habit, and the more they have used a particular way of judging the world in the past, the more energized that concept will be. When we think about this in terms of that part of our unconscious that is the imprint of the divine, the question becomes: How can we make that more accessible? How can we stimulate that so that it becomes the thing through which all things are filtered? How can we make it the main thing that influences how we see the world and therefore how we act in this world?
We can stimulate this part of who we are by “reminding” ourselves that we are made in the image of God…by reminding ourselves that Christ is in us. Just like the words flashed on the computer monitor, these reminders are our not-so-subliminal stimulators of that part of who we are. And these reminders can come from a number of different sources. reading scripture, coming to church, praying, meditating, or, as Paul so beautifully writes, “setting our mind on the spirit, which leads to life and peace.”
These are spiritual disciplines. These are the things we do over and over that shape our life, our thoughts, our behaviors. These are the habits we cultivate that produce life-giving behaviors without our even consciously trying or willing to in the moment.
Now, you might be sensing that I have built a gigantic circular argument. Sometimes the very things we wish we could do, but find ourselves unable to will ourselves to do, are these spiritual disciplines. I vow to spend time every day in meditation or study of the bible, but I break my vow over and over. And so, ultimately, my other behaviors remain unchanged as well, because the divine in me is not as accessible as other things I “activate” all the time.
But rather than this all circling in on itself, this is where we circle back to the power of love. We love one another into these disciplines…into a life that keeps the divine accessible within us.
When Paul writes, he writes not just to individuals…he writes to the church as a whole. He is suggesting how they might form themselves as a community of people who engage in regular practices that nurture the divine within, and thus produce loving actions. They come together to do these practices, because – even though Paul wasn’t aware of neural pathways and the workings of the subconscious – he knew that attempting a life of faith on your own was completely fruitless…a fool’s errand.
We do it together. We remind each other over and over, through words, actions, ritual, song, of our true identity…of the most important part of our subconscious…that of a creature created in God’s image. We love one another into more and more loving behaviors. Instead of being caught in a never ending loop of old, destructive behaviors and habits that become more and more ingrained and harder and harder to change, we are caught up in a never ending, self feeding loop of love. The more we are loved, the more loving we are. And the more loving we are, the more loving we become.
We do need to recognize that we carry in us both life giving and life destroying impulses. We can easily lose focus and, as Paul would put it, surrender ourselves to the sin cycle. The ruts and routines don’t magically disappear…some have deep roots. The way to liberation is to let go of focusing only on ourselves and of making ourselves self sufficient, even what that means trying to help ourselves do what is right and good. Liberation lies in opening ourselves to being loved. Liberation lies in supporting one another in spiritual disciplines that tell our brains over and over that we are God’s children, divine at our core, loving and good. It’s the power circle of love. Amen.
