Prolonged times of difficulty can affect our ability to think clearly. The mind dulls and creativity withers. This week’s healing story from the life of Jesus isn’t directly about the intellect but it is about the liberation our minds need when our functioning is impaired by trauma, stress, and challenge. Jesus came to set the captive free. Today, we pray for the divine touch to heal us, liberate us, and inspire us toward new solutions to our problems, new visions for human life, new ways of relating and caring for each other, and new expressions of creativity that nourish our souls and the soul of our civilization.
A meditation on Matthew 9:18- 26 and a poem by Ranier Maria Rilke (the author’s translation)
1.
Today’s reading from the Gospel of Matthew is a story within a story.
The first story goes like this: A child has died. A family is in crisis. The father comes to Jesus. He’s bereft with grief. Now, he’s the leader of the synagogue, and Jesus, because of his unorthodox ways, is in conflict with the religious authorities. It may be risky for the synagogue official to seek out the unorthodox preacher. But he’s also a father and he’s desperate. He knows three things: his daughter is dead, his heart is broken, and Jesus does miracles. He needs one. And so he risks being ostracized to ask for a miracle. Now, notice a little rhetorical device the storyteller uses to shape the drama of the tale. The writer inserts the adverb, “suddenly,” here; it’s a literacy device that intensifies the emotional load of the story.
Jesus responds with compassion. He follows the man toward his home, the place of intense pain. But as he’s going, a woman who’s been bleeding for a dozen years presses through the crowd, believing that if she can just touch Jesus’ garment, healing power will flow into her. This is the story inside the story. Again, notice that the storyteller inserts the adverb, “suddenly.” The writer intends to affect us with the evidence of one intense need layered on top of another. The women is healed through her desperate act of faith. And she’s healed, “instantly,” according to the storyteller.
But then the scene shifts and we’re shown Jesus focusing again on the death of the child and the family in grief. Jesus comes to the family’s house, and immediately, the girl’s life is restored, broken hearts are mended, and people experience the healing presence of God.
This story within the story, these two stories of trauma and desperation—woven together with the intense words: “Suddenly,” “suddenly,” “instantly”—show us the way life’s challenges often come at us, layered one on top of another, pressing in upon us, and overwhelming us. And they show us Jesus as a healer, capable of not only being compassionate, feeling the intensity of pain and human suffering, but also capable of acting in such a way that, despite all the pain and trouble, the layer upon layer of the challenges of being human, he can be present to the pain without being overwhelmed by it.
There’s something in these stories for the season we’re living through. It overlaps the intense stories of our own experience of layer upon layer of challenge and crisis. I see in the person of Jesus, as presented by Matthew’s Gospel, a way to reflect not only on our experience of the multilayered crises we’ve journeyed through, but also on the way that the way of Jesus hints at how we might recover the mental acuity we need.
Acuity is defined as mental clarity, or keenness of mind. Precisely what many of us don’t seem to have right now.
We need acuity if we are going to: 1. find new solutions to our personal and public problems; 2. imagine new visions for human life on this planet, and 3. cultivate new ways of relating and caring for each other so we can all flourish.
2.
Prolonged, stressful seasons of difficulty affect our ability to think clearly. It’s true that danger can stimulate the mental clarity that helps us survive. The autonomic nervous system can go into hyper arousal and give our brains what we need to try to escape immediate danger. That’s what our body and mind do with momentary dangers. Chronic dangers, low grade, long term traumas, most often do the opposite: stress that lingers dulls the mind, withers concentration, and can lead to more debilitating problems affecting our minds and our bodies.
In our case, it’s not only the pandemic that’s been a problem. There’ve also been a number of other troubles, personal and societal. And any one of them would have been enough in a single year to knock the wind out of us.
One of you told me recently that you don’t understand why you can’t seem to get done what you once got done. “I’m working from home,” you told me. “I don’t have a commute. I ought to be able to get more done because all I have to do is open my laptop and I’m at work. But I can’t. I feel like I’m in a fog a lot of the time.”
Others have kids to tend, they’re homeschooling and didn’t sign up for that. They’re trying to cook, clean, shop safely, and carve out a little time to foster a little sanity, which feels like it’s slipping away too quickly.
Some have lost jobs, or go to jobs that have changed drastically. Some have had to deal with Covid at home, or other illnesses, surgeries, treatments. Some have lost loved ones. Some are are just bored stiff. All this, layer upon layer, in a socially deprived environment where all the usual supports are gone.
This is low grade, long term trauma. And it affects our ability to think.
This week, The Atlantic Magazine, ran an article called, “Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain.” Atlantic editor, Ellen Cushing, says “we have been doing this so long, we’re forgetting how to be normal.” The pandemic and all that’s gone along with it is messing with our brains.
“‘We’re all walking around with some mild cognitive impairment,’ says Mike Yassa, a neuroscientist at UC Irvine. ‘Based on everything we know about the brain, what’s bad for it is chronic and perpetual stress.’
Living through a pandemic—even for those who are doing so in relative comfort—‘is exposing people to microdoses of unpredictable stress all the time,’ says another researcher quoted in the article. Research shows that stress changes the brain regions that control executive function, learning, and memory.”
“‘What’s very clear in the literature is that environmental enrichment—being outside of your home, bumping into people, commuting, all of these changes that we are collectively being deprived of—is associated with synaptic plasticity,’” which is essential for brain health.
It’s obvious that our bodies hate this pandemic, but so do our brains. They don’t fare well with all this stress and strain, change, and even boredom.
It’s little wonder we don’t feel we’re as sharp mentally as we once were. There are reasons you might not be sleeping well, can’t concentrate like you once could, forget things, even the names of people you know well, or find yourself even feeling anxious about things re-opening again.
If you’re experiencing some kind of brain fog, join the club. Most of us are.
3.
So, what do we do? How do we recover the mental acuity we both want and need? The letters, ABC, can point the way.
“A” is for “admit.” Before we can do anything about the brain fog most of us feel, we have to admit to ourselves that it’s there. “A” is also for “awareness.” You’re now aware that this is a pretty universal experience. You’re part of a club you didn’t intend to join. But the solidarity is probably helpful in some way. You’re aware now that you’re not alone. Your brain isn’t broken. That helps. And “A” is also for “acceptance.” This is a little harder. We resist what we don’t like, what we don’t want. But unless there’s “acceptance” it’s hard to deal with the reality of what we’re facing, and we’re not likely to reach out for help.
This is what I appreciate in today’s reading from the poet, Ranier Maria Rilke. The poet imagines God speaking to us, inviting us to journey through the pain and struggle and toward the fullness of life.
Listen—
Resist nothing: neither wonder nor woe.
Just keep moving: no feeling is final.
We must not lose each other.
So near is the land
known as life.
You will know it
by its trembling.
Give me your hand.
So, “A” is about “admitting” something going on, “awareness” that you’re not alone, not broken, and “accepting” the invitation to “just keep moving: no feeling is final.”
4.
Then “B” is for “befriend.” In one sense, “befriending” is an extension of acceptance. We accept the reality of cognitive impairment. We stop resisting it. When we do, we can do something more effective, redemptive, transformative. We can “befriend” our bodies and come down for a bit, out of our rattled brains.
Researchers tell us that ways to feed mental acuity, the freedom of the mind to function with clarity and agility, is by climbing down out of our heads and back into our bodies. Physical practices and experiences open up the vise of the mind when it’s chronically gripped by the stresses and strains of dealing with the layered crises we’ve been living with.
Exercise. Eating well. Sleeping well. These are all key to the recovery of our mind’s acuity.
And regular exposure to nature has a transformative power. We’re spending a lot of time inside four very familiar walls, and in front of our screens and devices. Birds, trees, and flowers are healing presences. So is flowing water—a river, the ocean, a water feature in the garden. This last week, I spent an hour watching the BBC special, “My Passion for Trees,” with actress Judy Dench. Sure, I was on a screen, but my body was also remembering what it’s like to walk among those giant and stunning creatures, trees; remembering what it’s like to smell pine and eucalyptus and bay laurel; remembering what it’s like to hear the wind in the trees, flies and bees buzzing, birds singing, the the soft crunch of the forest floor beneath my feet. If you can’t get to nature easily, you can find ways to enter it through your memories. The body remembers. You can enter the memory of nature that’s in your body and it’s nearly as effective as being there.
Music and art can also heal the mind and foster the spaciousness needed for the recovery of mental acuity, that keenness of mind that feels so elusive right now to so many of us.
“B” is for “befriending” the body, physical things, getting out of the head for awhile so the mind can simply graze in the pasture of physical life, untethered by your worries. And when the mind can graze lazily like this, it recovers its plasticity, it’s well-being.
5.
“A” is for “admit.” “B” is for “befriend.” And “C” is for “care,” “compassion,” and “comedy.”
We need to “care” for ourselves in times like these, to practice compassion toward ourselves. It won’t work just to try to demand more from our minds. They don’t like what they’re going through. And they won’t like being scolded or shamed or pushed mercilessly for more. Acuity, the mental keenness we want and need, doesn’t come that way. It’s shy. It needs space and freedom and some safety to come out. Practice “care” with compassion toward your mind. And practice “comedy”—levity, playfulness, laughter—these things open the mind from the vise grip of our stresses and strains. And if you’re like me, there’s been much too little of playfulness this past year.
It’s little wonder most of our brains feel like they're in a fog. But acuity, mental keenness, can return. Be gentle with yourself.
“A” is for admitting you can’t think like you once could. Acknowledge it. And accept it as something quite common to us all.
“B” is for befriending the body—climbing down out of the cramped room of your mind and experiencing the physical nature of life.
“C” is for care, compassion, and comedy.
Someone wise once said, “The devil fell by sheer force of gravity; angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”