This Too Shall Last

by K. J. Ramsey

  No one describes the process of attachment more beautifully than psychologist Henry Cloud.

  If everything goes right we begin to bond naturally as infants. When we are born we move from a warm, wet, dark, soothing environment into a cold, dry, bright, harsh one. We move from our mother’s womb, where all our needs are automatically met, to a world where we need to depend upon fallible people to take care of us. For those few moments after we slip from the birth canal into the light, we are in shock, in emotional isolation.

  One look at the face of a newborn gives you a good picture of this total isolation. Then the mother takes the child and begins to hold him closely and talk softly to him. Suddenly he goes through a transformation. He stops screaming, and his muscles relax. He turns toward his mother for warmth, for food, and for love. Emotional bonding to his mother has begun.

  Over time the child gradually internalizes his mother’s care. He begins storing up memories of being comforted by her. In a sense, the child takes his mother in and stores her inside his memory. This internalization gives him a greater and greater sense of security. He has a storehouse of loving memories upon which to draw in his mother’s absence.

  A “self-soothing” system is being formed in which the child can literally have a relationship with the one who loves him in her absence. He could not do this immediately because he did not have enough loving experiences. Through thousands of moments of connection the memory traces must be built up.

  As this relationship gets stronger and stronger, the child reaches another milestone: he achieves “emotional object constancy.” What this means is that the child is able to experience himself as loved constantly, even in the absence of the loved one. And he also is able to love the absent one, whom he has internalized.17

  God made us permeable.18 We are like sponges, soaking up the relational atmosphere around us. And we are most spongy in our first two to three years of life, as our brains “borrow” our parents’ brains, particularly their prefrontal cortices, to organize and regulate our own functioning.19 Our brains form and function through absorbing our parents’ presence. We internalize our relationship with our parents or earliest caregivers, whether that relationship was adequate, abusive, confusing, or wonderful. Their presence shaped the physiologic structure of our brains and the capacity of our hearts to trust and love. Even when we are adults, our lives are guided by the relational atmosphere we absorb, forming us toward faith or doubt.

  We were made for relationships in bodies shaped by relationships. Remembering this changes how we find grace in suffering and how we all can find wholeness in the stories God is writing in our lives. Remember, we are more than walking heads.20 We are embodied and relational, walking, eating, talking, hugging, touching, sitting reflections of the God who is three in one and showed his face in Jesus.

  “Somehow we Christians have come to believe that we have bodies, not that we are bodies.”21 We elevate our thinking capacity over the truth of our embodied, relational existence, and in doing so, we cut ourselves off from the grace of learning love through one another. God wants to renew our minds so we know his good, pleasing, and perfect will, and he renews them through us presenting our bodies as living sacrifices.22 Faith is formation for our whole selves. Hope is held in physical, relational experiences.

  Throughout this book, I will discuss the brain and the beautiful ways neuroscience reflects the transformative nature of relationships in the body of Christ. The brain is more than a three-pound mass at the top of our bodies, buzzing with more than 86 billion neurons.23 As psychiatrist Dan Siegel, a pioneer in the field of interpersonal neurobiology,24 reminds us, “The mind is embodied, not just enskulled.”25

  Your mind involves your whole body, including the activity of the brain throughout the body.26 It extends beyond your gray matter. Through both the synapses firing inside your skull and the brain’s distributed nervous system throughout your body, the mind connects with the world both within and beyond your skin. The mind depends on the presence of relationships to share energy and information and is both structured and changed by relationships. It regulates how energy flows through us, guiding the communication of neurons and creating the perceptions, sensations, emotions, beliefs, and meaning filling our lives in every moment.27 Your embodied, relational mind is what God is renewing.

  How we come to believe, trust, and love is a physical process. Being rooted and grounded in love requires relationships to guide our embodied, relational minds to renewed faith in the God who is good. Relationships are required, not peripheral. We are to let the word of Christ dwell richly among us, in the context of our communal life together.28 As Siegel explains, “The brain is a social organ, and our relationships with one another are not a luxury but an essential nutrient for our survival.”29

  Our relationships shape the story we live, not just the one we speak with our lips but the one we feel in our bones and believe when we’re most broken. Relationships have shaped our minds, constructing the way we experience our stories, tell them, and participate in God’s story. When we prod each other to believe God is working all things together for our good, we miss the larger grace we could extend in re-forming our mind’s potential to experience him as trustworthy and present. Our struggle to believe, our striving to succeed, our prideful, solo journeys to look stronger, more competent, and more put together than we are—all are rooted in relational experiences of feeling overlooked, neglected, insignificant, and small.

  We see God through our scars.

  To see God clearly, to believe with heart and soul and mind and strength, we have to see our wounds and let them be dressed. We can’t just consume theological facts about God and expect them to digest into a nourished, vibrant faith.30 If God seems absent, it may be because you’ve experienced an absence in your life so deep and so incompletely healed you wince anytime it’s brushed against. If God seems against you, perhaps it’s because people who should have been for you treated you with contempt or neglect.

  We were made for union with God, but we came into being through relationships fractured by sin. Your concept of God has been formed synapse by synapse in your earliest experiences, in your memories of harm and help, and the overall presence you internalized from your parents. Your struggle to experience God as good and present almost certainly has less to do with your doctrinal beliefs and memorized Scripture than with the way you’ve been shaped and scarred by relationships.

  Our ability to give and receive God’s love—to relate in ways that reflect the self-giving, empowering, gracing nature of God—is formed in the matrix and mud of relationships. Our story shapes our faith. And to live in the story of God’s love, we must be reshaped by communion with each other.

  Suffering feels like getting lost in a forest while the rest of the church hikes ahead, and the vulnerability and dependency we encounter in ourselves when we lose the trail while dusk descends painfully exposes the goal for which we were created. We need others, chiefly God, to survive. We were made for interdependence, but most of us have forgotten how dependent we are.

  One mercy of suffering might be its unearthing and refining of our deepest desires. It forces us to face what we most love. We become what we adore, and self-sufficiency reduces us to shadows of what we were made to be. In the limits of suffering, when autonomy crashes into the wall of our broken, needy bodies and splintering, shipwrecked faith, we discover what we most long for is a God who loves us no matter what. The complacency of ease can numb the sense of, and prevent the acknowledgment of, what we most crave: union with God. The solitude of suffering forces us to make peace with our loneliness, to sense our deepest longing is not simply relief but wholeness of life in God. In my lonely, lengthy, interior pain, I have come to long for and seek the invisible companionship of God.31 The greatest desire of my heart is union with God.32

  My sense and your sense of his companionship, however, cannot be sustained in solitude; it can only be sustained in community, in faces and friendship wh
ere we glimpse the larger, longer truth that God sees us. In the shadowy forest of suffering, when the way is unclear and the sound of solitude scares us to our very core, God is lighting a desire that will lead us home. Our longing to walk forward with friends is not weak, empty, or a dream that will only disappoint. It’s the spark of our embodied, relational souls crying for their safe haven in God. In the dismay and pain of isolation, faith trusts its small cry for communion is the God-given longing that will guide us home.33

  In both the silence of solitude and the faces of the faithful, God is forming his love in us. Henry Cloud describes the secure attachment of so thoroughly absorbing our mother’s gaze of love as newborns that we can perceive ourselves as constantly loved in her absence; in the same way, God is forming in us a deeper, fuller knowledge that we are constantly, wholly loved.34 Through our spiritual rebirth as daughters and sons of God, we are united to Christ and begin internalizing memories of God’s love. Suffering does not block his love; it is the ground of dependence where we sense our need for it.

  The irony of suffering is that experiencing weakness makes us more human, not less. We fear any loss of freedom will erase part of who we are. But it is in our need for others that we experience the heart of being human. When we encounter our limitations, losses, and basic needs for comfort and help, we encounter the truth that we were never intended to be independent. “Indeed, the body is not one part but many.”35

  I reject the notion that I am an individual being, built by the bulk of my successes, suffering in the wake of my failures, a tree rooted in determination or withering in its lack. We are not sole trees standing stalwart in an open field, rooted only as deep or wide as our effortful faith will grind into the ground. We are more aspen than oak, reaching skyward in hope, glorious in waving gold, both our beauty and survival formed and sustained in interdependence. A single aspen tree is connected to hundreds or thousands more by a network of roots so deep they can survive wildfires. Stemming from one seedling and held together by shared roots, aspen trees in a grove stand as a single organism. Our glory is derived from one source, our strength from shared roots.

  Unlike the aspens in their quiet unity, we forget our shared source, roots, and wholeness. We live like single trees instead of a grove, and we blame each other’s lack of sturdiness when storms tear down our branches. When the soil of one’s life lacks what is needed to strengthen drooping arms so they can lift in faith, we judge instead of fertilize. We forget we are a single organism—one body—and alone we wither.

  Christians who are suffering need the church’s root system to sustain them, but far too few of us have experienced this. We need the nourishment of our shared roots. My wholeness is inextricably connected to yours. My hope is bound up in yours. My capacity to taste and see that the Lord is good is not a creation of my own determination but the fruit of willing, self-sacrificing love. I am one who hopes because I am one who has been shaped by the hopes of others, whose hurts are held in the hearts of others, and whose faith when fragile is augmented by the faith of those who are strong.

  The point of faith was never for you to sustain yourself on your own. The point of faith is to form your entire, embodied, relational self, through weakness and dependence to realize you were made to know and be known. It is to shape you, through the presence of Christ and the physical presence of his people, to sit, stand, dance, and run together in the rhythm of the Trinity pulsating through all time, space, and matter to unite all things in love. You won’t always remember this reverberating love and unparalleled story on your own, but even this is grace, as the thread of weakness pulls you farther into the loom where the Weaver’s hands are forming the fabric of a cosmic wholeness that will last.

  NOTES

  1 Tish Harrison Warren uses the lovely phrase “tiny theophanies” in her book Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016), 135.

  2 Matt. 6:26.

  3 James B. Torrance, “The Doctrine of the Trinity in Our Contemporary Situation,” in The Forgotten Trinity: A Selection of Papers Presented to the BCC Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today, ed. Alasdair I. C. Heron (London: British Council of Churches, 1991), 15.

  4 Gen. 1:26.

  5 Acts 17:28.

  6 Dallas Willard, Life without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23 (Nashville: Nelson, 2018), 19.

  7 As theologian Alan Torrance writes, “The communion of the Trinity as such constitutes the arche and telos of all that is.” Alan J. Torrance, Persons in Communion: An Essay on Trinitarian Description and Human Participation, with Special Reference to Volume One of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2011), 258.

  8 Kelly M. Kapic, God So Loved, He Gave (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 18.

  9 In The City of God, Augustine describes humans as terra animata, animated earth. Rather than reifying the mind, rationality, or even self-awareness, Augustine highlighted God’s breath as the animating power turning what was previously mere dust and dirt into the glory of animated physicality reflecting God’s own image. Stephen Sapp articulates the importance of this embodied anthropology in how we view one another when disease or disorders minimize our rational capabilities, insights which carry great import for viewing and treating those who suffer as whole, beautiful reflections of God. Drawing from Augustinian insights, Gilbert Meilaender likewise challenges us, especially as it pertains to bioethics, to hold with humility and wonder the natural progression of death. See St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 20. See also Stephen Sapp, “Living with Alzheimer’s: Body, Soul and the Remembering Community,” Christian Century 115, no. 2 (1998): 54–60. And Gilbert Meilaender, “Terra es Animata: On Having a Life,” Hastings Center Report 23, no. 4 (1993): 25–32.

  10 Stanley J. Grenz, The Social God and the Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei, vol. 1 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 305.

  11 Theologian Colin Gunton writes, “To be human is to be created in and for relationship with divine and human others.” Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 222.

  12 John A. Teske, “From Embodied to Extended Cognition,” Zygon 48 (2013): 759–87, doi:10.1111/zygo.12038.

  13 Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas writes, “The Person is otherness in communion and communion in otherness. The person is an identity that emerges through relationship . . . ; it is an ‘I’ that can exist only as long as it relates to a ‘thou’ which affirms its existence and its otherness. If we isolate the ‘I’ from the ‘thou’ we lose not only its otherness but also its very being; it simply cannot be without the other. This is what distinguishes the person from an individual. The orthodox understanding of the holy Trinity is the only way to arrive at this notion of personhood.” John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 9.

  14 Serene Jones, Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World (New York: Viking, 2019), 152.

  15 Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind (New York: Bantam, 2012), 7.

  16 Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (New York: Guilford, 2012), chap. 3.

  17 Henry Cloud, Changes That Heal: How to Understand Your Past to Ensure a Healthier Future (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 68–69.

  18 Rich Plass and Jim Cofield, The Relational Soul (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 25.

  19 Lois Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain (New York: Norton, 2014), 83. See also John H. Coe and Todd W. Hall, Psychology in the Spirit: Contours of a Transformational Psychology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), 241.

  20 Brad D. Strawn and Warren S. Brown, “Liturgical Animals: What Psychology and Neuros
cience Tell Us about Formation and Worship,” Liturgy 28, no. 4 (2013): 3.

  21 Warren S. Brown and Brad D. Strawn, The Physical Nature of Christian Life: Neuroscience, Psychology, and the Church (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012), 4.

  22 Rom. 12:1–2.

  23 Eric H. Chudler, “Brain Facts That Make You Go, ‘Hmmmmm,’ ” University of Washington (n.d.), https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/ffacts.html (accessed July 5, 2019).

  24 Interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) is an interdisciplinary field that brings together many branches of science and theories of human knowledge and meaning. It is a major influence on my therapeutic work and is a body of knowledge that has significantly contributed to my thinking in this book. IPNB beautifully expresses what Scripture has always stated, that our personhood is formed, expressed, and sustained by relationships.

  25 Siegel, The Developing Mind, 5.

  26 Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe about Ourselves (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 39.

  27 Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation (New York: Bantam, 2011), 54–55.

  28 Col. 3:12–17. While embodied relationships are the normal way in which God works, God can and does sustain his children outside the scope of the relational interaction I’m describing, when no positive relationships are available or possible. But this is the exception, not the rule.