by K. J. Ramsey
In Jesus we have been united with a presence, memory, and story that touches and transforms our stories of sorrow into stories of life. In Christ the suffering we want to escape becomes the place of more fully participating in the reality of the kingdom of God. Our union with Christ does not rescue us from our earthy existence. Rather it plants our feet on the arid soil of suffering and makes it fertile ground.
We can only experience stories including suffering and prolonged waiting as good by encountering the story and person of Jesus, not once but over and over in the myriad moments when life leaves us breathless, bereaved, or bored. Remembering Jesus’ entire, embodied life changes how we live our entire, embodied lives. The presence, memory, and story of Jesus can and will remember us into people who know they are loved.
Remembering Christ and being re-membered by him is not simply a matter of recounting his story but of reexperiencing his life in the most mundane and maddening moments of our lives. Our memory, our stories, and the vast neural networks propelling us toward either health or death must all be touched by the presence, memory, and story of the only man who died but still lives.
Jesus does what we could never do for ourselves. The curse of sin has woven every human life into a rope that will hang us. Every human story is braided into the hanging weight of shame. We fight for air, gulping, gasping, and flailing. Each of us, aware of our imminent death or not, fights for a life we cannot secure.
Christ came to release us from our kicking, futile attempts at escaping death’s knot by cutting the gnarled loop wrapped tight around our flesh, to hold us, exhausted on the ground of our execution, and with the breath that raised him from the dead, to breathe life into our broken bodies so tenderly, so completely, and so continuously that we can walk with him again.
How close Christ came forms the reality of how close we can come; his life unites us to God. Jesus came as one of us, in a body marked by death’s cords. God came in a body that could get sick, a body that would be scorned and spit at, a body that would die. And a body that would live. It was as a human that Jesus faithfully offered himself as a living sacrifice to breathe God’s breath of life into our bodies suspended and subject to the power of death.
Jesus’ life is not just an example. The thirty-three years he walked the dusty ground of Israel were not simply a section of history recorded to encourage, challenge, or confuse us. No, in Jesus the new power and new reality of the kingdom of God intersects human history. The hanging noose of shame no longer has to be the end of the human story. The domain of darkness is no longer the only power at work in this world or your life.
The boundaries of your story are no longer the dates of your birth and death.6 Every mundane and monumental moment of Christ’s life was lived to bring before the Father the faithful human response to God’s love we could never produce on our own. Each unrecorded kindness to strangers and his family, every moment of simple or searing trust, his thirty years of living in obscurity before beginning his ministry—Jesus’ humanity is the foundation and force of our human faith. By the Spirit, the breath of God, Christ’s faithful life becomes ours, here and now, in the places we most struggle to be faithful and faith-filled.
There is more at work within, between, behind, and before us than the disappointments or drudgery of today seem to indicate. Jesus’ life enfolds our stories in a story larger than our own, of a people more loved than we realize, a power beyond our perception, and a world more lasting than we can imagine. The life of Christ is ours to receive, a life lived on our behalf that turns our fainthearted faith into worship. Jesus does in us what we can never do for ourselves.
Suffering feels like the narrator of your story, telling a tale of woe. But Love is its true Author, writing your life into a larger story of a people pursued, oppression obliterated, death defeated, and a world reborn. The reign of God and your enjoyment of it is the reality that will last.
To say we struggle to experience that reality now, as we suffer, is probably the greatest understatement of this book. Our struggle is more than a matter of belief or its absence, and learning to recognize and tend to its origins will gradually change our experience.
Because of how God designed our brains to function, our stories shape how we experience the world, including how we experience the story and presence of Christ. We might believe the fact that God is loving, but our memories often have molded us to experience him as anything but. Psychology and neuroscience teach us that how we experience the present is constantly being shaped by our past. Memory is forming the substance of our stories, but most of us are unaware of its steering.7
While we think of memory as a collection of autobiographical facts, it is actually a complex function of how the brain processes each moment, situation, and relationship and directs our response. Our neural structures are formed through our early relational experiences, which attachment researchers call our “internal working model.”8 Our minds are etched with the ways we have experienced others and responded to them, and this constitutes, on a deeper-than-conscious level, how we continue to experience our relationships with others, ourselves, and God.9 Your past shapes your present and your future.
In 1949 the Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb described a concept that underlines why memory so powerfully shapes our lives: neurons that fire together wire together.10 Every experience you have corresponds with a specific pattern of neural networks firing, and each time you repeat an experience or behavior, the same set of neural networks fires. The more frequently a pattern is fired, the more easily it will fire in the same way in the future. Now known as Hebb’s axiom, this concept demonstrates how our experiences carve well-worn pathways in our brains that reinforce and repeat similar patterns of doing, being, and believing.
Two of the most general forms of memory constantly sculpting our neural pathways are implicit and explicit memory. Grasping a broad sense of both may help you consider what is shaping your story and how that story can change.
Implicit memory is our most primitive form of memory, functioning even at birth and involving the lower regions of the brain (including the limbic system, brain stem, amygdala, and other regions of the right hemisphere). This type of memory stores, encodes, and retrieves experiences without our conscious awareness. Whether we are pouring a cup of coffee or walking down a street or perceiving the emotional atmosphere of a conversation, our minds automatically circumvent the circuitry needed for conscious, voluntary mental activity. Our bodies remember the way Dad got angry when we cried as kids, and it automatically associates the expression of vulnerability with a negative response, so much so that we expect anger or dismissal when we let our tears be seen by those closest to us now. Implicit memory makes simple actions effortless, but it makes mistrust and self-protection in moments when they are no longer needed effortless as well.
Our bodies remember our experiences without our conscious awareness, a fact that holds profound power for understanding and changing how we live. We often are experiencing something connected to and deeply influenced by our past, without being aware of it. By paying attention to our bodies and how they are reacting to a situation, we can begin placing our current emotions and reactions into the context of our story. With kindness and curiosity, our bodies can be guides to places in our past that hold hurt and anxiety, pain far deeper than whatever we are experiencing now, wounds that need the tender care of Christ. Remembering that implicit memory is continuously directing the way we respond to our lives gives us room to live differently, to fire distinct neural networks, to create new pathways of peace.
Explicit memory is the form of memory we most commonly associate with remembering, including both autobiographical memory (remembering your birthday) and factual memory (remembering when a bill is due). Explicit memory starts developing later than implicit memory, at about eighteen to twenty-four months, as the hippocampus begins its work of integrating different aspects of implicit memory—feelings, perceptions, sensations, and bodily and spatial aware
ness. The hippocampus connects implicit and explicit memory, enabling our ability to recall and to know we are remembering. Our autobiographical memory emerges as our prefrontal cortex develops and integrates with the hippocampus, giving us a sense of self over time, understood through language and thought. Autobiographical memory gives us a sense of what we have lived, what we are experiencing now, and how the future may unfold. Explicit memory requires conscious attention and is what enables us to form a sense of story.
Implicit and explicit memory work in concert to shape our story, and it is through the lens of our stories that we view everything and everyone, including God and ourselves. What you have lived actively and constantly sculpts what you continue to live into. Remembering your story, down to the emotional tenor of your youngest years, places your hands in Christ’s around your present to sculpt your life into the shape of his love. Instead of being subconsciously steered by unresolved pain, tending to the wounds in your memory can sculpt your life into the shape of God’s love.
Our memory can obstruct both our view of God and the embodied reality with which we can experience grace, guiding us to view our ordinary bodies and ordinary days as prisons and deserts far removed from God and grace. Our stories can block us from grace when unacknowledged and forgotten, but when remembered with respect and care, they reveal the fingerprints of Christ’s incarnation in our lives.
The chasm between who God says he is and who we experience him to be, especially when hard things keep happening, is not crossed by whipping our minds into submission with more theological facts or quickly naming suffering a gift.11 This chasm is crossed only by new experiences, a relationship that forms love so deeply in our memory that acceptance and grace become our expectation.
In Jesus, we are continuously offered the relationship that will change our stories by renewing our minds, down to the very firing of our neural networks. We respond to our circumstances and God through the matrix of our emotional memory, and “emotion memories can be modified only through new emotional experiences.”12 Significant change in how we experience our circumstances—change in the memory structures of the brain that are reciprocally guided and shaped by emotion and relationship—is possible through “months and years of daily doses of loving communion with God.”13 Because Christ came, because he suffered, because he lives in us now by his Spirit, he is always crossing the chasm to us. In those experiences in which our memory has taught us to expect judgment and abandonment, he offers his presence.
I wonder if we don’t absorb the Breath of God swirling around us in suffering, loss, and seasons of monotony because we consider the story of Jesus as though it were a book whose only chapters that matter are the first and the last. We think of Christ like we think of ourselves—as though his bodily existence was simply a vehicle to accomplishing success. We unintentionally treat his body and our own as either commodities that will purchase happiness or inconveniences that will block it. I know we don’t mean to. It’s like exhaling the cultural air we breathe—so automatic that we aren’t aware we are doing it.
The entire, embodied life of Christ forms the food of our faith, the nourishment that strengthens weakened knees so they can stand firm and tired hands so they can hold hope. But we prefer the rich diet of a Christmas feast followed by Easter dessert. We heap holiday food on the plates of our minds, plates coated in the acidic film of prolonged pain, and we wonder why we feel foggy and faint. In Christ’s entire life—including his birth, anonymity, ministry, suffering, death, and resurrection—we encounter the faithfulness that can nourish our often-feeble faith into strength. We long for joy, and it is here. Christ’s entire life can fuel our entire lives, down to our very breath. Joy becomes the habit of our hearts, the energy directing our minds, and the truth upholding our bodies when we encounter our ordinary lives as the place where Christ is present. The middle of the story you are in is the place where God is already meeting you, merging your life with his own, and establishing his kingdom of death-defying love.
Your present discomfort has to bond with Christ’s past faithfulness to create future hope. Today, in tears or trouble or exhaustion, your present suffering can be the place where you experience Christ’s faithful endurance of suffering. Even your hopelessness can be a prompt to trust the endless well of hope Christ has on your behalf. Your present pain can marry Christ’s past faithfulness, re-forming your memory into the contours of his love. A memory reshaped is a future reimagined.
For Jesus’ entire, embodied life to transform our entire, embodied lives, we have to allow his love to rule every part of who we are. Living under the loving lordship of Christ requires paying attention to our bodies and stories with an alertness that produces “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”14 The fruit of the Spirit is a mind and life guided by grace and flowing with love. The fruit of the Spirit is a well-integrated prefrontal cortex (PFC).
The PFC is the part of the brain that creates and sustains many aspects of our well-being, including our ability to make sense of our story and shape its trajectory. The neurons in this part of the brain generally require conscious attention to activate, a challenge for us all. To remember our story and live into the better one where Christ has already come near, we have to pay attention.
Psychiatrist Dan Siegel describes nine functions of living that strongly depend on the PFC.
1. Body regulation. The PFC helps us regulate our heart rate, breathing, and digestion when we are facing stress. It receives information from our nervous system and can influence how we respond to situations that are triggering our fight-flight-or-freeze impulse.
2. Attunement. The PFC allows us to consider what another person may be thinking or feeling and shift our internal state in light of it. It allows us to resonate with, ponder, and respond to people’s internal worlds, including our own.
3. Emotional balance. The PFC helps regulate our emotions so that they are a rich part of our lives yet do not constantly overwhelm us.
4. Response flexibility. The PFC helps us pause before responding, creating space between what our bodies sense and feel and how we choose to act.
5. Empathy. The PFC creates capacity to feel what another is feeling, while remaining grounded and aware of oneself. It allows us to perceive how another person is seeing the world.
6. Insight. The PFC enables us to consider our past and future in connection to the present, giving us the ability to make sense of our stories.
7. Fear modulation. We often feel fear when facing situations similar to ones that have frightened us in the past. The PFC can calm the limbic system and amygdala, inhibiting our fear so it does not override our thoughts and behavior.
8. Intuition. The PFC enables us to recognize and interpret sensations from throughout our bodies, especially from the viscera (heart, lungs, and gastrointestinal tract). It opens us to the wisdom of our bodies, which helps us sense the world around us and our safety and place in it.
9. Morality. The PFC empowers the ability to consider not only our own good but the good of others, overriding immediate impulses so we can sense the meaning of experiences and challenges and seek the welfare of others.15
The PFC is the part of our brain we most need to gain awareness of our story and live into the trajectory of hope. Without outside intervention and intention, death and decay knot our minds into pathways and patterns of disconnection and disintegration. When facing the burden of suffering on our own, we will disconnect and detach from our own minds and from one another.16 All of life is a battle for our attention, and suffering strongly suggests we close our eyes and lock our hearts.
The prolonged, continual experience of weakness, pain, and loss will frequently place us in a position that feels vulnerable and unsteady. Stress, uncertainty, and difficulties will continue to bombard our bodies, putting us into fight-flight-or-freeze mode and triggering a deluge of overwhelming emotion. But there is a power at work within us, greater than the barrage
of suffering. There are always two roads before us: the lower road, where our brain becomes unbalanced, the PFC and its regulating functions become temporarily disintegrated, and the lower regions of our brain take over, shoving us down a rockslide of fear and disconnection; and the higher road, where the distress of suffering reminds us to pay attention to ourselves with care and seek security in the One whose brain is always balanced and whose heart is always kind.17
We’ll often stumble down the lower road, but Jesus goes with us, ready and willing to help us rise. Even when our brains are flooded and we are flailing, “we have the mind of Christ.”18 When we stand in the soil of suffering, abiding in the One who stood firm in suffering before us, this world touches the next, and we are slowly changed from the inside out. Suffering is a place we now find ourselves in, and it is the place where we can experience how near Christ has brought his kingdom.
Suffering does not have to be a barrier to the renewal of our minds. It can be the rocky footing that reminds us to reach for the God who already came to the ground.
In Christ we encounter a human faithfulness we could never muster—a faithful trust in God that stands in our stead, gives us strength, and carries us farther into the story of redemption. Our lives now exceed the bounds of time, space, and our memories because Jesus has intersected time and space with his life and reign. He does in us what we can never do on our own.
Our stories are no longer confined to our years, constrained by the cords of death. Our potential is no longer fueled by privilege or extinguished by its lack. Our memories are now united with Christ’s memory; every moment of his trust, obedience, perseverance, and joy is now mysteriously and authentically ours to access and apply.19 He has faith when we have none. He has trust when ours is thin.20