The biological process may help explain what at first glance appears as a troubling recurrence in the history of the church. The Body of Christ has sometimes moved by extreme, exaggerated reflexes. In behavior, as Charles Williams has pointed out, there are two opposite tendencies. “The first is to say: ‘Everything matters infinitely.’ The second is to say: ‘No doubt that is true. But mere sanity demands that we should not treat everything as mattering all that much.”’ The rigorous tendency leads to a sharp, intense view of the world that sees all actions as having eternal consequences. In its extreme forms it can evolve into pharisaical legalism and the fanaticism of “holy” crusades. The more moderate, relaxed approach can, at its worst, drift toward inactivity, a “who cares” attitude toward injustice and wrongdoing.
The apostle Paul, notably in Galatians and Romans, fought a pitched battle against both extremes, on the one hand denouncing legalists for perverting God’s grace and on the other hand upholding Christian works as a normal outgrowth of new life.
Christians have vacillated between opposing forces. In the earliest Christian centuries, the Way of Affirmation and the Way of Negation sprang up, each attracting ardent followers. The negators retreated to the desert and demonstrated their spirituality in feats of self-denial, while the affirmers labeled those who abstained from marriage and feasting as “blasphemers against creation.” The conflict was hardly new: Jesus contrasted John the Baptist’s asceticism with his own reputation as a winebibber and glutton (Matthew 11:19). Each tendency produced something worthwhile: The Way of Affirmation gave us great art and romantic love and philosophy and social justice while the Way of Negation contributed the profound documents of mysticism that could only come from undisturbed contemplation.
If I visit a community of young radicals who advocate withdrawal from society and intentional poverty, I may come away with a distorted view of what compassionate activity in the world should look like. Are we not called to foster the common good, to look for ways to help others thrive? Yet such a counterculture may temper the activity of the institutional church, calling it back to a prophetic awareness of justice. Perhaps their contribution may keep the Body from toppling over to one side.
Richard Mouw of Fuller Seminary recalls being in a meeting with sociologist Peter Berger. Speaking as a seminary president should, Mouw said that every Christian is called to engage in radical obedience to God’s program of justice, righteousness, and peace. Berger responded that Mouw was operating with a rather grandiose notion of radical obedience. Somewhere in a retirement home, he said, there is a Christian woman whose greatest fear in life is that she will make a fool of herself because she will not be able to control her bladder in the cafeteria line. For this woman, the greatest act of radical obedience is to place herself in the hands of a loving God every time she goes off to dinner.
On reflection, Mouw agreed that Berger had made a profound point. God calls us to deal with the challenges before us, and often our most radical challenges are very “little” ones. The call to radical micro-obedience may mean patiently listening to someone who is boring or irritating, or treating a fellow sinner with a charity that is not easy to muster, or offering detailed advice on a matter that seems trivial to everyone but the person asking for the advice.
C. S. Lewis was surprised to learn that his life after conversion consisted mostly in doing the same things he had done before, only in a new spirit. He concluded that being a practicing Christian “means that every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God.” The unifying factor in Bodily motion must be a common commitment to the Head. We will disagree on interpretations of what Jesus said and what are the best means of accomplishing those goals. But if we fail to find fellowship in our mutual obedience to Christ, our actions will be seen not as the counterbalancing forces necessary for movement but as spastic, futile contractions.
The Anarchic Neck
A blubbering hulk of a man entered my office in India. He was a successful Australian engineer who had been working in India, but now his neck twitched so violently that every few seconds his chin smashed into his right shoulder. He had spasmodic torticollis, or twisted neck syndrome, a debilitating condition sometimes caused by a psychological disorder.
Between the spastic flings of his chin, my patient described his despair. The torticollis, he said, had begun soon after a visit to Australia. A confirmed bachelor throughout his time in India, he had returned from Australia with a wife—a gorgeous woman, taller and younger than he, who soon became the subject of much village gossip. Short and obese, the engineer had a known history of alcoholism. What had she seen in him? What had prompted such a mismatch?
I referred the engineer to a psychiatrist, for I could do little except sedate him temporarily. The psychiatrist confided to me his suspicion that the engineer’s condition had developed out of anxiety over his new wife. The patient returned to me in a few weeks, unkempt, his neck wrenching spasmodically, full of despair.
When he sat alone, unnoticed by anyone, his neck rarely contorted. As soon as someone struck up a conversation with him, however, his chin would slam into his shoulder, aggravating a chronic, spongy bruise. Nothing helped other than sedation and the temporary relief that followed an injection of his nerve roots with novocaine. Finally, he reached the point of utter despondency and attempted suicide. He insisted, with a firm and resolute edge to his voice, that he would try again and again until he succeeded. He could no longer continue living with his anarchic neck.
Since we had no neurosurgeon, I reluctantly agreed to attempt a dangerous and complicated operation that involved exposing his spinal cord and the base of his brain. I had never ventured a procedure quite so complex, but the man insisted he had no alternative other than suicide.
I cannot recall an operation plagued with as many mishaps. The cautery short-circuited at the critical time when we most needed it to control bleeding. Then all the hospital lights failed, and I was left with a hand-held flashlight and no cautery just when the spinal cord was coming into view. To add to the stress, I had neglected to empty my bladder and felt most uncomfortable throughout the surgery.
Amid these distractions, I tried to concentrate on some very delicate cutting. After exposing the spinal cord and lower brain, I traced the hair-like nerves that supplied the spastic muscles in his neck. Any slight quiver of the scalpel could have cut a bundle of nerves, destroying movement or sensation.
Somehow, in spite of these difficulties, the surgery proved successful. When the engineer awoke, his back humped with a bandage, he discovered that the feared neck movement no longer plagued him. It couldn’t, of course, for I had cut the motor nerves that led from the spinal cord to the muscles that turned his neck. He could no longer make the movement that had previously dominated him.
Self-Serving Muscles
When people see someone with a spastic muscle, they often assume the muscle itself is malfunctioning. Actually, the muscle is perfectly healthy, and usually well-developed because of frequent use. The malfunction stems from the muscle’s relationship to the rest of the body; it demonstrates its motility at the wrong times, when the body neither needs nor wants it. A spastic muscle may, as in the case of the Australian engineer, cause embarrassment, pain, and deep despair.
Quite simply, a spastic muscle disregards the needs of the rest of the body, its dysfunction more mutiny than disease. Sir Charles Sherrington studied a brainless frog swimming easily across a pond. You can, he said, get the impression the injury is trivial until you examine the behavior closely and see that the frog is swimming randomly, with no purpose, just kicking its legs as a reflex. Absent a brain, movement can have no “purpose.”
Acts of love—healing, feeding, educating, ministering to prisoners, proclaiming the good news of God’s love—are the spiritual Body’s proper movements. Yet even these motions, which appear wholly good, can fall prey to a dangerous dysfunction. Like the spastic muscle, we may per
form acts of kindness for the benefit of our own sakes and reputations. Those of us in Christian work face this constant tendency toward pride. Someone comes to me for spiritual counsel, and I give it. Before they have walked out of my room I’m congratulating myself on what a fine counselor I am.
Jesus’ disciples, the first ones chosen to represent him, stumbled at this very point. They argued about petty issues: Who is the greatest disciple? Who will have the greatest honor in heaven? (Matthew 20:20-23). Jesus lectured them on the need for self-sacrifice, pulled children from the crowd to show the meek attitude they should have, and even washed the disciples’ dirty feet to illustrate the ideal of service. It did not seem to sink in—not until after that dark day on Calvary.
I have no desire to judge Christians today who seem to be exercising their muscles in a self-serving rather than a Body-serving way. I do wonder, though, about the dangers facing megachurches in places like Brazil and Africa, and especially the electronic church in the United States. A powerful “muscle” can reach millions of people and also attract millions of dollars in revenue. Does the medium give some leaders too much leverage and power? As a former missionary in a helping role, I know too well the human weaknesses that lead to spiritual pride. Those in the spotlight—media personalities and Christian speakers and performers—have described to me the besetting temptations that accompany ego strokes from adoring fans.
None of us is exempt. Radical Christians who urge social action, politically conservative Christians who give large sums of their investments to missions, seminary students who glory in their newfound knowledge, church members who join key committees—all of us need to come back to the image of God’s Son kneeling on a hard floor and unbuckling sandals covered with grime and dust.
We are not called to display individual strength as a discrete unit in the Body. Rather, our activity must be for the sake of the whole Body. If in the process of serving, applause or even fame results, we will need special grace to handle it. And if we consciously seek renown or wealth, the effect will be like the spastic contraction of a once-healthy muscle. Like Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5), we will have turned a good act into an impure act because of our impure motives.
Movement in the Body requires the smooth and willing cooperation of many parts who gladly submit their own strength to the will of the Head. Otherwise their actions, though powerful and impressive, will not benefit the whole.
What does this reliance consist of? Does the Spirit actually help with the specific pressures and choices confronting me each day? I explain my dilemmas and pour out my needs, but God does not respond by telling me what to do. There is no shortcut, no magic, only the possibility of a lifetime search for intimacy with a God who gently communicates to us through the Holy Spirit.
Paul urged fellow members, cells in Christ’s Body, to learn God’s “good, pleasing and perfect will” (Romans 12:2). In another passage he defined what our attitude should be, a reflection of Jesus’ own:
In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing,
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness. (Philippians 2:5-7)
By following that model of humility I am, in fact, learning the mind of Christ, the Head of the Body.
Chapter Sixteen
A SENSE of PROTECTION
IN A LITHOGRAPH by nineteenth-century printmaker Honoré-Victorin Daumier, a distinguished gentleman in a white waistcoat is sitting on a high-backed Victorian sofa. Perhaps I should say contorting, not sitting, for pain has doubled him up. His legs bend under him and his back arches downward, nearly forming a fetal position. Four sets of leering little devils perch beside him, half of them playing tug-of-war with cables looped around the man’s midsection and half sundering his abdomen with a huge, jagged-tooth saw. The man’s face expresses absolute agony.
Daumier added a title to his drawing: La colique, the pain of colic. Like most viewers, I find it difficult to view the print without a wince, mirroring the poor man’s anguish. Who has not felt at least a twinge from a muscular spasm caused by intestinal blockage or distension?
Pain is the hallmark of mortality. We plunge into the world through a woman’s stretched and torn tissues, our first response a cry of fear or grief or both. Years later we exit the world, often in one last paroxysm of pain. Between those two events we live out our days, with pain always lurking at the door. The word itself derives from poena, the Latin word for punishment, a dark hint that the demons working the saw are more than imaginary.
Ironically, I have spent my medical career among people whose faces also bear the signs of punishment and anguish, but for the opposite reason. Leprosy patients suffer because they feel no pain. They long for the demons who would alert them to impending danger.
My fascination with pain began, I suppose, in my childhood. As we traveled the mountains of South India, my parents would bring along a few pairs of dental forceps. I interrupted my play to stand by, with wide eyes and a racing heart, as my mother or father extracted teeth—without anesthetic. I would watch my tiny mother wriggle her pointed forceps up between the gum and tooth, seeking a firm grip so the crown of the tooth would not break off when she yanked. She hung on fiercely to those forceps while the patient’s own thrashing motions worked the tooth loose. The patients cried out, danced around wildly, and spit up blood. Still, even after seeing those reactions, onlookers lined up for treatment. Ridding themselves of toothache warranted the cost.
Occasionally in villages on the plains we would also see the impressive fakirs, religious men who demonstrated their conquest of pain. Some would push a thin, stiletto-type blade through their cheek, tongue, and out the other cheek, then withdraw the blade without bleeding. Others strung themselves high in the air by pulling on ropes that passed through a metal ring at the top of a pole and ended in meat-hooks stuck into the flesh of their backs. Showing no signs of pain, they dangled like spiders above an admiring crowd. Still others garishly decorated themselves with scores of oranges attached to large safety pins, which they jabbed into their skin. They laughed and merrily danced down the streets on stilts, jiggling the oranges in time with music.
On my return to India as an orthopedic surgeon, I encountered the full spectrum of human misery. Unaccountably, I found myself drawn to those who never came to the hospital, the deformed beggars who lined the entrances to temples, railway stations, and most public buildings. I saw clawed hands with missing fingers, ulcerated feet, paralyzed thumbs, and every conceivable kind of orthopedic defect, and I learned that no orthopedist had ever treated them or their fifteen million fellow sufferers worldwide. Because of the stigma attached to leprosy, few hospitals would admit them.
I have been studying pain ever since because leprosy destroys the nerves that carry pain, making the body devastatingly vulnerable to injury. I even came to appreciate those fanciful creatures who wielded the cables and saws in Daumier’s lithograph. Are they truly demons? Without their apparent torments, would the gentleman attend to his colic?
The Body’s Hotline
As I write, nerve cells are informing my brain that my strained back needs attention. The nerve endings of pain receptor cells detect pressure or inflammation, translate that sensation into a chemical and electrical code, and send those messages to the brain, which in turn weighs their significance and dictates a response.
Pain messages travel along a hotline, insisting on priority. They can preoccupy the brain, in the process drowning out all pleasurable sensations. The entire body responds. The muscles in my aching back contract, which intensifies pain by squeezing nerves. My blood flow changes: blood pressure reacts to pain just as it reacts to anxiety and fear. I may go pale or flush or even faint. Pain may upset my digestion, causing a spasm that brings on the feeling o
f nausea.
At another level, pain may dominate me psychologically. I may become cranky, complaining to my colleagues and family. Perhaps I’ll cancel an overseas trip to give my back extra rest, which in turn leads to further complications: guilt from letting people down or depression about my inability to work.
Amazingly, the sensation that evokes such a powerful response in every part of my body and mind soon fades into oblivion. Think back to your worst experience of pain and try to remember what it felt like. You cannot. You can summon up sharp recollections from other senses, such as the face of a childhood friend or the tune of the national anthem or even a memory of taste or smell piquant enough to prompt salivation. Yet the sense of tyrannical pain has somehow vanished. You have forgotten.
Dominating, subjective, and ephemeral, pain offers a research target as elusive as the quark. What is pain? When is it really there—and where?
As a medical student in England I had the rare privilege of studying under Sir Thomas Lewis, a pioneer in the study of pain. I remember those days well because Sir Thomas used his students as guinea pigs in his research. One gets an unforgettable perspective on pain by recording sensations while being pinched or pricked. Often Lewis subjected himself to the same tests, lest he misinterpret the students’ accounts. He collected his findings into a book, Pain, that became a classic, a model of beautiful language as well as medical research.
We allowed blood pressure cuffs to be inflated around a metal grater that pressed into our arms, endured drippings of hot sealing wax, and dutifully performed isometric exercises while a tourniquet cut off our blood supply. One wicked contraption shot electrical voltage through the fillings of a tooth. Some volunteers submersed their hands in ice water, then hot water. We had cheeks and hands pricked simultaneously to determine which pain extinguishes the other. We heard bells rung and stories read aloud, and we repeated sequences of numbers in forward and reverse order, all to measure how distraction modifies the sensation of pain.
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