Chapter Fifteen

BODY in MOTION

A FRAIL MAN with a more-than-prominent nose and a face seamed with wrinkles crosses the stage. His shoulders slump slightly and his eyes seem sunken and cloudy; he has, after all, passed his ninetieth birthday. He sits on a stark black bench, adjusting it slightly. After a deep breath, he raises his hands, which, trembling slightly, hang poised for a moment above a black and white keyboard. Then the music begins. All hints of age and frailty slip away from the minds of the four thousand people gathered to hear Arthur Rubinstein.

He has chosen a simple program: Schubert’s Impromptus, several of Rachmaninoff’s Preludes, and Beethoven’s familiar Moonlight Sonata, any of which could be heard at a music school recital. They could not, however, be heard as played by Rubinstein. Defying mortality, he weds a flawless technique to a poetic style, producing music that provokes prolonged shouts of “Bravo!” from the wildly cheering audience. Rubinstein bows slightly, folds those marvelous nonagenarian hands, and pads offstage.

A bravura performance such as Rubinstein’s engrosses my eyes as much as my ears. Hands are my profession, and I have studied them all my life. To me, a piano performance is a ballet of fingers, a glorious flourish of ligaments and joints, tendons, nerves, and muscles. I must sit near the stage to watch their movements.

I know that some of the passages, such as the powerful arpeggios in Moonlight’s third movement, require responses too fast for the pianist to accomplish consciously. Nerve impulses do not travel fast enough for the brain to sort out that the third finger has just lifted in time to order the fourth finger to strike the next key. Months of practice pattern the brain to treat the motions as subconscious reflex actions—“finger memory” musicians call it.

I marvel too at the slow, lilting passages. Rubinstein controls his fingers independently, so that when striking a two-handed chord of eight notes, each of the fingers exerts a slightly different pressure, with the melody note ringing loudest. A few grams more or less pressure in a crucial pianissimo passage has such a minuscule effect that only a sophisticated laboratory could measure it. The human ear contains just such a laboratory, and musicians like Rubinstein gain acclaim because discriminating listeners can savor those subtle nuances of control.

Often I have stood before a group of medical students or surgeons to demonstrate the motion of one finger. I hold before them a dissected cadaver hand, almost obscene-looking when severed from the body and trailing strands of sinew. I announce that I will move the tip of the little finger. To do so, I must place the cadaver hand on a table and spend perhaps four minutes sorting through the intricate network of tissues. Finally, when I have arranged at least a dozen parts in the correct configuration, with care I can maneuver them so the little finger bends without buckling the proximal joints.

In order to allow dexterity and slimness for actions such as piano playing, the finger contains no muscles; tendons transfer force from muscles in the forearm and palm. In all, seventy separate muscles contribute to hand movements.

I could fill a bookcase with surgery manuals suggesting various ways to repair hands that have been injured. Indeed, I have written one myself: Clinical Mechanics of the Hand. Yet in forty years of study I have never read a technique that succeeds in improving a normal, healthy hand. Computer scientists have developed programs that can defeat grand masters at chess, but the most sophisticated robots cannot come close to duplicating the fluid motions of a four-year-old at play.

I remember my lectures as I sit in concert halls watching slender fingers glissade across the keyboard. I revere the hand; Rubinstein took its function for granted. Often he closed his eyes or gazed straight ahead and did not even watch his hands. He was not thinking about his little finger, he was contemplating Beethoven and Rachmaninoff.

Scores of other muscles lined up as willing reinforcements for Rubinstein’s hands. His upper arms stayed tense, and his elbows bent at nearly a ninety-degree angle to match the keyboard height. Shoulder muscles rippling across his back contracted to hold his upper arms in place, and muscles in his neck and chest stabilized his shoulders. When he came to a particularly strenuous portion of music, his entire torso and his leg muscles went rigid, forming a firm base to allow the arms leverage. Without these anchoring muscles, Rubinstein would topple over every time he shifted forward to touch the keyboard.

I have visited facilities that produce radioactive materials. With great pride, scientists show off their expensive machines that allow them to avoid exposure to radiation. By adjusting knobs and levers they can control an artificial hand whose wrist supinates and revolves. More advanced models even possess an opposable thumb, an advanced feature reserved for primates in nature. Smiling like a proud father, the scientist wiggles the mechanical thumb for me. I nod approvingly and compliment him. But he knows, as I do, that compared to a human thumb his atomic-age hand is clumsy and primitive, a child’s Play-Doh sculpture compared to a Michelangelo masterpiece. A Rubinstein concert proves that.

Learning to Move

Six hundred muscles, composing 40 percent of our weight (twice as much as bones), burn up much of our energy in order to produce motion. Tiny muscles govern the light permitted into the eye. Muscles barely an inch long allow for a spectrum of subtle expressions in the face—a bridge partner or a diplomat learns to read them as important signals. A much larger muscle, the diaphragm, controls coughing, breathing, sneezing, laughing, and sighing. Massive muscles in the buttocks and thighs equip the body for a lifetime of walking. Without muscles, bones would collapse in a heap, joints would slip apart, and movement would cease.

Human muscles are divided into three types: smooth muscles control the automatic processes that rumble along without our conscious attention; striated muscles allow voluntary movements, such as piano-playing; and cardiac muscles are specialized enough to merit their own category. A hummingbird heart weighs a fraction of an ounce and beats eight hundred times a minute; a blue whale’s heart weighs half a ton, beats only ten times per minute, and can be heard two miles away. In contrast to either, the human heart seems dully functional, yet it does its job, beating 100,000 times a day with no time off for rest, to get most of us through seventy years or more.

Muscles pack enough potential to allow the Bolshoi Ballet and the graceful sports of ice skating and gymnastics. On TV the performers seem models of weightless beauty, gliding through the air, pirouetting on a single toe, dismounting from a high bar with a light spring. Up close and in person, though, motion seems more like hard work. It is noisy there, all shocks and thuds and creaking boards and panting, sweating bodies. That humans can transform such strenuous activity into fluidity and grace testifies to the dual nature of motion: robust strength and masterful control.

The movements of a Rubinstein or a Michael Jordan do not come cheaply. The motor cortex of the brain, on which will be written all the coding for intentional movement, starts out as blank as a washed chalkboard. An infant, dominated by gravity, cannot hold her head or trunk upright. Her hand and leg movements are abrupt and jerky, as in an old silent movie. She learns fast, however. In seven months, if all goes well, she will sit upright without support. A month later the infant can stand unassisted, but on average it takes seven more months for her to walk smoothly without consciously thinking of the action.

For the toddler to stand, the muscles that oppose each other in hips, knees, and ankles must exert an equal and opposite tension, stabilizing the joints and preventing them from folding up. “Muscle tone” describes the complex set of interactions that keeps all the infant’s muscles in a mild state of contraction, making her erect posture as active and strenuous as the movements that follow it. The toddler’s body crackles with millions of messages informing her brain of changing conditions and giving directions to perform the extraordinary feat of walking.

The brain stores our movements in a kind of hard disk in the lower brain. Repeat an action often enough and it becomes a subconscious reflex so that, for example, I can walk without thinking about it. This act of delegation explains Rubinstein’s finger memory: the reflex response permits him to move his fingers faster than his higher brain could order them. It also explains the “waiter effect.” Experienced waiters or flight attendants will not allow you to pick up a heavy coffee thermos from the tray, or the reflex would cause the hand holding the tray to jerk upwards, spilling the tray’s other contents. On the other hand, they can lift the thermos without any danger of spilling, for the stored memory has learned to control the reflex. Predictability is the key. The same principle explains the tickling reflex: I cannot tickle myself because my own actions—though not someone else’s—are predictable, drawing from this stored memory.

A Muscle Choir

Muscle cells perform just one action: they contract. They can only pull, not push, as their molecules slide together like the teeth of two facing combs. Cells join together in strands called fibers, and the fibers report to a further hierarchy called a motor unit group.

One motor nerve controls a motor unit group, wrapping itself around the muscle group as an octopus would encircle a pole. When that nerve gives a signal, all of its muscle fibers contract, becoming shorter and fatter. Muscles operate with an “all or none” principle. They have no throttle, rather a simple on-off switch. Strength varies, as when a pianist lightly taps a key or pounds it mightily, because of the number of motor units firing at any moment.

Conductors of large choirs warn their singers not to take breaths at the end of a pianissimo measure since the sound of many singers inhaling would be audibly distracting. Rather, they should suck in air in the middle of a measure, staggering their breathing so that the choir continues singing while just a few members inhale at any given instant. Similarly, the motor nerve directs some of a weightlifter’s motor units to take a rest when needed, while the biceps’ overall strength stays steady.

Rarely will all the motor units in a large muscle fire simultaneously. In an emergency, adrenaline may induce feats of great strength, called hysterical strength, such as a mother lifting a car off her child—perhaps then we galvanize all the motor units into simultaneous action.

I have literally heard the muscle “choir” by inserting a needle into a muscle and attaching it to a machine that transforms electrical energy into sound. Click-click-click: a constant stream of messages reports the activity of muscle tone. Slowly flex the biceps, and the volley of clicks accelerates. Move the arm abruptly, and the clicks crescendo to machine-gun frequency. The cells never stop clicking, and they adjust instantly, in a fraction of a second, when the brain calls for sudden movement.

As the meter records the stream of static flowing from just one muscle area the size of a needle point, hundreds of other muscles go undetected. A large and crucial group of them fire off whether or not we think about them: the automatic muscles controlling our eyelids, breathing, heartbeat, and digestion. The wise body does not trust our forgetful selves with these vital functions. So reliable are they that we cannot voluntarily stop our heartbeat or breathing. No one can commit suicide by holding their breath; accumulating carbon dioxide in the lungs will trigger a mechanism to override conscious desire and force the muscles of ribs, diaphragm, and lungs to move.

Consider the electrical network linking every home and building in a city like Beijing or New York. At any given second lights switch on and off, toasters pop up, microwave ovens begin their digital countdowns, water pumps lurch into motion. A far more complex switching system is operating in your body at this second, and it performs harmoniously, much of it at a subconscious level. When you reach the end of this page, you will turn or swipe it with your fingers, only vaguely aware of the elaborate systems that work together to permit such an act.

Balancing Act

In the physical body, as well as the spiritual, a muscle must be exercised. If a person loses movement through paralysis, atrophy will set in and muscles will shrink away, absorbed by the rest of the body. Similarly, the corporate Body of human beings shows its health best by acting in love and service to others. When it ignores cries of pain and injustice, and fails to respond, it begins to waste away.

As a Christian, I am struck by the disorderly way in which that particular Body moves. Study any century, and the history of the church then will include splits and divisions, heated debates about the role of social concern, and sadly excessive reactions. Because church history includes these spasms, we easily discount the effectiveness of the Body’s motion.

As I look closer at the biology of motion, though, I can better grasp how seemingly disconnected spurts of energy can contribute to progress. In the human body every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Muscles pair up antagonistically so that when the triceps contracts the biceps relaxes, and vice versa. One of the pioneers of neurophysiology, Sir Charles Sherrington, demonstrated that all muscular activity involves inhibition as well as excitation. Every muscular sentence includes a clause with a balancing “but.”

The knee-jerk reflex, which involves only two muscles, illustrates Sherrington’s principle. When a doctor taps a patient’s knee, muscles on the front of the thigh spring into action, excited. That response only occurs because muscles on the back of the thigh, which keep the knee bent, do not contract, an act of inhibition. The knee jerk relies on two equally powerful stimuli, one of which leads to action, the other to inaction. In complex movements, like walking or kicking a ball, hundreds of opposing reactions occur simultaneously. All muscular action follows this principle of give-and-take.

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 perform 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.