Chapter Twenty

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EVEN ON A QUIET DAY my brain vibrates with activity, processing five trillion chemical operations every second. I am most conscious of the traditional five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Other reports are more subtle: I know intuitively the tilt of my head, the bend of my elbow, the position of my left foot. More sensors inform me of the need to stop for lunch; my stomach “feels empty.” My brain, isolated in its thick ivory box, receives all these reports in a kind of electrical Morse code.

Even so, the brain can uncannily reproduce reality. Consider a Beethoven piano sonata. Deaf in his later years, Beethoven never heard the music he composed—that is, the eardrum, three bones, and sound receptor cells never participated in the creative act. Yet his brain internally reconstructed tone and harmony and rhythm so that he did “hear” it. No molecules danced their tarantella; the music took form in silence, cerebrally, in code.

Today, if my musically talented wife picks up a written score of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique, she identifies it almost at once. She can hum along as she reads, relying on her own mental bank of sounds to hear it in her mind. And if a radio station happens to broadcast a performance, she recognizes it after hearing a few measures. How many billions of computations are required for the mind to recollect a piece of music—a feat performed at blinding speed with little conscious effort?

As you read this paragraph, you hardly note the individual letters forming each word. You do not spell them out one by one, reassemble them into a composite, and scan a dictionary for the meaning—though in reality your mind does all that, subconsciously. It works so fast that when I speak, using letters, words, grammar, and punctuation, I concentrate solely on the meaning of what I want to communicate. Neurons with stored knowledge freely supply the individual elements, and my central nervous system arranges the glottal puffs and slides to create intelligible sounds.

The writer Jeanne Murray Walker describes the result: “Words are only scraps of sound, rags of wind, bits of vibration we shape like music with our tongues and teeth and breath. But if you’re reading this, words are where the two of us are meeting. Words help us grasp one another, they nerve us to go on.”

My brain presents the world to me not in reductionist blips of data but wholly, conceptually, meaningfully. And herein exists a great mystery. The mind that coordinates all this profound activity lies locked away. The brain itself never sees: if I expose one to bright light, I risk harming it. It never hears: the brain is so sheltered and cushioned that it feels only the most reverberant sensations. The brain does not experience touch: it has no touch or pain cells. Its temperature varies no more than a few degrees; it has never felt hot or cold.

My perception of the world forms from millions of remote stations sending reports in a digital code to a bony box that has never directly experienced those sensations. The taste of chocolate, the prick of a pin, the sound of a violin, a view of the Grand Canyon, the smell of vinegar—all these reach my consciousness via impulses that are virtually identical. I perceive the outside world because tiny, flower-shaped neurons have shot chemicals at each other.

The mystery of the person I am, Paul Brand, centers in the brain. Every other cell in the body expires and gets replaced but not the neurons. How could we function if memory and knowledge periodically sloughed off like skin cells? In terms of my physical body, I am a different person from my younger self—the exception being my long-lasting nerve cells. These maintain the continuity of selfhood that keeps the entity of Paul Brand alive.

From the darkness and loneliness of that bony box, my brain reaches out to reality with millions of living wires. They extend like tendrils of a plant, stretching hungrily toward stimuli from the world beyond.

The Descent

I have described the brain’s hierarchy in detail because from it we can learn about leadership. The brain delegates its tasks to the brain stem, the reflex arc, all the way down to the final common path of individual neurons. This network of cooperation, involving every cell in the body, makes possible amazing feats of genius and athleticism. Always, though, the brain reserves the “higher” activities of cognition and prioritizing for itself.

The most effective organizations of people follow a similar pattern of delegation and mutual interdependence. I have extended the analogy in order to lay the groundwork for spiritual lessons we can learn from the physical body. As a Christian, I turn to the analogy of Christ as Head of the church, a title the New Testament applies to him seven times. Insights from the brain shed light on the style in which headship is exercised.

The body hints at a fundamental principle of how spirit, or mind, interacts with matter. God, a Spirit unbound by space and time, in an act of deep humility took on the confinement of matter and time—an event that Christmas celebrates. “’Twas much, that man was made like God before / But, that God should be made like man, much more,” wrote John Donne. The actual incarnation, however, spanned only thirty-three years.

From the outset Jesus predicted his departure, foreshadowing a time when he would leave the work in the hands of his followers. After his departure, Jesus Christ receded to the role of Head in order to create a new Body, this one composed not of living cells but of men and women from all over the world. “As you sent me into the world,” Jesus reported to his Father, “I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18). Can the shift be expressed more succinctly?

In one sense Jesus’ departure from earth was an ascension—church calendars call it that—though in another sense it was a further condescension. God elected to make God’s presence known through people like us—not in one body but in many, not in one perfect Son but in millions of ornery children of all races, sizes, IQs, personalities, and genetic traits. The Spirit has chosen to make our prayers, our compassion, our actions, our proclamation of truth and justice a primary means of relating to the world of matter.

Today, we are God’s medium, Christ’s Body. When you look at me, you don’t see the whole Paul Brand; rather you see a thin layer of skin cells stretched across my frame. The real Paul Brand resides inside, especially centered in my brain, hidden from the outside world. Even more so, we cannot “see” God; we lack adequate perceiving organs. Rather, God becomes visible through the members of the Body.

We are called to bear God’s image corporately because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted. Yet collectively, in all our diversity, we can come together as a community of believers to restore the image of God in the world.

This style of involvement with the created world—power exercised “from below” rather than from above—raises urgent questions. For the agnostic, such questions take on a tone of accusation: “If there is a God, let him prove it somehow! Let him step in with divine power and straighten out the mess of this world.” As a Christian, I struggle not so much with the question Is God really there? as with Why has God chosen such an indirect and hidden way of working on earth? Why rely so heavily on unreliable human beings?

I get a clue into one possible answer whenever I take on a teaching assignment and experience the peculiar satisfaction of work done through others. If I were to calculate the number of hands that I personally operated on, I would likely come up with a number around ten thousand. That number seems large, a testament to my advancing age. However, as I reflect further, I realize how negligible that number is. Millions of people in the world suffer from leprosy, a quarter of whom have hand damage. In a lifetime of surgery, putting in as many hours as I can muster, I have personally helped only a tiny fraction of those with needs.

Many times, though, I have visited a tiny rural clinic in a place like Borneo and watched a young doctor perform procedures that derive from those we developed at Vellore. In Pakistan, South Korea, Ethiopia, and virtually anywhere leprosy work thrives, you will find students who were trained at Vellore or Carville. Nothing, absolutely nothing, fills me with more joy than to see the seeds of what I taught now sprouting in others’ lives. What I invest in a classroom can multiply a hundred times what I could possibly achieve on my own.

That realization gives me insight into God’s way of working in the world. Just as a teacher extends his or her work through students, and a brain expresses itself through loyal cells, God expresses God’s own self through a Body in which Christ serves as Head. During his time on earth, Jesus had no influence on the three places I have lived: Britain, India, and North America. In the centuries since, however, his followers have established loyal outposts of the kingdom of God in those places and many more, just as he commanded.

“Whoever listens to you listens to me; whoever rejects you rejects me,” Jesus once told his followers (Luke 10:16). The identification of the Body with its Head is that complete. A little later, on the night of his arrest, Christ explained his imminent death for the confused and somber disciples. “It is for your good that I am going away,” he said (John 16:7). Although they did not know it at the time, the new era of headship was underway.

The Risk of Delegating

Dorothy Sayers names three great humiliations God has willingly undergone. In the first, the incarnation, God stripped off the prerogatives of deity and descended to live as a human being on earth. In the second, the crucifixion, God’s Son suffered an ignominious death. The third humiliation, she says, is the church. God in the person of Jesus Christ is one thing, and God in us is quite another.

The Head working through member cells involves a sort of abdication in which God sets aside omnipotence and adopts an invisible, behind-the-scenes role in human history. In so doing, God riskily entrusts the divine name and reputation to imperfect human beings. Members of Christ’s Body have sullied God’s reputation by such misdeeds as launching crusades, torturing heretics, and trafficking in slavery. The flaw is not in the Head, to be sure, but the humiliation is there.

I turn again to the analogy of the human body. A healthy body relies on proper channels from the brain to body parts, as well as a commitment from individual cells to do the will of the head. Persons afflicted with neurological diseases live with the constant frustration of disobedient cells. Some of them possess magnificent minds, such as Stephen Hawking, the late physicist. And yet many so afflicted are judged ignorant or mentally deficient because of the disruption between mind and body.

In a spastic disease or paralysis, somewhere, often in the descending fibers to the cells, communication breaks down. A paraplegic can lie in bed and plot how to move her toe, then will it to move with her full mental energy, but because of a broken connection the toe will not move.

In the spiritual Body, a cell must submit to orders from the Head, for only the Head can judge the needs of the whole Body. Obedience alone determines an individual cell’s usefulness in Christ’s Body. Errors inevitably creep in—spastic movements, if you will. It cannot be easy for the omnipotent One to endure the humiliation we bring on. (Is there a divine counterpart to the frustration a paraplegic feels?)

I must quickly add that analogies to the spiritual Body apply only partially, for dysfunction there never results from brain damage. But many nerve disorders—cerebral palsy, for example—occur when synaptic channels below the level of the brain somehow clog up. Neurologists occasionally encounter the unusual condition called alien hand syndrome. These patients have hands that seem locked in a tug of war: one hand may spontaneously seize objects from the other hand or try to restrain the other’s movements.

The apostle Paul, master of metaphor, gives a precise description of a person suffering from this sort of disconnection in his letter to the Colossians. The person he describes has focused on judging neighboring cells rather than on obeying his own orders from the Head.

Such a person . . . goes into great detail about what they have seen; they are puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind. They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow. (Colossians 2:18-19)

Repatterning

The brain assigns a specific region to govern each finger, each toe, each significant body part. For instance, my brain devotes a site to all the associations of my right ring finger. How is it used in playing the guitar? Does it steady my hand in writing? Does it bear a scar from a prior injury? The brain stores these memories and abilities. If my finger is used prominently, as in playing the guitar, the brain will have an increasing richness of association with the finger.

In my surgical practice I sometimes disrupt these associative pathways and try to establish new ones. For cosmetic purposes we give some leprosy patients new eyebrows by cutting a swatch of hairy scalp and tunneling it under the forehead to the eyebrow area. Still attached to the scalp’s original nerve and blood supply, the patient’s new eyebrow “feels like” part of his scalp. If a fly crawls across the transplanted eyebrow, the patient will likely respond by slapping his crown.

Or in a tendon transfer procedure I may move a healthy tendon from the ring finger to replace a weak or useless one on the thumb. “Move your thumb,” I instruct the recuperating patient, and nothing happens. The patient just stares at her hand. “Now move your ring finger,” I say, and the thumb springs forward. Over time the patient must repattern her brain to transfer the sensation of ring finger motion to the thumb. It can take months to reestablish smooth patterns, and many patients over the age of forty never fully adapt.

The image of thumb cells struggling to receive a strange new set of orders from the head helps me appreciate the apostle Paul’s injunction to be transformed “by the renewing of your mind.” Elsewhere, Paul exhorts the Philippians to “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5 KJV, emphasis added). I think of spiritual disciplines as the repatterning therapy required to develop a smooth, steady stream of transmission between a cell and its Head.

Some Christians are now rediscovering ancient disciplines of faith. Through meditation, fasting, prayer, simple living, worship, and celebration, we can develop an ever-increasing richness of association between ourselves and the Head. The simple practice of repeating prayers from the Book of Common Prayer can help discipline the mind. In neurophysiology as well as spirituality, repeated acts of obedience strengthen the connections. A good pianist does not consciously think through the motions involved for each finger to strike a note; the fingers follow pathways laid down through hours of practice.

For the beginning Christian, the process of learning Christ’s mind may seem mechanical and ungainly. The Christian walk, like the toddler’s walk, begins with false starts and stumbles and missteps. Gradually, though, the muscles and joints in knee and leg and foot learn to cooperate together so that the child runs across the room without giving conscious thought to the process. Each new skill will begin in a fumbling, error-prone way until movements become fluid and natural.

Of all the marvelous aspects of the human body, I know of no greater wonder than that every one of the trillions of cells in my body has access to the brain. And in the spiritual Body, I know of no greater wonder than that each one of us has direct contact with the Head. Incredibly, it seems that God yearns for contact with the disparate members of the Body. God listens to our input, considers our requests, and quite literally uses that information to influence activities in the world. “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” (James 5:16).

Living by Instinct

Let me shift the image from physiology to nature. On my walks outdoors I have been watching a pair of young orchard orioles build their first nest. A few branches away hangs a nest built last year by older orioles, a nest so sturdy that it survived a winter storm that tore branches from the tree. Yet these young birds never fly over to inspect the old nest or study it for design innovations. They know exactly what to do. They neglect eating in the urgency of their task.

The orioles begin by selecting the best location. They look for a small branch with a well-spaced fork on which to weave the nest. The branch must be so thin as to droop a little from the mere weight of the leaves, in order to guard against squirrels. Foliage must surround the site to conceal their offspring from hawks and other predators flying high above.

Once they agree on a prime location, the birds search for individual blades of grass, of one type only, that conform to a certain length and consistency. One of the birds stands with a foot perched on each twig of the fork, holding a blade of grass under one foot. Using only its beak, it ties a half-hitch knot around that twig, leaving a long end to dangle. After flying away for another blade, it ties a half-hitch on the other twig and then weaves the two blades together. It repeats this process over and over, plaiting the strands of grass into a thick cable. The nest itself will swing between these cables. After several days of selecting, weaving, plaiting, and wattling, the two birds will have a neat, spherical home, strong enough to withstand gale-force winds.

Inside my house, my wife is knitting me a pullover sweater. As I watch the birds, I can see her through a window. Her skein of wool is the product of the skill and experience of shepherds and shearers and spinners and dyers. Margaret keeps glancing down at a printed pattern that reflects the artistry and calculations of master knitters. Reading those instructions requires education, and following them employs a skill she has learned over the years. A sweater that I will wear with pride finally emerges, a result of the shared intelligence of many brains over many years. Given a live sheep and told to create a sweater with no outside help, my wife would surely fail.

I know that, even with full concentration and the manual dexterity developed over years of surgery, I cannot weave strands of grass into a hollow globe that will cling to a branch in a storm. I tried it once, and the final product fell apart, limp and useless. Yet I have ten fingers while an oriole has only a beak and two feet. Instinct is the key.

A kindred species, the bunting, follows another imprinted code that guides it across the Gulf of Mexico to a new home five hundred miles away. I have watched migrating birds depart. They sit on reeds in the swamp and look out across an expanse of water that must appear endless. Unencumbered by reason, the birds always head south. Their instinctive wisdom predates the egg from which they hatched.

I sometimes think of the bunting and the oriole as I struggle with spiritual decisions. Messages from God reach me along crowded pathways of communication. With my reason, even while contemplating what the Bible says, I can easily rationalize my way to other conclusions. The commands are hard; they require love and sacrifice and compassion and purity, whereas I concoct excuses that make obedience seem unattainable. At such times, as my own selfishness and pride rear up, I need a force more dependable than reason.

Just such a force comes built into each of us: the conscience or subconscious, a law written in our hearts. We can encourage and mature this instinct by the disciplines of faith. As one example, if I must decide whether to tell the truth in the face of every situation, my life will be hopelessly complicated. But if I have developed a reflex of truthfulness, I can learn to walk as a Christian without having to think about each individual step.

When the crucial moment of choice arrives, I often have little time for conscious reflection. All that has gone before enters into that moment. I think of those tiny birds, the oriole and the bunting, and ask that in renewing my mind God would imprint instructions into me as if they were put there genetically. I ask for an uninterrupted flow of messages from the Head and for a response of faithful obedience.