Recently, I have written about the ways antidepressants have affected my spiritual life. Check it out here, here and here.
My eyes were flung wide open with amazement when I first experienced the obvious, powerful connection between brain chemistry and the feelings of being “connected” with God.
The laboratory was my own body, and I couldn’t deny the results.
I was happy but not surprised when my first prescription of Prozac started
to take effect (after about 6 weeks), and I actually felt better! The oppressive fog of futility and hopelessness was burned away and slowly replaced by what I imagined most people would call a level-headed feeling about my place in the world.
No, Prozac wasn’t an “upper” or an opiate. Antidepressants don’t work like Ecstasy, amphetamines or heroine. At least, not for me. Prozac (which eventually stopped working after several years; changing from one drug to another is a frightening experience I may talk about some other time) did not induce euphoria.
Rather, Prozac helped me to feel something other than unmitigated hopelessness. My depression was never so much about being sad, though I certainly did feel that often. It was more about laboring beneath an unbearable weight of futility and despair with no relief in sight. Depression was a long, dark tunnel with no glimmer of light ahead.
Prozac allowed me to glimpse the light. Eventually, it opened up that tunnel into a 360-degree horizon of color, complete with day, night, sunshine, moonlight, rain, wind and, yes, even the occasional fog.
This was all new and wonderful, but it was exactly what the doctor told me I could expect after six weeks of properly measured medication.
What I did NOT expect was the amazing transformation that Prozac brought to my relationship with Jesus Christ. I began – I think, perhaps, for the first time in my life…? – to experience salvation by grace through faith. (Yes, I had always believed it. I taught it and preached it. But to FEEL it in an ongoing fashion! Well, oh my goodness…)
I finally began to grasp the “joy of the Lord,” not merely as an ephemeral, distant specter vaguely perceived during those periods when life’s shadows were not constraining me like a pressure cooker, but as a regular feature of my day-to-day life. I can remember thinking to myself, “This must be what knowing God is like for normal people.” It was like feeling the stream of cold air from a brand-new air-conditioner blow across my face in the middle of a scorching Arizona desert afternoon.
These new experiences of spiritual well-being also set me on a new course of research into recent discoveries about the role of neurochemistry in both human emotions and religious experience. So expansive has this area of
research now become that it has generated its own subject-heading of Neurotheology. I have not tried to keep up with this research or its publications. Too much of it is well beyond my understanding and my personal interest, if truth be told. But I do continue to ponder the many, crucial questions raised for me by my own experience. With these questions come many theological and pastoral implications, most of which I suspect we cannot sort out this side of eternity.
For instance:
- How exactly does neurobiology affect spirituality viz religious experience? What is the connection between materiality, e.g. brain matter, body chemistry and the experience or the perception of knowing God? Is it best described in terms of perception? receptivity? natural inclination? Or something else, like imagination (as the skeptics insist)?
- If neurochemistry is genetically determined, are people genetically predisposed (predestined!?) to be religious or irreligious?
- If neurochemistry can inhibit and/or enhance a person’s feelings of intimacy with God, can it also completely shut down any and all sense of God’s presence? In other words, are atheists created (predestined) by their genes?
- The Bible talks about spiritual experience in relation to things like faith, commitment and decisions of the will. What role does neurochemistry play in these matters? (For example, I never stopped having faith in Christ even as I lived with depression. Faith and experience are not the same thing.)
- So, can we one day imagine the creation of a “faith inducing” pill? If scientists can create a god helmet, what about a god pill?
I don’t know the answers to these kinds of questions. But I have come to a few conclusions about their implications for Christian worship.
First, different bodies mean different spiritual lives and different types of spiritual experiences for different people.
Church folks, especially leaders, should neither expect nor enforce uniformity throughout the Body in this regard. One might think that we would not have to point this out, especially in light of Paul’s teaching about corporate worship in 1 Corinthians 12:1 – 14:40, but it’s always worth a reminder. I will never forget the student who described a scene in her childhood Sunday school class where all the children were lined up against the wall and told that they could not leave until everyone spoke in tongues to the teacher’s satisfaction. Folks, I call that spiritual abuse.
People who love Jesus all experience, and therefore will all express, their devotion to Christ differently. A certain measure of this variability is beyond a person’s control. Introverts cannot be turned into extroverts. Neither is it kind to require extroverts to continually stifle themselves in forced mimicry of dour Puritan piety.
The church must allow for diversity in personal expressions of devotion. What matters is God’s conversation with the heart, not external emotional outbursts. (The Spirit’s presence is easily faked, if you haven’t noticed.)
Second, I hope and pray that everything going on in every corporate worship service is always a genuine expression of real encounter with the resurrected Jesus. And I always assume this is the case until presented with clear evidence to the contrary.
Honestly, the internal affairs of another person’s worship-life are none of my business, unless I am a leader and the other person’s behavior becomes damaging to the Body for some reason. Yet, as thinking people, it is always worthwhile to be “wise as serpents while remaining as gentle as doves.”
Not everything happening in every church service is entirely of God. We can know that to be true because human beings are involved! And human beings – even Spirit-filled human begins – have a prodigious talent for messing things up. Especially in church, where zeal, fervor and expectations of sincerity provide fertile ground, sometimes even shit-filled compost heaps, for ego to work its deceptive schemes for pulling the wool over our eyes.
How much of our corporate worship is due to the Spirit? How much is of the flesh? How much is generated by genetics? How much is bubbling brain chemistry? How much is evidence of group psychology?
I have no idea. But it is naïve to imagine that any of these factors are ever missing from our get-togethers. After all, we are only fallen, fleshly, damaged people seeking to adore a Holy God forever beyond our comprehension who saves us by grace while momentarily leaving us to face off daily against the ugly ghosts of our unredeemed selves. What could go wrong?
Praise God, then. For Jesus is always faithful to us no matter how we feel about it or (fail to) express it.
