The Left-Brain’s Conspiracy Against Spiritual Rest
Image credits belong to: Yoko Saito (@yokosaito) | Unsplash Photo Community
This blog post draws heavily from the headspace of Matthew 11:28-30
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
I have been reading the prologue of John Mark Comer’s book called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry while crafting this post.
Comer lays out the context of the average American lifestyle of hustle-and-bustle. Comer describes a career and lifestyle that severely challenged his spiritual integrity, even as a pastor and bestselling author of Christian inspiration.
He mentions the occasion at which he had to teach 6 times in one day at his church. He returned home at a very late hour. He drank a beer and lounged on the couch with a movie, since he could not sleep. Comer then confesses the naked truth that many Americans face while running on life’s hamster wheel:
“I feel like a ghost. Half alive, half dead. More numb than anything else; flat, one dimensional. Emotionally I live with an undercurrent of a nonstop anxiety that rarely goes away, and a tinge of sadness, but mostly I feel blaaah spiritually…empty. It’s like my soul is hollow” (page 2).
His fast-paced life that intends to get a lot done in a short amount of time should resonate with anyone’s frustrations of being in business. His church grew faster than he had expected.
“I got into this thing to teach the way of Jesus.”
He questions, “Is this the way of Jesus?”
That leads into his next question “who am I becoming?” (page 3)
He envisions himself being successful but unhappy, years down the road. He admits that a victorious pastorship does not prove that the pastor is truly walking with Jesus Christ, being like Him, or doing as He did. A pastor can have thousands of members in his church but still not be anchored to Christ as as the Lord. Comer knew he did not want this to be his life.
He is reading emails while flying on a plane when he discovers that “a number of staff are upset with me. I’m starting to question the whole megachurch thing. Not so much the size of a church but the way of doing church” (page 5).
This really resonates with me, as it reminds me of the toxic drama that leads to HR lectures and gatherings in irreligious workplaces. Such an event feels icky and revolting, because it involves correcting an unholy thing that should never happen in a holy place. That is what my intuitions tell me, at least.
The pressures of leadership intensified enough to make him seriously consider walking away from his church or stepping down to a lower position. This was mostly driven by the desire for a simpler and slower approach to doing church. He and his family did, in fact, take a sabbatical. He later returned to a family-friendly lifestyle with “fewer hours” of work. He eventually was able to settle into the new groove of things even while questioning who he was apart from being a megachurch pastor. He was able to feel the presence of God again, after so long.
Comer quotes Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han who observed Westerners, saying, “They are too alive to die, and too dead to live” (page 9).
Comer anticipates that people will dismiss his “anti-hurry manifesto” based on the assumption that he is “woefully out of touch with life as an executive in the social Darwinism of the marketplace” (page 11).
I find it fascinating that Comer chose these two terms:
“Social Darwinism”
I wonder exactly what he intends to convey by this. Perhaps he is thinking of “survival of the fittest” as it was devastatingly misconstrued in the context of laissez-faire capitalism and racism during the Gilded Age when it was recommendable to neglect the poor.
Charles Darwin was the man who authored the book called On the Origin of Species in 1859, which introduced us to the groundbreaking theory of evolution via natural selection. Natural selection pertains to plants and animals that gradually change throughout long spans of time. Species reproduce, random mutations generate new species, and organisms struggle to get food in the contexts of natural selection.
19th and 20th century sociologists distorted Darwin's biological theory to justify discrimination of the poor and the exaggerated discrepancies among cultures across the globe. It was believed that those who succeeded in business did so because of their biological and social fitness that was innate to them, whereas the poor were innately feeble and unfit to reproduce. Herbert Spencer is the sociologist credited with coining the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Not Charles Darwin.
Social Darwinism is no longer considered to be valid. So, I do not want to get too carried away with that.
More to my Point!
To this day, when people think about evolutionary theory, they think of "survival of the fittest.” People have internalized that in relation to the widespread hustle-and-bustle of the marketplace. My conversations with people throughout the years have revealed to me how the hustle-and-bustle symbolizes the poor’s envy for the rich. It is an envy that can never be satiated by any accomplishment(s) that resemble opulence and luxury. I have occasionally wondered if the poor are left to seethe in their ranks that are eternally beneath the feet of the rich, due to the habits and mindsets that plague the poor.
Life can seem drab, meaningless, purposeless, and mechanistic when many are expected to function like a machine that is underpaid when succeeding and punished when failing. Whether we call this social Darwinism or something else, I think the general public’s strategies are basically binary: adapt by gaining more stuff or live with nothing; perform well or lose your job and then starve; grow strong or become weak; stand on your own two feet or die; on and on it goes.
Drawing from Matthew 11:28-30
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
No wonder we typically cringe at the thought of Jesus' words saying, "My yoke is easy, and my burden is light." A fast-paced world with many performance-based overseers teaches us to worry that even a moment's rest in Jesus could give the world enough time to pounce on us and steal our lunch money. Jesus says he is gentle. But the world is not. We feel like we must be un-gentle to survive, and that survival instinct makes it hard to feel the presence of Jesus.
What we easily forget is that the gentleness and rest of Jesus Christ is the recharging station for our brains and bodies so we can face the world, again. It is easy to forget this truth when the culture tells us that belief in Jesus is illogical, irrational, delusional, and fantastical. Our emotional, mental, and spiritual lives are discolored by this reluctance for spiritual rest.
My Final Point!
Now I want to introduce you to Iain McGilchrist.
Our mental health can be determined by how we attend to our external reality as well as our internal reality. Unfortunately, the 21st Century is obsessed with emulating the flawless performance of machines rather than being human. This is the tyranny of left-brain thinking that is so fixated on hunting and gathering, which overrides the right-brain thinking that would allow us to relax and enjoy the meal in a cozy home.
No, I am not trying to perpetuate the left (logical) vs right (emotional) myths of ‘teach yourself’ pop psychology. McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary makes it clear that the internet is rife with misinformation on this topic.
He and I both want to avoid that misinformation while emphasizing the need to journey beyond the left hemisphere’s boundaries of seeing the world in such ‘static’, ‘atomistic’, ‘linear’, ‘abstract’, ‘decontextualized’, ‘unimaginative’, ‘unintuitive’, and categorized pieces. McGilchrist uses those terms in a conversation with Jordan Peterson.
This reductionist view of the world is not offered to us by reason or science. Instead, this reductionism wants to foist upon us the ideology of anti-imagination, anti-intuition, and anti-creativity intended to be allergic to any holistic vision of the world. Holism says we should see things as wholes instead of isolated parts. The wholes are interconnected in a seamless stream of constant flux instead of just being frozen and manipulated in spacetime. Unfortunately, the left hemisphere that is obsessed with “the business of getting our daily bread” cannot absorb that broader context of interconnected wholes, since that job belongs to the right hemisphere.
Peterson’s conversation with McGilchrist made this analogy: the tyranny of the left hemisphere is like trying to enjoy music “note by note” with pauses in between, as opposed to “hearing it at the level of all its phrases and sequences and totality at the same time.”
In short, the left hemisphere’s job is to map the world while the right hemisphere’s job is to experience the world. We need to believe the world that we have mapped instead of believing what we have mapped of the world. McGilchrist makes it clear that the left hemisphere is not exactly “wrong” but instead very “partial” in its understanding of the world. The two hemispheres should be combined and balanced, instead of separated, when approaching the world.
Just a few things to quote from McGilchrist before I finish:
“Instead of this vision of stasis, particulate, atomistic elements that have to be put together to have any meaning or direction in them, the right hemisphere is seeing something which is coherent, in which nothing is ever completely separate from everything else, which is constantly moving and changing. It is embodied and that embodiment, like the rest of its context, makes it what it is. When you take it out of that context, it is something else completely. The right hemisphere understands what is implicit, all the things that are not being said, the bits between the perception that make the thing rich and living.”
“This is the world that it creates for us: a rich, embodied, implicit, living world. You can experimentally suppress one hemisphere at a time, and what we find is that when the left hemisphere is working alone, it does see as inanimate zombies the things we would normally see as living mechanisms, whereas the right hemisphere working alone will see normally inanimate things as animate.”
McGilchrist exemplifies the sun “moving across the heavens” as something that the right hemisphere would see as animated and living.
The ancients saw the world as living. Hence, they worshiped the sun as a living entity and believed in a spiritual realm. Today, Western materialistic culture disdains the ancients for their worldview of animated life.
As a Christian who worships Christ, I do not encourage sun worship. Though McGilchrist is not sure what he should worship, he at least is encouraging our culture to believe in the divine again. I applaud his encouragement for us to believe in the divine again.
The author of this blog post is Matthew Sabatine, who was born in the United States and raised as a Christian but left the faith in his early twenties. He returned to the faith midway through 2022. Matthew has some experience in the mental health field as a direct support professional, caring for people with intellectual and development disabilities and people who were in long-term residency/rehabilitation programs. Though Matthew has no formal undergraduate or graduate degree, he has experience co-facilitating therapy groups under the supervision of licensed counselors. Matthew currently works in sales/marketing by day and blogs on his free time at night.
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