Be with you. Let us pray. O gracious and holy Father, give us wisdom to perceive Thee, intelligence to understand Thee, diligence to seek Thee, patience to wait for Thee, eyes to behold Thee, our hearts to meditate upon Thee, and our life to proclaim Thee. through the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. Before I start with my concluding brief remarks, I just want to thank you for inviting me. It's a great privilege and honor to do this. I'm going to have to hustle back down the hill as soon as I'm through, but I hope to be here many, many more times in the chapel.

[01:06]

Go back to Father Francis Kline of the Mipkin Monastery. His comment that every age makes a contribution to the church. Another contribution that is being made to the church is neuroscience. and how it's helping us to understand the human brain better. And the brain is not just this in here, but the whole organism as it interacts with the brain. It is such a burgeoning field that it's hard to keep up with all the publications, and I am not presenting myself as very knowledgeable, but I think I know enough about it now to have been greatly helped. And my interest in this has come from my own struggles with post-traumatic stress. So I attended several week-long seminars on stress management and neuroscience and it's been enormously helpful. What I want to do is share with you a few things or four, actually, that I found particularly helpful.

[02:18]

There are many more, but I want to lift up the ones I found helpful. The first one is that neuroscience is discovering that there's no once and for all working through or shedding of a past problem or trauma or injury. These experiences we have get encoded in the brain and the body, and they cannot be erased. Not only that, but a very large part of the brain is called the limbic system, which is in the back here. This is called the prefrontal cortex, the thinking part, and then the limbic in back here, and then there's a more primitive brain at the bottom. the stem, brain stem, which organizes breathing and so on. But the limbic system, which emits feelings, for instance, if there's danger, it will make us feel endangered or anxious or whatever, does not have language.

[03:29]

So if things kind of are in the normal range, there'll be some feeling come up that then gets run by the thinking part, and the thinking part will make some sense out of it. Am I making sense so far? Okay. But if it's strong enough, the thinking part can shut down, and unfortunately, the strong feelings that are emitted from the limbic system don't have language. So it's not like a little text on our email, you know, watch it or something, it's more feeling. Now this discovery that there's no once and for all working through something goes against the widely accepted belief, especially in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, that you can really work something through once and for all. For instance, in analysis, if problems recur after you've had your analysis or long-term therapy, then that really means that the therapy hasn't succeeded, so you better go back for more therapy.

[04:46]

I have an example of this in my best friend in Holland, who was also born in Indonesia. He has become an atheist. He's a Freudian analyst of the traditional stripe. He was an analysis for, he told me, for six or seven years, a number of times a week. He went through the whole routine. And to my great surprise, when he told me that the analyst never ever brought up the war experiences this guy had, which from my point of view was a huge omission. So not surprisingly, at some point, he had some trauma reactivation, but he then interpreted this as the analysis having failed and it needed to go back into analysis. So that's an example, kind of a striking example of a widespread belief that you can work something through and you're done with it. So the unpleasant news, there are two bits of news here, one unpleasant, one pleasant.

[05:49]

The unpleasant news is from neuroscience that it is not possible to ever work something completely through. But it is possible to develop new ways of behaving. And this has to do with an amazing gift from God, which has also been a recent discovery, which is called the plasticity of the brain. It used to be thought that by the time you're six or seven, things pretty well settle in concrete up there. But this is not true. The brain keeps evolving and sending out new tendrils and making new connections until the moment we die. This is called plasticity. So that even though we cannot erase anything, we can establish new behaviors that also then get encoded. The second insight from neuroscience is that we need others to recover. And the reason we need others from a neurological point of view is that our minds, this is not the same thing as the brain, but our minds are generated through interaction with others.

[07:03]

And out of that interaction come encoded parts of our brain which then influence our behavior. So we cannot escape interacting with others, but the way we interact with them can make a huge difference in terms of the behavioral patterns that get established. I talked about this in the morning, the importance of a safe, caring environment. A third contribution is that the, and I've talked about this this morning, so I'll be very brief here, is that helping people who have been traumatized, or people who just had a hard time, is a very delicate process that needs to be done with care, and that any intrusive questioning is not helpful at all, as a matter of fact, can re-traumatize people. One of the most deleterious effects of having been traumatized

[08:09]

is a feeling of helplessness, of no longer controlling one's environment, of not able to do anything about what's going to go on. And that's why it's so important to be treated in a way that you can have some sense of agency about your own behavior, including whether you want to talk about it or not. And here's a fourth one. We know that we now know, again through neuroscience research, that in the limbic system, this back part, which is also called the emotional brain, there are two structures called the amygdala. The term is not important, but just so you get some idea of what's going on there. And the amygdala are called the watchdogs of the brain. The amygdala, A-M-Y-G-D-A-L-A, the amygdala store previous upsetting experiences, and they tell us when we get close to another one. But because there's no language here, they don't text us.

[09:14]

That explains what can be the sudden eruption of feeling when we felt perfectly okay right beforehand. Now here's a very interesting observation that has been made. It's been linked, it's been studied through yoga, but also through prayer. You with me so far? I don't want to get too technical. Okay. The main point to remember is that the stronger the emission of negative emotion, like fear or anxiety or whatever, is from the limbic system, doesn't come like that. the more the thinking part gets shut down. And if it's bad enough, it goes offline. And that explains why giving people advice when they're really in the middle of a trauma is useless.

[10:17]

And I'm sure you have experienced yourself that when you're upset, and someone tells you how to do something, or that you shouldn't be upset, or it'll go, you know, forget it. It's gonna go, shh. Because the treatment from the cortex is not functioning. But, and this is a fascinating bit of research, They now know that from the limbic system, the feeling parts, are multiple connectors to the other parts of the brain. And this has an adaptive function, because the amygdala will tell us there's trouble, and often we need to take action before we can understand why there's trouble. In other words, if you step off a curb, and also this big truck comes there, the amygdala will start screaming. Okay. Now if you had to go through the thinking part, is that a truck? How far is it? Forget it. You merely do something about it.

[11:22]

So there's an adaptive function to that. They also have found out that from the thinking part to the emotional part, the limbic system, there's only one connector. And here's where prayer comes in. Brief, repetitive prayers when you're very upset. can keep the thinking part of the brain going. Now that's an amazing bit of discovery. Now I'm not talking about prayer as necessary for our Christian formation, for our soul, our openness to God. That's a theological perspective, okay, spiritual. But I'm talking just neurologically. That is enormously helpful when you're upset. to keep praying not long extensive prayers, but very brief prayers like the Jesus prayer or whatever, very brief prayer, just to keep saying it because it keeps the thinking part active. Here's a quote from a neuropsychologist in Boston, Patrick McNamara.

[12:27]

Religious practices like prayer and meditation form a way of developing and training cognitive functions, that's the thinking part, that are crucial for personal autonomy, moral insights, and intellectual creativity. Let me read that again. Religious practices, like prayer and meditation, form a way of developing and training cognitive functions that so easily get shut down, that are crucial for personal autonomy, moral insights, and intellectual creativity. So this then looks back to something I've touched on, I want to say something more about, which is the profound insight of our Christian forefathers and mothers, I think about the desert folk, who realized that we are not responsible for whatever arises in us. We are not responsible for whatever arises in us, no matter how strange or wild or cookie or whatever.

[13:36]

We're not. But we are responsible, we have agency to how we deal with it. And this is where the Hesychastic tradition has been very helpful to me with their whole notion of logismo. You may be familiar with this, but let me just quickly explain. We're talking about the early Greek-speaking church, okay? Everyone spoke Greek, New Testament Greek and so on. Now, there's a Greek word for thought, which is logismos, L-O-G-I-S-M-O-S. That word gradually assumed the meaning of negative thought, or intrusive thought, or hammering thought, or seductive thought. Negative, in other words. The plural is logismoi. So they pictured, I'm kind of visual, so this appeals to me.

[14:41]

They pictured these things that arise for which we are not responsible, like a trauma reactivation, That's a very good example. There's no way you can keep that down. I mean, it just happens. You're not responsible for it. Okay. But if you look at it as a logismos or a logismoi, then already you have some distance from what's happening. And they had wonderful ways of describing this. So you're not responsible what arises, but then these logismoi are not just, they didn't use the word intrapsychic dynamics, they didn't know that language. They talked about the evil one. So they come from the evil one to test us. And I agree with that completely. So the evil one, these logismoi, be like people mocking on our door, the door of our hearts. This is the imagery. So if you hear the rap on the door and you look through the, who is, oh, the logismoi.

[15:45]

No, I don't need anything today. But they said, logismoi are very, the evil one is very, very sly, and they may go in through the back door. Well, it may give you such a convincing rap that you say, yeah, you know, maybe, you know, maybe okay, why don't you come in, have some tea or something. But then they warned their disciples, if you start doing that, you're really on a slippery slope, because the gizmo act are not just these negative, intrusive thoughts or seductive thoughts, but they're also, they talk about that a lot, they're rationalizations. So here you are, you let the logismo in, because it sounded so plausible, and you live the living over your heart, and you start talking, and yeah, why not? So you think about a certain action that probably is not quite moral or whatever, but why not?

[16:48]

No one will find out, or everyone does it, or it's for a good cause, it doesn't matter. Then they warned, you're really in trouble because of this. Why don't we stay overnight? Or can you give us a bedroom? And before you know it, they take over the whole house. And the way they described that is just very close to what we call addiction. So you're no longer the head of your own house. Now, to me, this has been a very helpful way of kind of picturing that. To hear these feelings, I, all the time, strange stuff comes up. Where did that come from? Okay. Most of it's kind of, you know, junk. You kind of blow it off. But sometimes it's, oh, wow. I remember once walking down the street in Twinson, this was, and someone looked at me kind of meanly. I don't know what's going on in me, but I immediately had this limbic flash of, I've got to kill this guy.

[17:56]

It can go very quickly. A method isn't a gizmo. But it can actually be accompanied in our body with kind of an upsurge of emotional feeling. So you have this flash of, I'm going to kill this guy or whatever, and then you start walking on, but it takes a while to calm down. Does that make sense? It takes probably hours before you really calm down. Maybe the guy looks like someone who has hit you in the past, who knows? So I found this very helpful, this Logismore thinking. And if you're interested yourself, there's a wonderful book which used to be here in the bookstore. I bought a copy here once. It's called The Mountain... Hang on a second. The Mountain of Silence, by a Cypriot-American sociologist who was Orthodox, brought up as Orthodox, kind of wandered away from his faith, met up with an Orthodox priest, and through conversations with the priest, he began to recover his faith as a Christian.

[19:14]

And the book is a fascinating narrative of the basic Christian doctrines as viewed through orthodox eyes. And this whole Gizmo stuff is described in two chapters. It's called Invisible Intruders. It's well worth a read. I need to wrap this up. I've done some thinking about the effect on me of regular contemplative prayer. And as I told you, I use the Jesus prayer almost exclusively.

[20:18]

On the early church, as many people in antiquity did, when you invoked a deity, they didn't just believe that you thought of the deity's name, but that you invoked the actual presence of the deity. And this is why the early Christians thought of invoking Jesus, not just remembering Jesus, but invoking an awareness in their hearts of Jesus' presence. And what has happened with me, and not perfectly by any means, what's happened with me is that I've learned to trust that presence more whether I am aware of it or feel it or not. I think like many modern people I'm kind of a kind of a default setting that you gotta prove it to me.

[21:25]

One way to prove Jesus' presence is that I feel that presence, right? But that's not true. The presence is there whether I feel it or not. Christ's presence does not depend on my feeling. This became very obvious to me once in a spiritual direction session. where the person says something like this, if I feel God's presence, then I can believe in God. But if I don't feel God's presence, it goes out the window. And when you think about that, it's really very strange to say the least. Does God's existence, God's presence, the presence of Christ, of the Holy Spirit, depend on my feeling?

[22:30]

Of course not. But to gain that trust, that to me was an amazing discovery. So at times there is a consolation of feeling that closeness, but not that often. But the trust of the presence is more there. And this leads me to a final comment that all this depends on the resurrection of our Lord. Without the resurrection, there'd be no Catholicism, no Anglicanism, no Eastern Orthodoxy, nothing. The resurrection is the foundation of our ability to have faith in the merciful God, to hope against all odds, to trust that Christ has risen,

[23:45]

and will come again, and is with us now, and to know that loving and being loved, in an agapeic sense, not in an emotional closeness sense, but that loving and being loved are indispensable for human flourishing. Let me stop there. I don't have any iPhones and I only do what my phone says.

[24:49]

Retain them? I don't think we can. I think we have to be reminded over and over again. You know, I think this is where the community comes in. I think it's the living faith of people in a close community that is the reminder. I think that's true. I'm also painfully aware that in these brief talks, I've just hit the tops of the waves. But if any of this makes any sense to you, it's easy to pursue it.

[26:09]

I'm going around. Well, yeah, because it's the gift of all gifts. As you can tell, it certainly helped a lot of Orthodox. They have their problems too, the Orthodox. But a lot of theology I found very helpful because it's more akin to the early church theology. But the icon, you have that icon in the chapel here, of Christ on the broken down doors of hell. So, and the whole triduum of Christ dying but then going into hell and liberating Adam and Eve and all the people after them and pulling them out.

[27:16]

So I picture that as Christ having the courage, you might say, to go into the lair of the evil one and break his neck. Now, the evil one was still quite active. In Indonesia, where I, as you know, where I was born, a lot of snakes. Even people often, I remember, I was a little kid, but I followed the gardener around and he had a kind of a little, they call it a kliwan, which is a little It's like a little axe. It holds me up. And then the snake will be headless. But the body will go for quite a while before it gets still. Again, just an image, but Christ broke the back. And there's still a lot of thrashing of evil. And then returning to the disciples,

[28:21]

with forgiveness, with shalom, with don't be afraid. It's incredible. And not just that it happened once, but it's continuing. I don't know if it's making any sense, but it's incredible. That's not to say we have domesticated the resurrection.

[29:30]

Excuse me, I'm just continuing on, but the two of you shared, that's Christ's presence. I'm so moved that you were told the same thing that Claudel said. That you found comfort in the communion. I think we can say that's the continuation of the resurrection. It's an original knowledge. The culture that spreads throughout them are cognate to me, as I mentioned in my last video on culture and the truth. It's like a strange constant. You die, and then you feel no heaven or hell whatsoever. It's more simple. You know, we have the 520 miles, or whatever it is, or whatever. It's not a considerable strain on the body, but at the end of the day, I'm just going to go with what someone told me.

[30:46]

I don't know. I don't know. It's more available. I think the greatest pathology of our Western culture, not just in America but in Europe, is the fallacy of control. I don't think it's doing us any actual... Not that we shouldn't control what we can't control, but the idea we control everything is just crazy. It's a comforting piety, isn't it? That's a refreshing thought to add to your thought process.

[32:16]

You know, like, when some people come down from the North or the West or someplace, you seem to be nervous. You think of, you know, how is that nervous, you know, what's that, and so on. And therefore the text is very, you know, helpful. Yeah, that's right. Where was that while you were... I was in Peru. In Peru? Yeah, I played baseball there and had a few fights too, so... Yeah. Yeah. Before I made it to the Olympics in February, I got knocked out. But here's the kind of thing, you know, I don't really accept that, like, you want to do it yourself, you want to do it with the world, but you don't really want to accept it. Yeah. Father James, you said you had a closing prayer for these retreats?

[33:21]

Well, I thank God for all of you. It's mutual. Well, my dear friends, God be with you all. To say hallo and tot ziens, till we see you again. You're welcome. Well, it was strangle on the way out.

[34:22]

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