Christmas Eve 2022

"Enjoy the darkness."  

We'd done legs-up-the-wall, Downward-Facing Dog, lunges, Warrior 2, Warrior 1, and even a sort-of-half-handstand supported by the wall. It was late-afternoon yoga in mid-December. As I'd come into class, the instructor asked (as yoga instructors do), was there anything in particular I needed today, anything I needed to work on? 

"Slow me down," I said. As usual, I'd rushed to get there. 

"Mentally or physically?" she asked. 

"My brain," I said. "It's so busy."

I rolled out my mat by a corner of the wall, collected a blanket and blocks from the shelves at the back of the room. Five or ten minutes of quiet rest with my legs up in the air, supported by the wall, slowed me down, as did the deliberate practice that followed. 

Yoga classes end with Shavasana, also known as Corpse Pose, where you lie still on your back, relax, and let go. The lights are dimmed and the almost-darkness of the room is comforting and enfolding, something to enjoy, like sleep, but aware.

In these days around the December solstice and Christmas, darkness is everywhere. The house is dark in the morning when I get up. Darkness shows up in the afternoon before 5 p.m. We had a stretch of rainy, gray December days last week where even at mid-day I found myself starting conversations with "It's so dark." In these final days before Christmas 2022, extreme weather is a reminder that winter can be dangerous as well as dark.

But there's light, too. Lights on the Christmas tree. Lights up and down the streets, brighter than used to be thanks to LED bulbs. 

In the last two weeks I've spent time working with the 8th graders who are reading the scripture lessons this evening at the Children's Service of Lessons and Carols at my church. I make sure they understand what they're reading and help them share it out into the congregation. Mostly I remind them to slow down and look up occasionally. Their bright faces will reflect the wonder of this night.  

Contrasts between light and darkness show up often in these Christmastide lessons read year after year. Isaiah prophesies that "the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light." In a reading from Genesis 22 God directs faithful Abraham to consider the stars in the heaven; his descendants will be that numerous. There's the "glory of the Lord" shining around the shepherds as the angel announced Christ's birth over the fields of Bethlehem. There's the light of the star that led the wise men to the unexpected birthplace of the new child king. 

The final lesson, a grand theological summation, is John, chapter 1: 

What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it. (v. 5-6)

Life, light, glory and good news -- memorable images, all good things. 

But what about the darkness? 

Consider the darkness of the manger. My oh-so-Lutheran book group celebrated Christmas last weekend by gathering to read out loud from "Martin Luther's Christmas Book," a collection of excerpts from the reformer's 16th-century Christmas sermons. As he told the Christmas story from the pulpit, he added lifelike details from his own imagination to help his listeners enter the story and have a more intimate encounter with God made human. Mary, he emphasized, gave birth in the dark, with only Joseph to attend her. No water, no light, no midwife. No carefully prepared baby clothes, no place to lay the infant but a manger -- and that manger was in a very dark stable.

Luther's age experienced darkness more directly than we 21st century city-dwellers do. Street lights and headlights light up the roads in front of us, and flashlights on our phones show us where to walk on the way to the bathroom at the campground. We have to drive far out into the country to find the darkness that makes it possible to see the multitude of stars that Abraham saw. We aren't directly acquainted with moonlight nor its absence when the moon is new and all the landscape is in shadow.

But we do know of dark times—metaphorical darkness, times of spiritual struggle, grief, and depression when we are afraid because we are not sure about what's in front of us. Dark in this sense, however, has become a word to use with caution. Blame Jung, blame "Star Wars," blame Christianity -- dark is often used as a metaphor for evil and and has been used as a racist tool for instilling a sense of inferiority in people of color. We could banish the word dark (and perhaps should banish some usages), but that won't make our fears of the unknown go away.  Meanwhile, as Barbara Brown Taylor writes in Learning to Walk in the Darkness,  we miss a lot of truth if we look for God only in the bright and shiny things. 

Christmas Eve brings us to the darkness of the manger where the newborn Jesus emerged from the darkness of Mary's womb into a still-dark place. But in this dark world he was held and supported in Joseph's calloused hands, settled against Mary's softening belly, wrapped firmly and securely in swaddling bands, and laid in a rustic but sturdy trough for feeding animals. Human parents did the best they could for their God-made-human infant. And Mary pondered all the things that happened that night in her heart for a long, long time and recalled them weeping when they laid Jesus in the tomb following his crucifixion.

The list of people I know going through dark times seems longer than usual this December. Perhaps that's because I'm getting older. I've typed "you're in my prayers" into Facebook messages, emails and texts too many times in the last few weeks and felt the dim insufficiency of the message. Really, when are people not being hit hard by loss, grief, illness, failure, days of reckoning? 

The first Christmas in my life that was like this was in 1983, when my 57-year-old father was diagnosed with a brain tumor that would take his life well before spring appeared. One of his gifts to me during that dark time was a closer acquaintance with Paul Gerhardt's hymn "Once Again This Night My Heart Rejoices." There are many stanzas, most of which no longer appear in Lutheran hymnals. But this is the relevant one:

Hark! a voice from yonder manger, 

Soft and sweet, doth entreat, 
"Flee from woe and danger;
Come and see, from all that grieves you
You are freed; all you need
I will surely give you."

I was young then and in the year that I grieved for my father, I looked for an end to the darkness, the time when I would emerge again happily into the light and return to a life disturbed only by more quotidian problems. 

But if you follow Luther's imagination, his story-telling, you have to picture that voice promising freedom is coming from a dark manger. To come and worship the child who lives there means entering that darkness, not sure of where to put your feet, not sure if there's clean straw where you'll kneel. You're trusting a voice you can't see; it's a baby, a voice you can't understand except on the most basic level of wired-in empathic responses to newborn cries and needs. 

I've been working on this blog post for ten days now, wondering where it would end up, trying to make it come out some place where "enjoy the darkness" would make some kind of sense. It's 5:45pm on Christmas Eve; the darkness has fallen here in Illinois and a beautiful choral arrangement of "Silent Night" is playing on Spotify. The setting is right, but much as I feel this blog post should arrive at a satisfying ending tonight (like a Hallmark Christmas movie), I don't have one. 

It's Christmas Eve. It's dark. It's unknown. But God is here—whether it's in the eyes-closed Shivasana, Corpse Pose, of yoga practice, in eyes-closed prayer for others, or in very personal encounters with grief, sorrow, death and dying this Christmas tide. 

May you find all you need in the Christ Child this Christmas.

Feeling conscious

This week I read a little book by Antonio Damasio titled "Feeling and Knowing: Making Minds Conscious." Damasio is a prominent neuroscientist and author. "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain" is another of his books; you get the idea. He's an atheist, interested in explaining consciousness in materialist terms. (Materialist: a person who supports the theory that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications.)

A dozen or more years ago I read part of an earlier book by Dams -- I think it was "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain." I gave up before finishing it. It seems to me that he defines his way toward explanations. If you define things a certain way, you can build them into a theory of how it all works, but this means you have to keep those specific definitions in mind as you struggle onward through the text. Since the words he defines are ones that are used broadly in non-scientific contexts (i.e., mind, emotion, conscious) you have to keep reminding yourself of the narrowness of the terminology as you read. You also encounter names for regions in the brain, which are unfamiliar to me. The science of consciousness comes out of knowing something about what kind of information each of these areas process and how they interact. I was reading this earlier book at night. There was more falling asleep going on than there was  comprehending, and eventually I gave up. 

"Feeling and Knowing" was on the new book shelf at the library. It is literally a little book, small in format. Though it's more than 200 pages, the chapters are short and there's plenty of white space where one chapter ends and the next begins. It seemed readable. In the intro, "Before We Begin," Damasio explains that this book chips away at all the "connective tissue and scaffolding" of earlier, longer writings to present the ideas he most cares about in concentrated form, like poetry. 

So it was an easier read, 20 or 30 minutes in the morning for several days. It reads more like philosophy than science, so it seemed an appropriate book for a time of day when I often read something spiritual or devotional. I put enough effort and intention into reading that I feel it merits a book report, to challenge me to put this all in my own words as a check on whether I understood what I read. 

Basically, says Damasio (I think!) minds become conscious when they recognize themselves as the ones doing a thing or having a perception. They can do this because feelings that originate in an organism's nervous system connect body to brain and, importantly, brain back to body.  In the 17th century Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." Damasio's version is "I feel, therefore I am." 

Okay, that's grossly over-simplified. You need a longer and more exacting discussion of what feeling is in neuro-scientific terms before you use it in a materialist understanding of consciousness. Feeling arises in the nervous system, which is the body keeping track of itself. The nervous system has millions of cells and sends billions of messages to itself about feeling. There's a distinction between perceptions of the sensory system and information recorded by the nervous system in feeling. Sight, hearing, and touch perceive things that are outside the body and independent of it. Feeling is the body interacting with itself and thus aware of itself, aware of being in the world. 

As I read I thought back to being a young child in the dark, confined to bed because, you know, bedtime, but unable to fall asleep as quickly as my sisters in the same room. With nothing to hear, nothing to look at (and no reading lamp next to my bed at that age), I would start to wonder who or what I was. Was if I was a machine or a robot in the middle of a world inhabited by some other kind of creatures, who were not machines? Who or what was living in my interior world? Funny, at age six or seven I didn't wonder about how the world looked to other people, to other children my age. I was conscious of my own singularity. I assumed I was a one-of-a-kind consciousness. Maybe I didn't yet have the necessary neurons or the necessary experience encoded in neurons to think about other people being conscious in the world. Even now, it doesn't come naturally. I have to step on the brakes, put my hands on the steering wheel, and maybe turn on the headlights before my brain can see through another person's windshield. 

Bessel Van Der Volk's book The Body Keeps the Score fits into this world of feeling and knowing, as it details how the nervous system records experience as feeling and how feeling and knowing are more than verbal, conscious exercises. If you've had the experience of grief unexpectedly welling up in your gut or your tear ducts, you know this, just as you might know it from the feeling of wordless awe, even joy, you experience when you see the colors of a sunset or the majesty of a mountain. A pile-up of feelings produces how we react to all kinds of things, and it takes some introspection to pick that all apart and understand it. 

Words are helpful. Just like money. They turn values into currency to exchange with others and use for our own planning purposes.

This is  The Perverse Lutheran blog, so I can't very well finish without talking about the traditional Christian concept of a human soul and of God. These don't have a place in Damasio's materialist world, and I confess, I don't know what they mean in my world. That Gwen-child becoming aware of her own consciousness had already had plenty of religious training; naming the mystery of it all "God" made it scarier. I could take the creationist view and say, yes, science is great, but with the complexity of it all, the many remaining unknowns -- well, you need God to explain all that. But jumping from science to superstition seems to easy. It shorts the circuits. 

So I'm left wondering, awed, brain exercised, on a bright Saturday morning. Feeling, thinking, knowing -- I still have to load the dishwasher, find a tablecloth, maybe bring down some Christmas decorations from the attic. Consciousness getting real and changing the input it's getting from my surroundings.