When I
was a girl, I trained for equestrian eventing. This is comprised of a dressage test,
a cross-country jumping course, and a stadium jumping course. The training
hours were long and intense, as my horse and I learned to move and act as one
entity. More important, though, than contact with my legs or my seat or my
hands was the contact that I made with my eyes. My horse, of course (of course!),
had his eyes on either side of his head, which limited his field of vision so
that there was a blind spot in the three to four feet directly in front of him
– which is something you don’t want to contemplate too closely when you’re
cantering toward a three-foot jump! I had no problem seeing what was directly
in my path, but it was not enough simply to focus on what was in front of me.
“Soft eyes! Soft eyes!” my trainer would yell from the arena railing, meaning
that I was concentrating too hard on what was straight ahead. “Soft eyes” was a
reminder that I needed to pull back the focus and see in the panorama. If you
are too narrowed in on what is immediately before you when riding, you do not
see what your horse sees, and he knows it. His knowing it makes him nervous and
less likely to trust you. And trust is the key to a successful horse-rider
relationship. His sight is fractured, and he needs yours to be whole.
I remembered
this when I recently read a book that changed my life. It is called The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. I had never thought of my brain
before in terms of the right-left hemisphere divide, but the author of the
book, Iain McGilchrist, makes a compelling case for what this divide means, why
it matters, and how a tilt culturally and intellectually toward what he sees as
the usurpation of the left hemisphere into the realm of responsibilities that
ought to be given to the right has diminished and impoverished us. It is not a
religious book; but, I wholeheartedly agree with G.K. Chesterton’s assertion
that “if Christianity should happen to be true – then defending it may mean
talking about anything or everything. Things can be irrelevant to the
proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the
proposition that Christianity is true.” The book is a masterpiece of scientific
and philosophic scholarship, and its scope is too wide for my purpose here;
however, I want to share the central
idea that Mr. McGilchrist posits, and how it has made for me a bit more
translucent that glass through which we now see so darkly.
The primary
idea is found in the relationship of the hemispheres. Both halves can receive
information. The right brain, though, receives information in a holistic,
contextual way rife with empathy, implicit meaning, and a sense of seeing
things “as they are.” The left brain receives information in a more abstract or
impersonal way, being analytic and reading explicit meanings. The left brain
wants to classify and categorize and tends to take an outside, invariant view
of information. Mr. McGilchrist contends that the human brain was originally
designed to be right-hemisphere dominant. Ideally, our right brains would
receive information, send it over to the left brain to organize, which would
send it back to the right brain to internalize and act upon it. The title of
his book, though, refers to a story Nietzsche told about a wise and loving master
whose extensive realm was run to ruin and collapse when an ambitious and clever
emissary, entrusted to rule on the master’s behalf with the same fairness,
honesty, and kindness, wrested the power unto himself and brought tyranny
instead. In such a way, McGilchrist sees the left hemisphere, made to serve the
right, now in ascension over it.
All the
left brain can offer without the right is a fragmented, impersonal vision of
the world. And does that not ring true in our world today? Where people have
400 Facebook friends, but no one with whom to share a cup of coffee? Where
families are ripped apart because the individuals rebelled against the whole? Where
we run in circles, splintering our time between projects that never seem to reach
completion? The right brain, with its emphasis on looking outward, seeing the
Other, is our key to comprehending something very important about God and our
relationship with Him. Without its point of view, we see in the shards of a
mirror, reflecting only ourselves; with our right brains, God gives us a
window.
We fall
into a trap whenever we try to “explain God” on the left hemisphere’s terms. Isn’t
that Satan’s original ploy? He fractures and makes incomplete our perceptions
of the Most High. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” Then,
he narrows our focus, encouraging us to “judge” God in human terms. And even
today: How can you believe in a God that
would let a child die? How can you believe in a God that would let an
earthquake swallow up a town? How can you believe in a God that would . .
.? The Bible may not make sense when
taken in pieces. But, the Story was never meant to be told in fragments. It is
a whole that is even greater than the sum of its parts. It is gestalt. Just as
you cannot begin to understand the sacrifice of Jesus without an understanding
of the helplessness of your own sinful
state, you cannot really get a grasp on the utter depravity of the human will
until you hold it up to the light of the holiness of Christ.
Things
that stand as roadblocks to our relationship with God usually have to do with
traits that are typical of left-brain dominance. One thing our left brains
cannot stand is any sort of paradox – the apparent co-existence of two
irreconcilable ideas or entities. Fully
God and fully man? A kingdom that always was and is to come? The wisdom of
fools? Losing life to find it? If we ponder these truths too closely, we
start to lose the beauty of them; we begin to believe that we must justify them
in human terms. If, though, we just let
them wash over us, they make perfect sense. Mr. McGilchrist writes that,
perhaps, the things that our left brains tell us are paradoxes, our right
brains intrinsically understand.
As I
walk into my nineteenth year of faith this autumn, I think of those days long
ago, training with my beloved Thoroughbred. Today, I am not preparing for a
blue ribbon in an event, but for a far more glorious prize. I am trying to retrain my eyes again to be
soft, to see more than I think I can see, to behold the whole picture and not
just a narrow focus. I want to see the Story – from Genesis 1:1 all the way
through Revelation 22:21 – as the narrative, not only of ancient peoples, but
of my life. Now, though, it is my
vision that is fractured; I need to trust Jesus, day by day, to make my sight
whole.
