Scriptures, Spirals, and Strange Attractors

(Visual representation of a Strange Attractor, Wikipedia)

The man profoundly said to Jesus in Mark 9:24, “I do believe; help my unbelief.” I have co-opted that Scripture for decades. At first, it meant to me: “In my gut where the deepest resonance with You happens, I am completely given over to the truth of Your goodness and love. But I acknowledge that I have some brain-habits of worry that may not be immediately assuaged. I want to consciously choose trust even when the gut-feeling of faith subsides. Help me with that.” That specific wording, of course, has the benefit of hindsight. The lived experience was fraught with desperation and produced shorter variants blurted out mid-learning-curve. My earlier versions sounded more like the literal Scripture: “I’m so there with You; but please help the rest of me get there. There are still tangles.”

When I was in graduate school, I learned that a cell could “downregulate” its own receptors to neurotransmitters to adjust its reactivity to its chemical environment. In other words, you won’t react if you don’t receive the stimulus in the first place—on a cellular level. In that, I saw hope for the “help my unbelief” part of the Scripture-prayer. At that time of my life, I was also in a deep dive of so-called “identification with Christ,” focusing on the cross as the center of the completed Gospel Story, severing us from dysfunction and marrying us back to Life as God gives it. (The Pauline revelation is replete with implications of the work of Christ as both a “One-for-all” and a “once-for-all action.) Always keen to integrate truth, I combined the newfound concept of downregulation—absorbing the receptors--with the most amazing rendering of Romans 6:11 that had come across my path. Here is the Sanday and Headlam paraphrase:

“In like manner do you Christians regard yourselves as dead, inert and motionless as a corpse in all that relates to sin, but instinct with life and responding in every nerve to those claims and divine influences under which you have been brought by your union with Messiah.”* (For comparison, the NIV simply says, “In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”)

I remember loving the phrase, “in all that relates to sin,” because clearly my particularized brand of missing the mark—the thing that I was reckoning dead--was my tendency to keep taking it all back into my own “mental hands”—replacing holy relationship with human rumination. I had a pastor at that time that had taken the stance, “Worry is sin,” and I wrote those three words large in the flyleaf of my Bible for extra motivation to “not worry!” (How cluelessly unkind we were to nervous systems back in that day!) I didn’t need the extra push: I already had a lot of motivation to “not worry,” not the least of which was my own misery.

When the cross met downregulation in my heart, my translation of “I believe—help my unbelief,” became: “I absolutely believe and connect myself by faith to the reality of the cross where You conquered my worry even down to the molecular level. So, I now declare I am in the process of downloading my over-abundant receptors to worry. Worry can’t get the rise out of me it used to because I don’t have the receptors—they died with Christ. I am shifting into a different consciousness as my default.” The short form of this at the ready when real-time worry still suddenly beckoned became the simple declaration, “I have no receptors to worry.” I was proclaiming an inward reality I had grasped.

After living into that for a while as a conscious choice, I noticed that some “other” receptors seemed to become operative—lo and behold, there was indeed an experience of promised, transcendent PEACE arising more frequently! And the Holy Spirit had begun also to curate my noticing towards beauty—which had before seemed more like a luxury. To my delight, I came to discover that beauty had a neurochemical effect on me—like a calling card for broader Kingdom truth (much like C.S. Lewis noticed with joy). It was an experience of neuroplasticity before there was a word readily available for it. Romans 12:2 was being incarnated in my very tissues. It was glorious and it grounded me in the new way of being that had come to me in Christ.

You can imagine my dysregulation when people critiqued what they perceived as an over-emphasis on Scripture as the Word of God. Some were noticing the Western tendency to laud the book over its Author and confine Jesus TO Scripture rather than letting Him be released into living presence THROUGH it. Was I doing that? Using the Scripture as mere technique? I desperately hoped not. The pause it gave me turned out to be short-lived every time I examined it. Their accusation was that “practitioners” of what was then called “word of faith” were making it too clinical. I was coming at it differently. I was watching the Holy Spirit use words of Scripture to change me in a way that would actually stand up even under “CLINICAL” TRAILS, if you will. This thing is so thorough that the Savior you love is also actually YOUR SAVIOR in your real need! (I’ve never known God to shy away from the laboratory as long as He gets to transcend it rather than be dissected by it!)

At some more recent point, Iain McGilchrist would show up in my life—and yes, I have only read his writing and watched his videos—but I still say he didn’t just arrive in print—he rather SHOWED UP. He moved in, unpacking coherent and resonant understanding for the phenomenon I had been circling for years. As you know from my other Substacks, McGilchrist’s model of the brain hemispheres gave me language for inner moves the Holy Spirit had been teaching me through Scripture for decades. The first part of Mark 9:24, “Lord I believe,” then became for me:

“My right hemisphere is thrilled to rest in the peace available simply by RELATING to You, the King of the Universe. You are my Reason for reason! You are my heart-reasons to which rationality bows the knee. I do not need certainty as much as I need immersion in YOUR Mystery of Love. You Yourself provide the PICTURE that makes sense of all the granular PIXELS, and you also roll out in me the awareness of the PATTERNS so I can cooperate. (I breathe into the therapeutic value of that even as I write it here.) “Lord I believe” spoke to me of the divinely designed mastery of the right hemisphere.

Mark 9:24, part b, “Help my unbelief,” then became, “I spread my analyses at your feet. I lean not to the nervous ‘predictive texting’ of my left hemisphere. I exit the hall of mirrors. I bring you the pieces of broken glass where I have obsessively divided everything into parts, so that You can give me in return the optics to reunite them into a whole of Your kaleidoscopic beauty. Help me remain weaned from trying to conquer the fragments of the irreducible.”

Some may think this is too esoteric and/or metaphor-laden to help in “real life,” but I would counter that perhaps it is instead an infusion of the very thing needed: a rush of coherent beauty to rehydrate the crystalized facts back into living flow! You might word yours differently, of course. (And sometimes I word mine in other people’s lyrics—like David Gray’s line: “No need to nail it to the ground; no need to smother it with sense…” comes to mind. Ah, how that brings the emissary to her knees, and it’s from his song appropriately called, Fallin’ Free.)

One more iteration of Mark 9:24 came via my GREAT friend, Jo Hargreaves.** The “Perrianne and Jo” connection has been a vital exchange throughout the years—the stuff of legendary spark and synergy. Jo helped focus the fact that these glorious nervous systems which God has richly and delicately provided for us as a means of response to our environments COULD POSSIBLY get “stuck in a moment.” In other words, one inward encounter with God—no matter how many goose bumps it legitimately generates--might not INSTANTLY accomplish the needed shift of consciousness for all time. Our nervous systems carry interpretations of life that sometimes need to be “wooed” not “whammied.” We get to be the stewards of them, lovingly bringing them along on the journey. (I like to think of the goose bumps as the initial nervous system “calling card”—we then get to open the door and welcome Presence into full habitation in that area…Jesus said, “if my words ABIDE in you…” They do work far beneath the skin as well as in the arrector pili muscles.)

The shame-free awareness of the nervous system generated this iteration of Mark 9:24: “Here in this bath of your Presence, I feel drenched in the hope that the past and its injuries were consumed at the cross. Jesus took them into Himself when He hung there suffering—they died there in His great death. He arose—with me inside Him—having fully metabolized them away. BUT…I also acknowledge that the amazing nervous system you have given me may require some timed-release exposure to catch up. So, Father, I ask you to help me walk out this new consciousness as I breathe into it, moment by moment in lived experience. Help me hold space in the triggers and redirect them into embodied trust micro-choices. Let my triggers morph towards glimmers.”

By now you can see that, “Lord I believe; help my unbelief” is a movement toward sanctification that might map (at least for me) onto every legitimate model. The beauty of Jungian individuation becomes, “Father, help me integrate my shadow as I walk out my faith and become more of who you originally intended me to be as made in Your image. Help me find the 90% gold buried there by digging in the dirt.” And in the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model, the Scripture might simply become: “Lord I believe. Help that reality be the staging ground for gathering the exiles inside me home.” The Scripture brings holy anchoring, as well helps the whole process catch on holy fire. I guess what I am celebrating here is the particular, incarnational capacity of individual Scriptures. It is not just the big Story that heals you—though it does—it can also be the individual WORDS that like laser light do the work of that story on a smaller fractal scale.

Back in February, I heard Chris EW Green speak for the first time at our O₂ Network conference. He uniquely rolled out a telic story of personal incarnation of Scripture. He showed us how one verse evolved through his life in spiral fashion, at every level increasing in coherence. The Scripture—recursively gathering meaning unto itself from his lived experience--seemed to me like a “strange attractor”— a perfect metaphor that just happens to be from the world of “complex dynamical systems” (so math) that few people visit. (Give me an hour and I’ll take you there…is the dream of my life and I’m convinced I could almost do it! For now, I simply supply the graphic above.)

In strange attractor fashion Chris Green may have incepted me with the writing of this article, though I did not think that until it was written. This really was my journey parallel to his—or at least one of the journeys. His point was this spiraling relationship with Scripture is the incarnational norm. Once launched in our inner space, like the Mars Rover, the Scriptures just keep emitting meaningful signal no matter how far in the path of discovery they fly.

Paul said, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom…” (Colossians 3:16) I naively did and still am and, I believe, the result yields a spiral effect. When we allow the divine story—both in the meta and the micro--to become the holy Strange Attractors in our lives, they gather more and more meaning as they roll through the inward landscape. It makes sense for the incorruptible seed that began our new birth to take on more and more flesh as it grows, doesn’t it? Perhaps some time, rather than only thinking of future potential of Scripture in our lives, we should slow down and consider past spiral faithfulness and marvel as we give thanks. And I have a suspicion that that kind of Selah might be just what the Psalms intend.

*Though this came to me as attributed William Sanday and Arthur C. Headlam, I can find no evidence of it as their direct paraphrase. Instead, there is evidence of the “corpse” analogy and their expansion on what it means to be “alive to God,” in A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans My guess is that an anonymous someone cobbled this paraphrase together from the longer commentary and I preserved that wording in the form it came to me.

**My network has grown through Substack, notably Dr. Lee Warren and Gina Birkemeier whose work also reminds us to steward, not brutalize, these wondrous nervous systems we have been given. I’m so grateful for that too. All these connections trace back to Jo.