When I was a kid about 11-years-old, I witnessed a miracle that I have never been able to explain until now. My dad, a pastor, got a call from the police. There were two men having a huge fight south of the railroad tracks and because my dad knew these two guys, they thought he could help. I was sitting on the couch when he got the call and for some reason, he asked me if I wanted to go along. I didn’t even hesitate. A real, live fight?!?! I’m in! I could hardly wait to witness this!
When we got there, I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing. These two guys were going at it big time. And one had just pulled out a knife. And to my surprise my dad jumped out of the car and yelled in the most powerful voice I had ever heard. “Hold on you two! Hey! Hey! Stop it!” He sounded like God! And then he addressed both guys by their names. And miracle of miracles they paused a moment. And then he said something I’ll never forget. “Hey, you two would you mind praying with me? " And he knelt between them and prayed. My dad wasn’t a windy prayer-er, but that night he went on a while. And by the end all of us, including this 11-yr-old agnostic, were on our knees.
And after the prayer. You will never guess what happened. THEY STOPPED!
(When Dad got back in the car, he turned to me and said, “Whew! I can’t believe that worked! To be honest with you Brook, I had no plan B!” We laughed in relief all the way home.)
Now what happened there? What exactly happened when Dad bowed his head and asked those two enemies to pray with him?
This morning I’m going to share with you one reason why I think prayer might be the most important act in our lives by trying to explain “scientifically” what I think happened that night.
I’ve been reading the book “Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship” by Terrance Real and in his book, he shares that he thinks too much of the world today is operating out of the wrong part of our brain! Listen to him describing what happens when we “blow” and get mad at our partner in a section of his book he calls “Remembering Love.”
“Before you pick up that verbal knife, before you brick yourself in even further, let me remind you that you love this person. And therein lies the rub, my friend. Do you remember, really, in that heated moment when fear or righteous anger courses through your veins, that you love this person? Do you remember it when your body shuts down and, for the life of you, you can barely squeak out a word or two? The sobering answer, if you’re dead honest with yourself, is that you do not. In that heated moment, the sweetness between you, the sense of the two of you as a team facing the world together, the sense of us, is nearly impossible to locate.
The good news is that the love is still there. The bad news is that it’s stored in parts of your brain, body, and nervous system that, in those flash moments, you no longer inhabit. Your endocrine system is on high alert, pumping stimulants into your bloodstream. Your autonomic nervous system---far below your consciousness—is in fight-or-flight, spurring you on or shutting you down. The higher functions of your brain (the prefrontal cortex, the reins) have gone completely offline, while the more primitive parts of your brain (the limbic system, particularly the amygdalae) have decisively taken over.”
I don’t know about you, but I think our world, for the last 5 or 6 years, has lived most of its existence in what I call “Amygdalae” Hell! We have lost the “sweetness between” us. Instead of taking the time to center ourselves and move into the prefrontal cortex part of our brain (what Real calls “The Wise Adult” part of our brain) we stay instead in this “me vs you” “us vs them” part of the brain.--the primitive part of the brain that is all about survival. We all desperately need to discover the “wise adult” part of our brain!
So let me try something out on you. Maybe that is what prayer really is doing. It’s re-centering our brain! It’s moving our brain from the “primitive survival” mode to the “wise adult” mode. It’s moving us from me vs. you to “us”.
One of the practices of prayer that I’ve discovered in my Christian journey is the power of the breath prayer. In many ways, I think we may have borrowed this from our Buddhist brothers and sisters. In this method of praying, you center in on your breath. As you breathe out, you let all that stuff (the anger, the frustration, the bitterness, the pain) go, and as you breathe in you allow that sweetness, that love, that grace, that forgiveness in. You refocus. You move from the Amygdalae to the prefrontal cortex!
According to Terrance Real, my dad let the two of them borrow his “Wise Adult Self” and when they did that their primitive brain, their “Amygdalae”, turned off. And while dad was praying, the “Wise Adult” part of their brain (their Frontal Cortex) clicked in.
In my mind, when I hear the clanging cymbals of our politicians battling for their own survival, as I witness them pulling their knives out ready to "cut each other's heads off," I imagine God, in the form of my dad, driving up to the scene in a beat-up old VW and shouting in a voice I can only decribe as "holy mystery", saying: “Hold on you two! Hey! Hey! Stop it!” And then I watch this humble God invite both parties to a position of prayer. And as we move from our primitive self to our wise adult self, we began to become "us" again. We re-discover something we have forgotten: “the sweetness” that happens when when we let God move each of us from me vs. you to “US”!
Your friend and pastor, always searching for the breath of God whose wings bring us always to “US”, Brook