Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [29]
“Let’s say you have heart disease,” Astin proposed. “You’ve got a whole array of factors that have come to influence your getting that disease.You have biological and genetic factors, family history, dietary lifestyle factors, psychological factors, depression and stress.”All of these influence cardiovascular function.
“And let’s say I’m a spiritual healer, and I’m trying to influence the course of that disease in some way, to facilitate healing,” he continued. “Well, that’s not happening in isolation. It’s happening within the context of a whole host of complex factors that are influencing that disease. So it doesn’t even make sense to think it could supersede the influence of everything else.”
In other words, it is impossible to tease out the prayers for a heart patient from his genetic predilection or the thousands of cheeseburgers he consumed over the years.
As I was wrapping up my research about prayer, I realized that science has embraced a sliver of my childhood faith, a century after Mary Baker Eddy “discovered” Christian Science. Most medical scientists now agree that mood states like depression—which are heavily influenced by your thoughts—predict disease progression in a variety of diseases. Or, as my mom would say, your thinking is your experience. Indeed, nowadays scientists shout it from the rooftops, forgetting that they were until recently the snipers gunning for people like Norman Vincent Peale, or Norman Cousins, or my mother.
But positive thinking doesn’t require God, and that is the critical point. Many scientists still deride the core of religious belief. They reject that there could be a force that can infuse prayer with power, call it God or Higher Power or the Divine Mr. Fixit. They reject this because that force, or mechanism, would have to operate outside of the laws of nature as we currently understand them. This is the Maginot Line that separates two sorts of scientists and two sorts of science. Over and over again, I would witness fierce hand-to-hand combat at this very divide.
Later, I learned of a possible—though not widely accepted—scientific explanation for this force. It is called “quantum entanglement”—what Einstein described as “spooky action at a distance.” But I had not arrived at that research yet. And so I tackled another personal question. Back in 1995, when my life appeared perfect from the outside and wretched from the inside, I had hit a breaking point and found in that unhappy moment a new spiritual direction. I had always wondered what triggered that dramatic shift, the kind of turnaround or conversion experience that is so common in spiritual journeys.Was it physical, or spiritual, or both? For that, I had to revisit the most exquisite, and painful, moment of my life.
CHAPTER 4
The Triggers for God
WHEN GOD BREAKS INTO YOUR LIFE, it is as if you are lifted up and plunked down in a new spiritual neighborhood. To your friends, you appear unaltered.You still part your hair on the left and speak with the same slight lisp. But you know, if no one else does, that your thoughts and ambitions and loves—your soul—have moved to a new zip code. You’re not in Kansas anymore. I can say this from countless interviews and from personal experience. As I heard story after story, I began to wonder what triggered these spiritual transformations.What are the forces that push a person off the cliff of agnosticism and into the sea of faith?
As I searched, I found the usual suspects. Emotional and physical trauma rank high on the list, as does a brush with death. Next to those are the quieter psychological triggers: a poor relationship with one’s parents,1 or stress,2 or even low self-esteem.3
Yet one antecedent stood out, according to the theologians, soci ologists, and psychiatrists I interviewed: brokenness. Brokenness occurs when life—in the form of addiction, cancer, singleness, unemployment, or indefinable misery—defeats you. It happens when you come to the end of yourself, you have exhausted your own resources, your own strength and resilience to cope with the situation at