One of the National Public Radio programs I enjoy is “Hidden Brain,” so when I heard that host Shankar Vedantam had a well-reviewed new book, I went out and bought a copy. Titled “Useful Delusions: The Power & Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain,” it tells tales that are remarkable, incredible (as in hard to believe), and sometimes horrifying.
Take, for example, the case of surgeon Bruce Moseley at a VA Medical Center in Texas. He had served as the surgeon for the NBA’s Houston Rockets, had a remarkable track record, yet he had long questioned the efficacy of a common procedure, arthroscopic knee surgery. He wondered if the procedure itself, the mechanical scraping of residue in the knee joint, had a benefit, or if the actual benefit was derived from the saline wash used during the procedure. He devised a study, and a colleague convinced him to add a third group, a control group that got the incisions, but had neither the actual scraping nor the saline wash. It was not easy to get a study like this approved, but it eventually was, and Moseley found enough patients willing to be randomly assigned into the three study groups.
After two years, patients in all three groups reported marked levels of improvement. And there was no difference between those who received the actual procedure, those who only received the saline wash, and those who had what was, in truth, placebo surgery. Let me say that again. The outcome was exactly the same for those who had the traditional procedure, mechanical scraping of residue in the knee joint, those who only had the knee joint flushed with saline, and those who had incisions made on their knee with no actual procedure.
This is a particularly stunning example of something we know as the placebo effect. Now, if you are like me, you tend to associate placebos with hypochondriacs and the gullible. After all, you and I are way too smart to ever be duped in this way. But are we?
I mean, it may matter in our profit-first medical system, where medicine is just one part of our grand social Darwinist experiment and we tell ourselves the poor get bad healthcare because they are lazy and unworthy and deserve to die, but if we take Mammon, the god of money, out of the equation, if we stop worrying about what CEO or hedge fund is going to profit and worry instead about outcomes, does it matter who got which procedure as long as two years later, the patient reports a positive outcome?
We do not understand how it works, but there is so much in life we do not understand, and the more we know the weirder and weirder the world gets. The bottom line is that believing matters. People who are part of religious communities consistently have better outcomes when they face critical illness than those who do not belong to religious communities, and I do not believe this is because we have a puppet-master god who rewires DNA and kills cancer cells if some magic number of people pray, because that god would be a nightmare.
Oh, I believe in God, just not that god.
No, people of faith have better outcomes because there is something in us that is mysterious and inexplicable, maybe eternal, maybe mortal, but certainly transcendent and miraculous. We, and all of creation, are touched by mystery, and our connection with the holy may not be measurable but it is real and consequential. Einstein may have mocked quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance,” but it is real, and you and I are connected in ways we do not understand to people and places and objects, to mountains and lovers long gone.
So we read this story in today’s scripture, this tale from Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, of Peter raising Tabitha from the dead, and our rational brain says “nah.” But let me tell you, human reason is important but it is not God. We can easily die on the altar of our own hubris, our insistence that we are capable of understanding everything, but we need not do so. The world is charged with the grandeur of God, as the great Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote one hundred and three years ago, and every moment is mystery and gift.
I don’t need to dissect this story. Reason says people who are actually dead don’t come back to life. But they believed, and their belief gave them the courage to act, and their actions were to care for the widow and the orphan and to tell the world that the source of all was a loving God, an eternal parent, and that they could opt into a kingdom life where truth was not defined by empire and brutality, by power and wealth, but was defined by faith that love wins in the end. And what’s so bad about that?
It is so easy for us, for me, to run everything through the grinder of reason, to dissect and label, but there is absolutely no explanation for why Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” has the effect it has on us, and if there was, I would not want to know. I prefer to live in a world where the holy is spilling out everywhere, a cup that runneth over.
Unlike those angry men who worship power, who wish to control women’s bodies and sexuality, who beat their chests and preen like peacocks in the Senate chambers, I do not want you to find God where I find God, do not insist that you experience the holy as I experience the holy, for the holy is all around, and just as you will never step into the same river twice, you and I will not grab the same transcendent divine. But it matters that you believe.
So while we may be a church without creeds, while we may leave room for liberty and conscience, we are a people who believe, broadly, in the story of love in action in the world, and the Judeo-Christian story gives shape, for many of us, to that urgent heartbeat of the divine.
That does not mean, of course, that we throw reason out altogether, that we believe just anything. There is no Q working deep in the government, sharing secrets about the deep state. Vladimir Putin is not a swell guy no matter what our former racist-in-chief has to say. God is not some psycho white guy in the sky, an unholy venture capitalist.
The measure of our belief is not that we can always know with absolute certainty exactly what is true, though sometimes we do. More often than not, however, we can make hard claims about what is false.
In the end, the measure of our belief is in whether it contributes to thriving, not just for ourselves, not just for our loved ones, but for all humans we encounter, with whom we are entangled, whether that operates on the quantum or through the inter-being of Zen Buddhism… thriving for this living planet and all that is alive, that is a word of God held in being in holy song, the deepest roots, the swiftest wings.
The measure of our belief is the outcome of that belief, whether we bear fruit, for we ourselves are mysteries, even to ourselves, hurtling through space and time like a rocket, and if we are lucky, if we tap into the holy, providing the sort of fireworks beauty that lights things up for a bit, that makes those who see us go “Ooh! Ah!”
My rational brain does not believe that Jesus exorcised a demon from the mentally ill man in the cemetery or the epileptic boy in the street. Medical science is not where it was two thousand years ago. But my rational brain does believe that the demoniac and the badly burnt boy came away from their encounter with Jesus transformed, and their belief was enough.
I don’t need to parse the miracle of the resurrection of Lazarus, of Tabitha, of Jesus himself. Of course there are plausible explanations! But the only explanation I need is the simplest of all.
The swirling and mysterious chaos of existence is. We are not in charge. And we are called to insert love and creativity into the system, compassion and gratitude, and on some days, courage and hope. And boy do we need courage and hope this week.
You are a miracle. This day is a miracle. Let’s believe it. Let’s live it. Amen.