A leap in the light:

...Even methods of prayer were heavily left-brain...

...I believe all those things...

...we don't "have" it...

...It is not merely imagination we need...

...Everybody's got an angle...

...It follows that purely left-brain conclusions are usually half-witted...

...masturbation doesn't produce warts on your hands...

...In a budget crunch, the choice between cutting math and cutting art is not a choice at all...

...When a real scientist goes into her laboratory at Sloan-Kettering, she doesn'trexpect to find the cure for cancer within an hour period-or this semester, or in her whole career...

...Their only direct experience with it has been the "cookbook" science of high school and college, where the scientific "experiments" are not experiments at all but rather recipes guaranteed to have predictable results as long as the student doesn't make a mistake...

...They are, indeed, geniuses, but only because they put their analytical acuity at the service of a dream, only because of the "mar-riage" of their "masculine" and "feminine" intelligences...

...What I'm suggesting here is that we've been withholding some of the evidence...

...Of forty-five high school seniors, most of them exposed for more than a decade to relentless instruction in Catholic orthodoxy, thirty-five answered' 'true.'' Why was I surprised...

...If I'm betting my life and all its choices on this decision, I'm not going off that high board until I have incontestable proof-"scientific" proof...

...If that seems flip, it's because there's something laughable about this insistence on utter certitude...

...I have a great deal of evidence to support my beliefs, but I could be wrong...

...My symbols-just as my definitions-for dealing with entities that are real but intangible, like love and energy and God, are all hypothetical, less than completely adequate...

...I put on the chalkboard demonstrations worthy of Aristotle or Aquinas or "Sesame Street.'' But they cling to their conviction like martyrs...

...students are required to ana-lyze poems, rarely to write them...

...Accepting a religion is not the same as choosing a political party: I'm accepting fealty to a God I can neither see nor touch...

...But an opinion is only as good as the evidence that backs it up...

...Maybe it's the culture: the fact of pluralism, the smorgasbord of faith/no faith choices, the sentimentalizing of belief...

...The left brain is analytical: it gathers data, sifts it, puts the best of it into logical sequence, in order to draw a conclusion, and puts it out to be critiqued...

...Understanding God and understanding modem science require exercises of the same skill: imagina-tion...

...There will always be more to discover about any truth...

...On the fifth test of the year, they're still agreeing that Yes, indeed, faith is a blind leap in the dark...

...The act of faith is an opinion, an opinion about what human beings are for, an opinion about what will make the one life I have worth living-and what will not...

...Like God...

...The left brain, unfortunately, is associated with what we have always considered "masculine": decisiveness, rigid logic, impartiality...

...Jesus as a tubercular, blue-eyed goy) his or her dealings with God and insights into God, self, and the relationship between the two will be tragi-cally constricted...

...I can hear it now: "But how will I grade them...

...Hopkins captured Margaret's quite genuine awareness of human mortality: "Nor mouth heard, no nor mind, expressed/What heart heard of, ghost guessed...

...But I want to keep improving them, to cut down a bit more my distance from the Truth...

...Most people who wdnt incontestable proof of anything don't know much about proof, including the kind available from science...

...Surely our utilitarian, Gradgrind education gives the right brain short shrift...

...It was the taking of a calculated risk based on a great deal of evidence that-stillwas not conclusive enough to compel assent or guarantee success...

...Brain scientists now claim that the two lobes of the brain have quite different functions (and since I'm no expert, I must take it on faith that they know what they're talking about and have no reason to deceive me...

...Newton and Einstein and Salk started with a hunch, then sat down to establish logical means of empirically testing whether the hunch was right...

...One of the richest-and perhaps most unlikely-sources of insight into God for me in my own praying and for my attempts to make him less distant from the people I teach comes from science and science fiction...

...That was an act of faith-emphatically not a leap in the dark but an opinion/decision based on all those uncountable other dives, his demonstrated skill, a coach's advice...

...Scientists speak unabashedly about neutrinos-which have no discernible mass, no electrical charge, and go through the whole earth scarcely slowed down by the effort...

...The right brain is "Hebrew": less specu-lative and more intuitive...

...But he got his stitches, climbed that ladder, and once more soared confidently out into the empty air...

...There is a clue, I think, in recent discoveries about the func-tioning of our brains...

...It is my "hunch" that most people- especially but not exclusively the young-have made an act of faith based on their parents' act of faith, or on the evidence that "everybody believes in God," or on the assumption that "you've got to believe in something...

...The left brain is "Greek": highly speculative...

...But systematic philosophic doubt is not a widespread human affliction, and blaming the parents or "the culture'' is too easy and too broad...

...If a per-son's imagining of God is locked into the images of church art (the stone-faced dignity on a lofty throne...

...There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your (left-brain) philosophy...

...Even poetry is so much left-brain exam fodder...

...Curie was a painstaking woman of intel-lect, but one who "saw" a single vial of radium somewhere in the black hillock of pitchblende...

...Michaelangelo was a most meticulous draftsman, but he had a soaring imagination...

...And so the right brain-the avenue to understanding and wisdom and faith-atrophies...

...There have been many geniuses who believed in God, but there have been just as many who didn't...

...We live in an age of pervasive low-grade paranoia...

...Right-brain starvation may help account for the popular-ity of romantic novels, comic books, sex-and-violence films, much of rock music...

...If sales of religious books are any indicator, a sizable number continue to accumulate new evidence and insights, though one would hardly expect Hans Kung's Christian readership to equal TV Guide's Christian readership, and much of the body of religious literature that is read is hardly adult...

...When the person comes up empty-handed too many times, so much for praying...

...Most believers who have been educated above the level of unquestioning ingestion of the catechism have at least some left-brain basis for their belief...

...But my problem is that I am in time and space, and both lobes of my brain are time-space-oriented...

...It is, in fact, the phi-losophy of life on which I base all other opinions and choices, the touchstone on which I judge their validity...

...and, at the root of them all, an imagination uncontaminated by analysis or cynicism...

...The Scholastic Aptitude Tests, the narrow gate into higher education, are strictly a left-brain assessment of the candidate's left-brain capacities...

...On one improbable occasion, after a lifetime of making picture-perfect dives, he cracked his head and crashed...

...Eastern methods of praying do that, but it is very difficult to find a left-brain,' 'cost-effective'' way to justify the expenditure of time and discipline and patience needed for such a way of contacting God to "pay off...

...Wonder, exuber-ance, trust, a tireless addiction to asking "Why...

...In these circumstances faith gets difficult, and especially religious faith...

...I rant and rave...

...Most seminary training in philosophy and theology was from manuals which, in many cases, were little better than more complicated versions of the catechism...

...The right brain is associated with what we have wrongly dubbed "feminine": receptivity, creativity, and, alas, bias and feather-headed sentimentality...

...Their imaginations objectify their fears of monsters in the closet...

...Reality eludes the cookie-cutter categories and definitions of the left brain seeking answers on its own...

...The point is that what I said above about education in general was and is as true of religious education: almost exclusively left-brain, and, at least for those trained before Vatican II worked its way down, not only left-brain but un-questioning because unquestionable...

...We may be closer to the truth...

...But why need our images of God be limited to the images available to men and women 2,000 years ago...

...On the other hand, a little muddy kid holding out a bunch of droopy dandelions says "love," too, and says it more satis-fyingly than my dictionary...

...Confronted with the statement, "Morality changes from culture to culture," the same students answer "true...

...Now, the evidence available to solve any problem worth the name or to arrive at a decision in matters of conse-quence is rarely, if ever, "so clear and distinct that I have no occasion to doubt it," as Descartes demanded...

...Real scientists wisely couch their findings not in absolute dogmatic formulas but in hypoth-eses: these conclusions are not carved in stone, there is more to be discovered, but this conclusion explains the data better than any other formulation yet made...

...it is also humilityvulnerability before the truth: God is greater than our minds'' ability to capture him, to net him in our definitions and sym-bols...

...Where do they get this idea...

...some godly folk grub for dollars or indulge in kinky, exploitative sex...

...I know it...

...By third grade, education has become solely a left-brain opera-tion, sorting them out for the system...

...Scientists are seriously considering the possibility that, when the last particle is cracked open, the ultimate "stuff' of the universe would be non-extended energy...

...It is inescapable, then, that he cannot age, that he has no genitals and is therefore neither male nor female...

...With our calculating left brains, we can know a great deal about God...

...Yet their conclusion, for all its lack of rigid logic, was nonetheless rational...

...There was and is very little attempt to show adult and young Catholics how to short-circuit the analytical left brain entirely, to let go of being "in charge" of the exchange, to become vulnerable to GCKI-if you will, "feminine" to him-not passive but receptive...

...But if it began early enough, when children are not only more malleable but less embarrassed by their imaginations, it could have a profound effect on the future of the church...

...A crucial question in studying the act of faith is-logically, at least--peripheral to it: how many people actually make a whole-headed act of faith in God-a calculated commitment based on intensive left-brain research, an inward, right-brain communion with the Object of the quest, and a personal "sense" that their belief has a higher degree of probability than its alternative...

...we've all been in similar situa-tions ourselves, many times, every day...

...But it is only with our right brains-vulnerable, receptive, "feminine"-that we will ever know God...

...Nobody seems to have told them God is saying, "Look, I'll try to give you some 'answers,' but I can't until you stop doing all the talking...

...What do children have that the rest of us have lost...

...Even to the scientist dealing with science, it's not available...

...Santa Claus, it turns out, was a hoax...

...The "Letters to the Editor" sections of most diocesan newspapers seem to give painful evidence that a large number at least of those with the courage to write letters have not raised their adult understanding of their faith from the Baltimore Catechism (which was written for children) and from literalist images of God, which were the only ones available to writers twenty centuries ago...

...That's not a novel thought...

...What's more, in the history of science the real break-throughs began in the right brain, not the left...

...it is "the scientific method...

...What's clear is that most of the students I've taught, and their parents, have no idea what faith really means-even though nearly everything they claim to' 'know" and most of the opinions they form and the decisions they make are acts of faith...

...Children don't have to be taught to let go of being in charge, because they're not...

...The left brain deals with knowledge, using definitions: the "head," as in "head-trip...

...The right brain deals with under-standing, insight, wisdom, using symbols: the "heart," as in "heart-felt...

...It's happened every year for the past twenty-three, with college and adult students as well as high schoolers...

...Instead, they float on it, blissfully...

...At a deeper level, there is the taproot of serious faith problems, the epistemological question: How do we know that our percep-tions of reality (or our culture's) match what's out there, especially on ultimate matters like the existence of God, the objective grounding of morality...

...But few give me the "feeling" they've reasoned out their opinion and based it not only on reason but on actual experience of God...

...Bight-brain powers are important in religion because, in a very real sense, one's image of God-the picture we get in our minds when we hear that word-is far more important than one's left-brain idea of God...

...But I don't know God exists-or that he is benevolent and not a sadist, or that he enfleshed himself in Jesus Christ, or that I will survive death...

...The person who can become immersed in science fiction sees that reality is most certainly bigger, more varied, more fascinating and mysterious than we suspect...

...a statement is trustworthy because the speaker has proved himself or herself trustworthy...

...the strict scientific method achieves its goals by rigorously excluding the subjective and uncon-firmable right brain...

...Or it becomes bloated with junk food...

...and the products of this training came out to teach in universities...

...In every medical school, some doctor surely had to have graduated last...

...keep your guard up...

...Let religious ed teachers learn and then show children methods of relaxing, centering themselves, making an empty space and just letting God come in and rest a while...

...Though Werner Heisenberg won the Nobel Prize more than half a century ago for announcing the Principle of Uncertainty, those who naively wait for "scientific proof' don't realize that scientists do not expect to establish anything better than a "high degree of probability...

...To hear a hard-nosed physicist explaining the relationships of muons and gluons and quarks makes a theologian's discussion of the relationships among Father, Son, and Spirit sound less like the ravings of some desert shaman...

...Like God, "ehyehasherehyeh," the pool of existence out of which all things draw their existence...

...some polit-ical leaders routinely lie, genially or sneeringly, and cover up their lies...

...The two travelers at Emmaus "knew" Jesus "in the breaking of bread," a conviction not capable of-nor, for the two men, needful of-logical proof...

...My dictionary takes forty-three lines to define "love," and still leaves me wondering...

...Why is it that we don't seem to convey the same way of thinking about religious faith...

...But even the so-called "soft" sciences, like philosophy and theology and sociology, also seem resolutely to downplay the right brain as some kind of "weak sister," purposely rendering themselves psychologically tone-deaf and color-blind in order to cling to an unflinching objectivity...

...The right brain is imaginative: it has hunches, sees a question in context, "senses" that this particular answer-even if the evidence is still inconclusive-"feels right...

...Scien-tists say there can be no entity which surpasses the speed of light, but that seems to me merely left-brain snobbery, and scientists delight in playing' 'What if?'' What if there were an entity faster than light (and how would our limited metallic machines capture such a presence...

...Maybe that is why so many answer "true" to "Faith is a blind leap in the dark...

...And reading some popularized higher science shows that not only are science and religion not antagonists but that the scientist is now pursuing a quest analogous to that of the theologian, and with the same imaginative tools...

...Maybe it's their parents: standard teacher cop-out...

...If I can judge from the youngsters and adults with whom I work, their idea of praying is, on the one hand, "saying prayers," and, on the other, asking God to change his mind, or to give definitive left-brain answers to confusing problems...

...they are young enough and humble enough to see fairies couched in cowslips and sense God shining out all over the place...

...I don't believe the walls of my room are white...

...Some methods, it is true, stressed using the imagination to place oneself "into" a biblical scene, but-at least in my own case-that was only so that I could pick up some trenchant insight I could write in my "light book'' to prove to myself that I was making ' 'progress'' and not wasting time...

...God antedated time and space...

...What makes the demand for'' scientific proof' before com-mitment to religious faith even more comical is that the very people who demand it put their lives daily into the hands of doctors, pilots, and cooks-without the slightest evidence of their competence, without even thinking to ask questions a-bout it...

...As Chesterton says, wise men and women do not try to cross the infinite sea-thus taming it, making it finite...

...I find, personally, that praying to "a Person made of light," who lurks beneath and leaks out from everything I see, is immeasurably more helpful than addressing an old person-age on a throne...

...The old cliche is false: seeing is not believing, seeing is knowing...

...She is approaching the truth asymptotically, hemming it in more closely, which is all we can do with any research...

...I can't blame their previous teachers, since in quite a few cases / was their previous teacher...

...An act of faith is an opinion, a belief...

...If neutrinos had intelligence, they'd have all the properties a less sophisti-cated audience gave to angels...

...I am submitting myself to a moral code based on God's control of the natures and purposes of things, and not my own...

...The same could be said of the generals and revolutionaries and entrepreneurs who change the direction of human history, whom the man or woman in the streets pictures as coldly calculating, purely "masculine'' geniuses...

...I think of Greg Louganis...

...a statement is trustworthy (epistemologically sound) if it is logical and reasonable in itself and consistent with other already tested truths...

...The downrating of the right brain's function in human knowing is not merely the result of scientific condescension to anything less than objectively verifiable fact (except perhaps for the lamentable case of Carl Sagan...

...Since it's not in stock, I'll never get wet...

...Perhaps it would be so fast that it would be everywhere at once, so hyper-alive that it would be at rest...

...Jesus said that, unless we become as little children, we cannot even discover the Kingdom, much less enter it...