Be Happy!

Here's how the deal went down for me.

I left the Roman Catholic priesthood for the joy of the gospel.

I spent a year in a community in Italy where there were a number of people gathered all facing big decisions. Some actually went on to join a religious order. But the final goal standing before everyone was the joy of the gospel. And it was with that experience shaping my decision I left the priesthood.

Later I quit a bureaucratic job and took a more menial one, again for the joy of the gospel.

You could say I was an addict for the stuff. What is it?

The joy of the gospel is the gospel in the earth not in heaven. It is what Jesus taught us to pray for, "Thy will be done on earth..."

It is divine springtime in the earth, a time of peace, nonviolence, life for all, above all for the poor and defenseless. It is the beatitudes, "Happy are you poor, Happy are you hungry!" Nothing can resist it. It makes the unbearable bearable, and in fact happy.

It says that even if things are grim economically, even if your enemies are pressing hard, even if you don't have a snowball in hell's chance, still you are happy because the good news is in the earth and like the seed of a mighty sequoia it will not stop growing. And this is so because the gospel has its own rules. It does not work by power and influence, by money and weapons. Its MO is hidden and oblique, filled with apparent dead spots where the cellphone of prayer gets no signal, no response. But that does not mean it is not working, and suddenly out of nowhere an answer will beak through loud and clear.

And even without that practical effect those who entrust themselves to it experience a completely different physics.

I believe this to be the case literally.

There is something called "neural plasticity" which means that if you use the brain in a certain way it begins actually to change and grow. A study was done on the brains of London taxi drivers who are obliged to accumulate what, in their trade, is called "the knowledge". This means a detailed map of every road and street in London carried inside their heads. The study noted a marked growth in a brain area known as the hippocampus, the part necessary for spatial memory and recognition. And the more time the taxi driver spent on the job, the more the area grew. And comparable changes can be noted for those who learn a second language, for musicians who practice every day, and--really no surprise--for people who pray regularly and strongly ( http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104310443 ).

Perhaps the joy of the gospel might be more difficult to detect--after all it is not a regular practice, more like an overall contextual sense, a vital impression connected to, well, everything. But we know that the brain contains about a hundred billion neurons and the connections or possible pathways between them approach the infinite. Scientists tell us a mere sixty neurons are capable of making more connections than the total number of particles in the observable universe. In other words, on a certain reckoning the brain is bigger than the universe, much bigger. And remember we have absolutely no knowledge of the world without the use of our brains. You could say practically speaking it does not exist apart from our brains. And in a way we construct it with our brains. So here's what I think.

For those for whom the gospel is in the earth--i.e. those who embrace with their whole selves the stupendous change in human history brought by Jesus--there is a clear sense in which their brains outguess the universe. Even though the world looks like it's being dragged down to death by all the violence within it those who live in the joy of the gospel already reconstitute that world by the transformed neural connections within them. Through the dead and risen Christ they knit the earth anew in terms of the neural shape they give it. They reorganize every informational element by virtue of the one who died and now has conquered death. They literally reboot creation inside their brains through love.

How and in what parts (or whole modalities) of the brain this happens remains to be detected, but from my own experience and especially observing others (those whom I have known who show a much greater constant joy than I can manage) I believe it to be a fact.

As a vision of Christianity this has serious consequences.

For the churches their gospel is too often in heaven not in the earth. They have directed our attention above, out of here, toward "the holiest in the height", because a transformed earth is just too counter-intuitive and it is much easier to believe in a "spiritual" other-world (one that does not interfere with the brain!).

But the pressure is on. The earth's actual survival is at stake. And the informational technologies now at work push Christians to find themselves in the concrete world, an urgent hyper-visual neurally alert world. So the churches with their gospel-in-heaven are dying and the new evangelical community churches with their bring-your-coffee, tweet-your-pastor and holy tattoo parlors seem to be thriving.

But the real challenge is the joy of the gospel. The media-hip churches may be simply celebrating the culture itself with a traditional overlay of joy-in-heaven hereafter, rather than truly teaching and experiencing the gospel-in-the-earth.

Because this gospel in fact continues to press us from deep within our humanity. Our communication and social media I believe are only a distant surface outworking of the profound relational movement unleashed in the world by Christ. (See my book Virtually Christian.) It is this movement that actually restructures our brain if we let it. 

Oh for the day when Christians will be recognized by the peculiar activity of their brains! This is what the earth is longing for, the revelation of the children of God!

Be happy!

Tony