Dave Barnhart's Blog, page 3

Week 2, Day 5: Summary—Handling Automatic Behaviors

Day 5: Summary: Handling our automatic behaviors

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

“Meditation on the Hill,” a photo from Sobi Hill, Nigeria, from Wikimedia Commons

This week, I’ve focused on the automatic feelings and behaviors that often precede our conscious awareness. The first two days I talked about fear and anger. These are our fastest automatic reactions, ancient emotions that helped our ancestors survive by fleeing danger or defeating enemies.

Unfortunately, traumatic experiences teach our amygdala to be more sensitive to danger. People who have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have adapted to a dangerous environment. They may be easily triggered by stress, or have recurring nightmares or difficulty with relationships. A huge amount of my time as a therapist and a pastor is spent helping people unlearn or at least reduce the frequency of these automatic responses.

Even those of us without PTSD have fear and anger reactions that are faster than our conscious awareness. They often lead us to hurt people we love, or act in ways that are contrary to our values. Because we are triggered faster than we can think, we cannot just will or reason these reactions into submission. We have to train them and strengthen alternative responses to things that trigger us.  

On days three and four, I looked at slower automatic reactions: habits and impulses. Habits are ways we have programmed ourselves. Habits can be powerful tools! We can hand off tasks to other parts of our brains so that our conscious awareness can go do more important things. We don’t have to spend as much mental energy deciding or motivating ourselves to do a task — the habit practically does itself. This only becomes a burden when we are trying to create or interrupt a habit.  

Impulses, on the other hand, come from the part of our brain that is most like an untrained toddler or puppy. The role of the nucleus accumbens is to assist with the anticipation and appreciation of reward. It teaches us to crave certain things, which then become part of our habits.

I think the Inside-Out movies do a good job portraying how these different brain regions and emotions interact. The self inside each of us is less like a single individual and more like a committee. The poor chair of this unruly committee that includes anger, fear, habit, and impulse is the prefrontal cortex (PFC). It has a difficult job when all the committee members are yelling! This is one reason meditation is such a powerful tool—it trains the committee quiet down, so the chair can decide where to focus its attention.

I believe a common theme in the world’s major religions is a desire to become more conscious, to have a more intentional, abundant life. Disciplines like prayer, meditation, reading sacred scripture, service to others, and corporate worship shift us from everyday consciousness into a different state of awareness. This is a process of growing in spiritual maturity that helps us live our lives in ways that better match our values.

The theological word I like to use for this process is incarnation. In Christianity, the incarnation is how God “puts on flesh” in Jesus Christ. But I also think it makes sense for us to consider how we “put flesh” on our own values, how we embody an abundant life. I believe it involves a union of mind and body, awareness and action. We become conscious of what is unconscious, and take steps to bring ourselves into alignment with what God is already doing in the world. As we become more conscious, we incarnate what we long to see in the world.

Prayer: Source of Life, help us wake up to your abundant life now. Amen.

Week 2, Day 4: Impulse

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22)

Image from Wikimedia Commons, from Lim S-J, Fiez JA and Holt LL (2014) How may the basal ganglia contribute to auditory categorization and speech perception? Front. Neurosci. 8:230. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2014.00230 http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2014.00230/full

Not far from the amygdala sits another brain region, the nucleus accumbens (NA), which is part of our “dopamine reward system.” The NA’s motto is, “if it feels good, do it!” It is most active when we act on impulses, and it plays a key role in learning. It also helps program the dorsal striatum, which (as I said yesterday) plays a role in our automatic behaviors. So if you have a habit of cracking open a beer at the end of the day, your nucleus accumbens and your dorsal striatum are shaking hands on a job well done. And if you have a hard time saying no to a reward or delaying gratification, that’s your nucleus accumbens at work!

I want to make a distinction between the way we usually think of “will power” as a character strength, and what I’m saying here about the ways brain systems interact. When we talk about brain systems and neurotransmitters, we make it clear that the struggles we face in changing our own behaviors are not about will power, but about biochemistry. When I’m trying to change a habit, I am literally pumping more blood into my prefrontal cortex (PFC) to override other systems (like the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, and dorsal striatum). It’s one against three! It’s an unfair fight!

When I’m wearing my counseling hat and trying to help people control their anger, or reduce their alcohol consumption, or overcome depression, I’m often trying to normalize their struggles and help them be less judgmental of their own failures. “We are bundles of automatic processes,” I tell them. “It is mentally exhausting to fight with your own brain.”

Yet self-control is about training ourselves to resist the impulsive action: to speak gently when we want to yell, to turn down the snack or drug, to back away from the rush of spending or gambling money. Serotonin, rather than dopamine, seems to be the neurotransmitter of delayed gratification. These neurotransmitters function like an accelerator and a brake.

We can train our PFC and give ourselves more control over our impulses with some basic things: exercise, sleep, time outside, and mindfulness meditation. These activities also boost serotonin levels which help us put the brakes on our impulsive behaviors. Not surprisingly, spirituality, worship, and awe also have beneficial effects on our brains’ ability to regulate itself.  

Christmas advertising is all geared toward appealing to our impulsive side. “Black Friday sales” start the week before Thanksgiving. The capitalist Christmas machine ramps up to stimulate our nucleus accumbens, giving us dopamine as we anticipate buying new things.

Advent, the season of waiting, asks us to practice self-control, delaying gratification. It reminds us that waiting is a skill that we can learn.  

Prayer: Emmanuel, God-with-us, the whole Earth waits for you.

Week 2, Day 3: Habit

These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:6-9)

A mezuzah, often affixed to the doorposts of Jewish homes, containing the scripture above. From Wikimedia Commons

One of our human superpowers is our ability to program ourselves with new habits. The principle is “neurons that fire together, wire together,” and anything we repeat often enough becomes automatic.

I am regularly amazed that, after decades of driving, I can make the two-hour trip from Birmingham to Huntsville, arrive safely, and have almost no memory of the trip. My brain was able to hand off a potentially dangerous activity to parts of my brain that needed no attention. I avoided potholes, took the correct exits, and navigated heavy traffic while my mind was focused on an audiobook.

I remember learning to drive. I was sixteen and feeling overwhelmed by all the things I was supposed to pay attention to: gauges, speedometer, side mirrors, and how to move my feet between brake and clutch. But with thousands of hours of practice, the car became an extension of my own body.

The dorsal striatum is a part of the brain essential for habit formation and automatic behaviors. Another part of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex, clues us in when something is off. If I get into the car and don’t automatically buckle my seatbelt, my brain will sense that something is off until I correct the problem.

But until behaviors become habit, until the dorsal striatum helps record and automate these brain circuits, I have to physically push blood into the part of my brain that helps me intentionally do things: the prefrontal cortex, or PFC. The PFC is the part of my brain in charge of where I direct my attention. This is why it takes a lot of energy to create a habit, and why it takes virtually none to maintain it. I don’t have to think about whether or not to brush my teeth at night—I just do it because it’s a habit. If I didn’t do it, something would feel off. But as a child, brushing my teeth felt exhausting, and required a major effort.

We become most aware of our habits when they undermine our goals and values — when we find it hard to exercise, for example, or when we are caught up in an addiction, or any other habit we’re trying to quit. And often building a habit of doing something involves stopping a habit of not doing something. But we don’t notice all the automatic behaviors we do that are helpful (like brushing our teeth, or following a routine), because they seamlessly blend into our lives.

Rituals are ways of both building and breaking habits. The passage above encouraged Jesus’s people to regularly repeat the shema, the sacred scripture that God is one, and they were to love God with all their heart, soul, and strength. This ritual was meant to make reflecting on God a seamless part of life. But rituals also interrupt our habits — holidays like Christmas and Easter disrupt the usual pattern of our days, giving our PFC a chance to pay attention to our goals and values. I believe this is one of their main purposes. And this is why holidays—not just the New Year—often mark times in our lives when we try to begin or break a habit.

We become conscious by paying attention to our automatic behaviors. Advent is a season in which to purposefully interrupt our automatic behaviors and reflect on whether or not our habits are bringing us in closer to our goals and values.

Prayer: Architect of our bodies and brains, thank you for the ability to modify our own programming. Help us to build habits that bring more of your love and justice into the world.

Week 2, Day 2: Anger

Be angry without sinning. Don’t let the sun set on your anger. Don’t provide an opportunity for the devil. (Ephesians 4:26-27)

John Martin’s painting, “The Great Day of His Wrath,” from Wikimedia Commons.

The monk Evagrius Ponticus included wrath among seven deadly sins in the 4th century. Wrath was not simply the emotion of anger, but the passion of a nursed grievance, a fury intentionally fed. Most theologians have made a distinction between righteous anger (for example, the anger over injustice) and wrath or anger resulting from wounded pride.

I’m not sure, though, that your amygdala knows the difference. Anger is closely related to fear and is mediated by the amygdala, because when flight fails, the last survival strategy available to our ancestors was fight. Anger is related to a feeling of danger or loss: something I value is under threat.

I should point out that for many men raised in a patriarchal culture, anger is much more socially acceptable than fear (or sadness, or grief, or joy), and for some of us, it becomes our default emotional reaction to discomfort.

One of my favorite Buddhist parables is about a monk who found it difficult to meditate because of constant interruption. Frustrated, he finally went to the lake, found an empty fishing boat, and rowed out into the middle of the water, where he could finally be at peace. Just as he was approaching a meditative union with the universe, he was jarred back into normal consciousness when another fishing boat bumped into his. He wheeled around to yell at the other boatman when he realized the other boat was empty. Without someone to yell at, an object for his fury, his anger evaporated. He realized than his anger was generated by his own imagination.

But here was the real revelation: Not that the other boat was empty, but that his own boat was empty. His mind was not fully present; he was caught up in an imaginary story in which his anger was justified at a nonexistent fisherman.

When people respond with anger to each other, they are often like empty boats bumping into each other, one set of biochemical, unconscious reactions leading to other reactions. We battle with imaginary enemies, not really hearing what the other person is saying. When we react with anger, we are often like humans who yell at dogs, “stop barking!” which only leads to more barking.  

This is one reason, I think, sacred scripture calls us to forgive, and to “not let the sun go down on your anger.” Like fear, anger produces cortisol, a stress hormone that raises our blood pressure and increases our heart rate. Anger likewise precedes our conscious thought, because our amygdala has detected a threat: to our pride, our status, or something else we find sacred.

While anger is a natural emotion and can certainly be called for, conscious people learn to steward their anger, and use it as fuel. Whether our anger is justified or not, it is fine to let anger paddle the boat — but not steer it.

Prayer: Provider of Justice and Peace, help us to be good stewards of our anger. Amen.

Week 2, Day 1: Fear

The angel said, “Don’t be afraid! Look! I bring good news to you—wonderful, joyous news for all people. (Luke 2:10)

“Biblically Accurate Angels” from a series on YouTube by Jonas Pfeiffer

For us to become conscious, we must realize how much of our usual life is unconscious, automatic, and mind-less. Last week, I talked about how our perceptions affect our consciousness. This week, I’m turning my attention to our automatic responses, parts of our mental and emotional life that precede consciousness.

Today: fear.

One of the amazing features of our brains is the threat-detecting amygdala, which is responsible for our flight, flight, and freeze reactions. It is an ancient part of our brains, which kept our ancestors alive by helping them avoid danger. It did so by being much faster than conscious thought. The amygdala reacts to perceived threat in less than 70 milliseconds, but the more complex part of our brain, the cerebral cortex, takes around 200 milliseconds to process data and give a name to that data. This means that when you are startled — for example, by someone sneaking up behind you and blasting an air horn — you will jump before you hear the sound.

While fear helps us survive, chronic worry, anxiety, and stress cause us to behave in irrational ways that reduce our well-being. A lot of my work as a counselor and a pastor is in helping people deal with chronic worry, a state where our thoughts trigger our own fear response, which triggers more thoughts, which triggers more fear. Trying to talk ourselves out of worry or saying “don’t worry” is not helpful, because the amygdala is faster than our cognition. We can no more think our way out of worry than we can levitate by pulling on our shoelaces.

In our intensive outpatient program for obsessive-compulsive disorder, exposure and response prevention is one of our primary tools for reducing worry. We have to train our amygdala to be less reactive, not by soothing our fears, but by facing them. A systematic, disciplined approach to facing our fears is a feature of both spiritual growth and mental health.

In light of the recent election, and climate change, and global conflict, and a constant diet of bad news, it’s no surprise that humanity seems more worried and fearful than ever. Regulating our fear is an increasingly important skill. By “regulating,” I do not mean suppressing: I mean acknowledging it, being mindfully aware of it, noticing where we feel it in our physical bodies, and leaning in to it. Our amygdala will not listen to reason, but it can be trained.

I get tired of people thinking that “spirituality” is about sunsets over mountain vistas. It’s just as much about facing your fears: staring death in the face, tolerating uncertainty, dealing with uncomfortable memories, and even managing disgust and revulsion.

CS Lewis points out that when angels appear in the Bible, they usually begin by saying, “fear not,” because our first reaction to seeing ultimate reality is more likely to be terror than sweetness.

God in Christ turns the world upside-down, and with that arrival, there will be fear. In Matthew’s story, King Herod will be afraid, and he will turn that fear into violence that will create fear in others. In Luke’s story, shepherds in the field will be afraid but instead will go searching for more of God’s glory.

May we also respond to fear with curiosity and engagement.  

Prayer: Commander of Angel Armies, give us courage in equal measure to our fear.

(Click here to learn more about Daniel Goleman’s term “amygdala hijack”).

Week 1, Day 5: Seeing isn’t believing; How illusions reveal the truth

When Jacob woke from his sleep, he thought to himself, The Lord is definitely in this place, but I didn’t know it. (Genesis 28:16)

Thanks for letting me share some of my favorite optical illusions with you! Because most of us are so visually oriented, I wanted to start week one of Advent with optical illusions. They are a good way to start talking about consciousness. When we become aware that we are not seeing reality, but our brain’s best guess at reality, we become more aware of our own mental processes.

What is consciousness? It’s the collection of sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that make up your experience right now. It includes your sense of self, time, and memory.

We are rarely aware that we are aware, rarely conscious of our own consciousness. Instead we ride the wave of whatever thoughts or impulses arise in the moment: my to-do list, my hunger, my need for a nap, that conversation I wish had gone differently. We are aware of the passage of time, mentally dividing our day into chapters and scenes. But unless we sit down to meditate, or something (like seeing an illusion) jars us out of our usual way of seeing, we are not aware of this profound thing that is happening to all of us: we are aware.

This week I’ve used optical illusions to illustrate some of the ways we get perspective on our own consciousness: 1) we notice that we can’t perceive what is actually there, 2) we notice that we do perceive what isn’t there, 3) we become aware of how context changes our perception, and 4) we become aware that contrast changes our perception.

I believe the story of Advent and Christmas, like most sacred scripture, is meant to create a change in our consciousness, a shift in the way we see the world. It is meant to unmask the illusions by which we live, to make us more sensitive to context and contrast, to show us what is really there (like divine presence), and what is not (like human-made concepts of “deserving”).

This kind of consciousness-altering revelation is, to borrow a word from psychedelic culture, “trippy,” as encounters with God often are. We readily identify trippy Biblical images in Ezekiel’s wheels with eyes, Isaiah’s vision of God’s robe filling the temple, or John’s apocalyptic monsters and pregnant women. But the New Testament images of manger, cross, and empty tomb are likewise consciousness-changing.

Next week, I’ll turn from perceptions to automatic behaviors as we continue to explore Christmas and consciousness.

Prayer: Divine Light, light up our world and renew our minds. Amen.

—Rev. Dr. David Barnhart, Jr. 

If you’ve enjoyed the optical illusions this week, you can find more at the Illusion Index.

Bonus Christmas image from the article :

(You can support the ministry of Saint Junia United Methodist Church by clicking here.)

Week 1, Day 4: Seeing contrast

Here is a classic optical illusion that shows how easily our judgments are thrown off. I remember first seeing this illusion in elementary school. Although the horizontal lines are the same length, we usually perceive one as larger than the other.

There are several theories about why this illusion works. One theory is that our brains shift into interpreting the horizontal line as a 3-dimensional image, that we’re seeing the line as a corner of an object that is close or far away from us. A corollary of this theory is that in cultures where people do not grow up around a manufactured environment with lots of right angles (in tribes of hunter-gatherers, for example), people are not thrown off by this illusion. The evidence for this theory is inconclusive.

One of the most fascinating papers I heard presented at the 2023 Psychedelic Science conference was about the visual perception of people on psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”). It turns out that people on psilocybin are more sensitive to contrast in such optical illusions (the strength of the illusion is greater), but that they also have greater “surround suppression,” meaning they are better able to filter signal from noise (Swanson, 2022). In some ways, people on psilocybin were seeing more clearly, not less.

This illusion reminds me of something my friend Melissa Scott says. She introduced me to the term “right-sizing,” a spiritual and mental awareness that corrects our tendency to think of ourselves, our problems, or our importance as either too big or too small. I think in many ways, the Christmas story is about right-sizing the human experience and our relation to the universe when we find God in a feeding trough. It’s about filtering the signal of divine presence from the noise of the distractions that dominate our attention.

I think seeing through the eyes of Christ helps us to see things more clearly, often in ways that put us at odds with the dominant culture. Richard Rohr calls this “Christ consciousness.” This way of seeing dispels illusions that tell us one person or being is greater than another. It helps us begin to clear away some of the cultural and cognitive biases that lead us to make errors in judgment.

Prayer: God, help us to see the world through the lens of Christ consciousness. Help us to right-size ourselves, our culture, our problems, and our importance in your awe-inspiring creation. Amen.

—Rev. Dr. David Barnhart, Jr. 

(The above optical illusion was created by Franz Müller-Lyer in 1889. Sourced from Wikipedia.)

(You can support the ministry of Saint Junia United Methodist Church by clicking here.)

Week 1, Day 3: Seeing context

This isn’t an Advent scripture, but it’s good quote to introduce today’s optical illusion:

“When they moved, the wheels moved; when they stood still, the wheels stood still; and when they rose above the earth, the wheels rose up along with them, because the spirit of the creatures was in the wheels.”  (Ezekiel 1:21)

In this optical illusion, the motion of the wheels is the same, but you will observe them moving left right, up, down, and in and out.

At first, I thought the arrows had something to do with the illusion of motion, but it turns out that the main effect is caused by a faint border of pixels around the wheels. If you cover up the arrows, the wheels still seem to move in different directions. (An explanation for how the optical illusion works can be found here.) Some people report that the arrows give the illusion a “boost,” making the motion more prominent.

In the last two devotionals, I pointed out that a) we don’t see things that are there, and b) we do see things that aren’t there. This illusion demonstrates that our brains interpret ambiguous data from very subtle context clues.

As a pastor and counselor, I try to be very sensitive to context. Context determines how we understand the narrative trajectory of the Bible. For example, do we read the New Testament as a story of a wrathful God throwing us one last lifeline before damning all of creation to hell and destruction? Or do we read it as an unfolding revelation of God’s grace, with Jesus as a herald of a new kingdom? You can certainly find support for either reading. I believe context imparts a certain direction to our reading.

I read the Bible as the story of God’s faithfulness to God’s people, a God who has been trying for ages to teach the principles of abundance (manna) and forgiveness (mercy) to humans who are infatuated with an economics of scarcity and a politics of coercive power. I come to this reading because of my own social context (how I was raised, the groups I identify with, etc.) and because of the historical context of the Bible. The Bible was written by escaped slaves, returning exiles, and oppressed people. Even though I belong to none of those groups, I see the direction of scripture informed by that background.

And I see it especially in the story of the pregnancy of an unwed mother, the visit of pagan astrologers, and their family’s refugee flight to Egypt. When I read scripture, I try to imagine what seeing it in or from a different context would be like. I squint, I cover up arrows, I draw lines around it. I apply historical, literary, intertextual, and womanist and queer lenses to see what the movement of scripture looks like from a different perspective. All of this makes me more aware of how my own consciousness, my own experience, shapes how I understand the movement of God not only in scripture, but in the world.

Prayer: God, help us to pay attention to context. Help us see through eyes other than our own. Amen.

—Rev. Dr. David Barnhart, Jr. 

(Optical illusion based on the work of Twitter user @jagarikin. )

(You can support the ministry of Saint Junia United Methodist Church by clicking here.)

Day 2: Optical Illusions: When we see what isn’t there

“…You say, ‘I’m rich, and I’ve grown wealthy, and I don’t need a thing.’ You don’t realize that you are miserable, pathetic, poor, blind, and naked” (Revelation 3:17).

I’m going to be sharing a lot of optical illusions with you this week, because I think they are great ways to illustrate how our consciousness works.

The two illusions I’m sharing today work because our eyeballs are always moving in very tiny ways. These micro-movements are involuntary. Paired with the tendency for our brains to fill in missing information about data they don’t directly perceive (see yesterday’s devotional), images that are still may look like they are moving. Lines that are straight may appear to curve or wiggle.

Yesterday I wrote about the fact that we don’t always see what is there. Today’s illusions show that sometimes we see what isn’t there; in this case, our brains add motion or curves to still images. In the above image, wheels that are still appear to move, because your eye is moving around the image to try to capture all that is there. But whenever you focus on a spot, you see that the wheels are still. Below, for a similar reason, lines that are straight appear to curve.  

Both of these illusions illustrate that the area your eyes can clearly see is actually pretty tiny. Even when you stand on a cliff and look out an immense sky, your brain is able to convey the enormity of your panoramic vision, but you are really only able to focus on an area about the size of your thumbnail.

We always add information to what we perceive. In relationships, this may look like hearing an angry tone or a nasty implication in a neutral statement. It may look like the assumptions we make about someone else’s intent or state of mind.

In society, it may look like making value judgments about wealth, status, and deserving. We associate money with success, and success with virtue (which John points out in the passage from Revelation above).

This doesn’t mean “everything is relative.” We can take out a ruler and measure. Using careful observation, we can see that the lines or wheels in the illustrations above do not move. The optical illusion only works as an illustration because there is a consensus-based reality that we can know.

I’m reminded of the story of Hannah from 1 Samuel 1, who prefigures Mary. When she kneels in the temple, praying without making a sound, the priest Eli initially assumes she is drunk. She sets him straight: “Don’t think your servant is some good-for-nothing woman. This whole time I’ve been praying out of my great worry and trouble!” (1 Samual 1:16). When we tell the story of Mary’s miraculous pregnancy, we’re aware that people who had incomplete information probably added their own information and assumptions to her story.

These illusions also highlight an important theme in both Christmas and consciousness. When we look at the stars, whether we see divine portents in the heavens or simply balls of burning gas, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.”

Prayer: God, help us be circumspect in our assumptions and judgments. Amen.

—Rev. Dr. David Barnhart, Jr. 

(Spinning Wheels optical illusion was sourced from Optics4Kids, and appears to come from a 2007 issue of Scientific American. I was not able to find an original source for the map/curving lines illusion.)  

You can support the ministry of Saint Junia United Methodist Church by clicking here.

Week 1, Day 1: Blind spots: When we can’t see what is there

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to preach good news to the poor,
    to proclaim release to the prisoners
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
    to liberate the oppressed,
    and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19)

I keep a file of my favorite optical illusions, and I sometimes use them with clients who are disturbed by hallucinations.

To normalize hallucinations, I tell them that we are always hallucinating. Our brains are piecing together what we see, hear, and experience every moment from incomplete information. Your brain filters out information you don’t consider relevant, and adds information it believes is missing. And even if your eyes are wide open and your vision is fine, your brain is not aware of what it cannot see.

Until you see something like this:

There are several dots in this illusion, but (depending on how close your face is to the screen) you will likely only see a few of them at a time.

The illusion above has to do with how your brain processes information, but there is a more obvious, physical blind spot where your optic nerve attaches to your retina. You can read about the experiment here. You seldom perceive your own blind spot, because your brain fills in missing information. It’s only when you try to track more than one spot with one eye open that you become aware how your brain is tricking you.

There is a lot of language in the Bible and in Christian tradition about healing blindness which, while sometimes ableist, is a good metaphor for coming to a new understanding. We talk about “revealing” or “revelation,” having an “epiphany,” or finding “enlightenment.” All of these metaphors are about light and sight. But we are walking around with “veiled” vision all the time and do not notice it.

Acknowledging that there is much that we do not perceive or know is called “epistemological humility.” It means trying to keep in mind that we jump to conclusions, make faulty assumptions, and have cognitive biases that shape our perception of the world. I’ll say more about epistemological humility later in the week.

The New Testament tells a story of a messiah who shows up but remains unseen, veiled, hidden. Looking at a crowd of people, you might miss that God incarnate is walking among them. Once you see the Incarnate One, you may become aware that there are other places you’ve missed seeing them. You might start to see Christ all around.

Prayer: God, reveal to us what is hidden. Amen.

—Rev. Dr. David Barnhart, Jr. 

(Optical illusion first posted on Facebook by Dr. Akiyoshi Kitaoka, from a paper by Jacques Ninio and Kent Stevens.)

For the next five weeks, I’ll be sending out a short daily devotional informed by my work as a pastor, theologian, organizer, and psychedelic-assisted therapist. I’ll be delving into scripture, theology, and recent research into neuroscience. If that sounds like your jam, feel free to sign up!

(You can support the ministry of Saint Junia United Methodist Church by clicking here.)