What happens in our brains and bodies as we worship?
As an Episcopalian who also happens to be a psychotherapist, I’ve long been fascinated by how the mind works, especially when it encounters the divine. Our mind is the setting for a host of mental activities, like loving, remembering, sensing, visualizing, deducing, imagining and engaging, to name just a few experiences that can come up during worship. The mind’s work depends not just on that big, wrinkly organ between our ears; our brain shares our skull with four other organs: our eyes, ears, nose and mouth. Our circulatory system is busy up there, too, feeding us with oxygen and necessary nutrients, and it’s the ultimate home base for the billions of neurons (nerve cells) that extend throughout our body. Billions. Every one of us humans has more neural connections inside ourselves than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy!
Something incredible happens on Sunday mornings when all these galaxies come together to worship at Grace: our minds start behaving differently. It begins when we walk through the doors. The stone walls, dark wood, stained glass windows, lighting, quiet music, altar dressings, smell, and other sensory cues create an ambience that draws us in from the outside world and invites our minds to be open to something different, something beyond ourselves. Novelty nurtures the growth of new neurons and new neuronal connections, so just entering the building can have a beneficial effect.
Regular congregants tend to choose the same places to sit each Sunday. Most of that is conscious: micro communities within the congregation can develop this way, and that can be rewarding. Young or old, introvert or extravert, connecting with peers stimulates more neural activity in the brain. Sitting in the same general place each week trades novelty for other benefits. For example, seeing the same things repeatedly from the same viewpoint reinforces prior associations and stimulates memory. Singing well-known hymns and reciting familiar prayers together can be especially satisfying for older adults, who tend to struggle with short-term memory as they age but can find it comforting to access words and tunes that are deeply entrenched and spiritually oriented.
There’s lots of physical activity in a Grace Church service. When worship begins, we all stand, which fires up the neurons in our Central Nervous System and rouses us to become mentally alert. When we sing an opening hymn, we inhale and exhale in unison. This deep, rhythmic breathing employs a different nerve bundle, the vagus (or “vagal nerve”), whose function is to slow us down, reduce anxiety and help us relax. Praying out loud together without music does this too: our own voices become the music. When the congregation sings or says the same words at the same time, breathing together as one voice, we briefly become like one large, living organism.
Offshoots from the vagus extend to our heart and lungs and direct them to operate together at a slow, healthy pace. The vagus sends offshoots to all our organs, from the most primitive (everything below the belt) to the evolutionarily newest –our larynx and the nerves around our ears, mouth and eyes. These upper organs are very important to us primates when we communicate with each other, because conveying our thoughts and feelings involves more than words. Tone of voice, eye contact, gestures and facial expressions humanize our conversations. They are features other animals have yet to perfect, although some come close.
Words, such as those spoken to us in the Sermon, stimulate the cortex in the front of our brain. We do much of our conscious thinking there. Pathways extending from our cortex lead to other areas in our brain where we experience emotion, perform tasks or access memories related to what our mind is working on. If our brain is healthy, it all happens with lightning speed.
The Nicene Creed and the Prayers of the People, recited together while standing, activate the vagus again. The General Confession, often done kneeling, dips our minds into remembered events and can arouse emotions like love, sorrow, hope, healthy humility and the determination to do better. Calmed and comforted by faith, we can then stand and greet one another in peace and joy—our eyes, ears and voices ready for friendly interaction in the “passing of the peace.”
The sense of belonging may be helpful in stimulating the desire to make a contribution at the Offertory, which links the two halves of the service. The Eucharist, aka the Great Thanksgiving, begins with more vagal-directed communal activity at the Doxology, which is spoken or sung. The peoples’ gifts of wine and bread and their monetary offerings are presented at the altar; then, after more prayers, we all approach the altar offering “ourselves, our souls and bodies,” as it says in Rite 1, like God offered God’s self to us through Jesus Christ. Having been symbolically nourished with a taste of bread and wine, we return to our seats, and the service ends with more singing and/or spoken prayer. We’re primed for bringing Jesus’s message of love out into the world.
Worship at Grace changes us a little each time we attend. We form new neural connections and reinforce old ones, all the while being spiritually soothed and refreshed by our vagus nerve. We tiny galaxies come to Grace as individuals, or couples, or families, but in the shared experience of corporate worship, our minds form a small, living universe, traveling together through time and space in the love of God.
Lin Weber, LMFT
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