Mind + Spirit = Armor of God?

 The mind is a powerful thing. 

When I was a kid, I read a story called The Chrysalids. It was one of the first post-apocalyptic stories I'd ever read, and it was pretty cool. Spoilers ahead. The civilization that was being rebuilt, it seemed, was a bigoted Christian society, one that dehumanized mutants, which were apparently more of a thing because of the radioactive fallout that had spread throughout the ecosystem. Any deviations were considered demonic abominations and culled: animal, plant, or human. It's very Amish-feeling. And it's apparently not sustainable. The main characters are mutants, though their differences are not readily apparent. They can communicate to each other through some power of their minds alone. It's not a typical telepathy. They can't read the minds of just anyone. They can only see each other's thoughts, and those thoughts are weaker with distance. It's kind of similar to having a voice and having ears to hear, but in frequencies other people can't hear. The youngest of them is more sensitive than any of them by a scale of dozens, equally louder in her ability to project her thoughts. She so powerful, she garners the attention of someone on the other side of the planet, someone from a society of these telepaths, where they have redeveloped the powers of flight and computation and electricity. Just in time, too, because the bigoted zealots around them start to notice something strange about them. 

Something else I was really into as a teenager was the Armor of God. Even then, I was constructing contrived Bible studies that felt like the nerdy stuff I wished someone would study with me. I had broken down the pieces of the Armor, fit them into a study about the Royal Priesthood, making the royalty theme fit into a knighthood concept. I wrote a highly allegorical short story of spiritual warfare of someone imbued with the Armor of God fighting forces of darkness in the world. 

Years later, my perspective has come full circle, though this time around, my expectations are more grounded, as I suspect cynicism and adulthood experiences have ground down even my abstractions. I have talked about my struggles with depression. I've also talked about the power of prayer insofar as it applies to coping with emotional struggles like depression and anxiety. There are a bunch of ancient prayer traditions that line up with what we now know to be sound psychological practices when it comes to coping with emotion out of our control and when it comes to thoughts we seem to have no power to stop. 

From a scientific and medical perspective, the mind has a lot of power indeed. We all know what the placebo effect is, and we all know it's been used to explain all manner of "faith healings" and has been guarded against extensively in the fields of psychology and pharmacology, mostly through the use of the double-blind method of study. Mood disorders are complicated, having elements in genetics, in behavioral habits, in diet and activity level, in life circumstance. Depression and anxiety are the ones I think are most commonly felt and dealt with. But there's a whole branch of psychotherapy called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, that deals with the parts of that equation we can control: our thoughts and our actions. By controlling those elements, we can influence the parts we don't have immediate control over and change the course of our entire mood, given enough insight and effort. 

I guess this is where my personal discipleship journey has caused my interest in scientific truth to coincide and intersect with spiritual truth. The Bible is full of references to the power of Scripture stored in the mind. Deuteronomistic texts, the laws and the histories, are rife with references of fathers commanding their sons to keep the commandments. Proverbs 3:1 references Solomon telling us to keep the commandments in our hearts. Jesus talks about attitude in his famous Sermon on the Mount, starting in Matthew 5. He preaches against things that have obsessive and destructive qualities over the mind. Anxiety and fear, rage and hatred, judgmentalism and self-righteousness, greed and envy, lust and desire. All these things have the power to hijack a person's mind and pull them into a deep, dark hole some never escape from. Any addict can attest to this. Parallels to the Armor of God passage include Romans 13 that calls it the "Armor of Light", and Galatians 3 calls it "clothing yourself in Christ". Psalm 46 is where we get "be still and know that I am God", and 2 Corinthians we get "take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ", Colossians 3 is where we get "do everything as unto Christ". Philippians 4 entreaties us to fill our minds with things that are "true, and noble and good and pure" and whatnot. 

The meditative practices are foundational to our very faith. In order to take captive every thought, we have to learn the truth that we are not our thoughts. Like breathing, we may have some control over our thoughts, but in the end, they will happen with or without our actual consent. The real "us" is the observer that can even notice the thoughts in the first place, the same observer that can observe our own breathing. We have to practice being still and knowing that God is God, meaning he is the one actually in control. This is where I discovered the practice of Centering Prayer. 

The Sacred Breath element is the part that I latch onto, because there is a lot of secular work done out there in a clinical and psychological area about breathwork. Teaching yourself to be still and observe, without attachment, the inner workings of your own mind can have valuable applications towards noticing that you may be infested with some of those intense emotional and attitudinal traps that Jesus preached against. Emotions, even more than thoughts, are things that happen to us more than they are anything we can really control. What influence we have over them is slower, more ponderous, than the influence we have over our thoughts. But separating yourself from them gives you the power to realize they don't have the hold over you you might have thought they did at one point. Some of the gifts of mindfulness, of sitting and knowing. 

Then there's journaling. There are many ways in which someone might keep a prayer journal. There are even many prompted prayer journals out there on the market. I have grown up where the practice of "devotionals" was pretty common. This is where you read a passage of the Bible, prescribed or not, and then you journal about your reflections about what you've read. This seems to have foundations in Lectio Divina, which is the ancient practice of meditating over the Scriptures. Mine was always more freeform. I remember hearing about someone who did it this way, but it's been so many years, at this point, that I don't really remember who said it and when. I write my journal entries like letters, addressed to God himself. This also falls more in line with the therapeutic benefits of journaling, as opposed to studying, which I feel like devotionals have. When you journal about your own experiences, it can have several effects, mentally. The first is one of control and understanding. This is part of observing your own thoughts. When you write about your feelings and about your thoughts, you're compelled to put labels on them. This makes them more manageable. When someone is terrified, they are often overwhelmed by their fear, compelled to make irrational decisions based on it. But when they identify the fear, they have greater agency to address it, to deal with it. Writing about your feelings and your thoughts helps give you this agency. It acts like a mirror, giving you more power to affect the things going on inside your head. The second major thing, for me at least, is that journaling is vindicating and validating. I believe this has roots in the Psalms, maybe Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and Song of Solomon. If you ever actually read through the Psalms, you know that they are supposed to be prayers come up with by King David, committed to music because he was a musician and that's how he dealt with his feelings. They're songs. But more than that, they are letters to God, prayers. And if you read through them, you realize that David is nuts. Scary as hell, he is. There are times when he prays for God to visit the worst kind of war crimes and horrors on his enemies. 

And yet, those same dark and twisted desires were made canonical scripture. If that doesn't validate that God is a safe place to bring your demons, than I don't know what does. I mean, it makes sense upon some reflection. Assuming God is everywhere and all knowing, is it any real surprise that he's quite familiar with the darkest depths of our souls? I mean, many of us, including me, grew up feeling like we had to have ourselves together, be some kind of saints, before God would hear us in our prayers. So most of us pretended to be better than we really were. We sanitized our thoughts before we offered them up to God. We censored ourselves when we made requests. Does any of that really make sense when God is fully present inside our minds and hearts? Not to me, not anymore. I cannot shock him with the darkness I hold inside of me. So why not admit to it freely? Why not acknowledge it and share it with him? I tell many people about this, but the following is still true: my journal is concurrently the most sacred and most profane space in my life. How can I be so bold as to desecrate God's presence with my darkness? He's already in it. He has already seen the fullness of my depths before time was time and has called me son. Just like the Father of the Prodigal Son only saw his beloved boy and clothed him in grandeur, so too my own heavenly father looks at me and loves me. In me he is well pleased. I have come a very long way in accepting that, and accepting that he does not pretend to ignore my darkest parts, but accepts them as part of me. Perhaps he helps for them to heal as time goes on, but some people live their whole lives and die before their darkness is really wiped clean by God. I stand, unashamed, before my heavenly Father and I talk to him as any child talks to a loving parent. Better, even, because I don't trust my parents to love me the same should they find out about my darkest parts. They hardly love me as well as I deserve knowing mostly my best parts and the least embarrassing of my bad. 

But there's more! A few years ago, I read through a book called The Undefeated Mind: On the Science of Constructing an Indestructible Self. That book was all about mental hardiness. This reminded me of armor. Of the Armor of God, or the Armor of Light. 

When I used to come up with Bible studies about the Armor of God, I talked about how the different parts of it protected us from different things. Helmets obviously protect our heads, but they also acted as a kind of badge, a sign of who we served, like the plumes in a Roman helmet. This was a reference to how we thought, and seemed obvious to me that many would identify us by how differently we think from the everyone else. The Breastplate had to do with Righteousness, or integrity as I believed it, and protected us from the close-quarters attacks. Armor is meant to absorb the blows from spears and swords, mostly. If you lived a life of integrity, then most character assassinations should slide off, right? The shield was about faith, and was modeled after the Roman shield that was used against flaming arrows. These were ranged shots that could eat away at you if you weren't careful. The shields referenced, though, were supposed to be covered in leather, soaked in water, to extinguish the fire when the arrows embedded themselves within the shield. I don't really remember what the flaming arrows were supposed to represent, though. What comes to mind is questions, destructive questions, because that's the only thing I can think of that can burn on that level. Finally, the "feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the Gospel of Peace". I had an insight that shoes are meant to protect from the journey itself, unlike the rest of the armor, which is meant to protect from direct attacks. The readiness and the peace of God are meant to protect you from the weariness and the exhaustion that comes from living a life according the Christ-like principles. 

In the Undefeated Mind,  there were some principles that I thought were interesting. The first was the idea of having a sense of purpose. One can endure much if they think it is the service of a greater purpose. Related, but separate, is the idea of passion. What excites you? Together, this reminded me of something I learned about in college, a lesson about something my professor called the Blue Flame of Ministry. It was a lesson in figuring out what "God's will" for our lives was. We all have things we're good at, things we're skilled in, and most of us have things we care a lot about. Finding where those things overlap was what he called the Blue Flame. The  next bits of the book have to do with how we handle failures and obstacles. Bad stuff always happens, to everyone. When you believe in a God who isn't held down by the standard rules of cause and effect, you can easily imagine a purpose behind bad stuff happening, or invent one. If you can come up with some kind of lesson to be learned from that bad thing, or note a skill or some personal growth out of it, then you can roll with the punches more effectively. The next lesson had to do with acceptance. Obviously, we only have so much control over things, and it's a lot less than you might initially imagine. We don't even have complete control over ourselves. But something that can help you keep going is acceptance. For me, it was easy to translate this into something Christian. God has forgiven everything. It was a lesson I had to learn the hard way when I was figuring out my own sexuality as a teenager and a young adult. If I obsess and guilt myself over my so-called "lust", then I was giving even more mental real estate over to it, rent-free. If God has forgiven me, then I could easily just agree with him and forgive myself, accepting the darkness in myself and moving on. Acceptance is one of the harder lessons I have had to learn recently and I'm a lot further along in acting on it than I ever have been. One of the last pieces is patience. We get most emotional when we are first struck by something painful. Allowing ourselves the space to feel that emotion, but not to act on it right away, gives us the space and the time to move forward in a way that is more meaningful and less painful. This is where mindfulness can come in and help. 

As someone who's struggled with suicidal ideation in years past, I can assure you that I am not a hardy person. But as someone who's struggled with those types of thoughts and continued on anyway, perhaps I can say, I'm becoming one. The mind is a powerful thing. And even though I have ranted here for what seems like ages, forever even, this only scratches the surface. This has only been about choices and attitudes. There are other things, stranger things, you can do with the mind, things that can change your whole walk of faith, if you let it. I think this is where I'l go next time: imagination and visualization.