Why Do You Pray?

Ephesians 3:14-21; Matthew 4:1-11

Last week we began to look at prayer as a Spiritual practice for finding our center and connecting with God’s purpose for our lives. Today’s text from Ephesians features a prayer for the church to make Christ its center and to find its purpose in God. “I ask that Christ will live in your hearts through faith. As a result of having strong roots in love, I ask that you’ll have the power to grasp love’s width and length, and height and depth, together with all believers. I ask that you’ll know the love of Christ that is beyond knowledge so that you will be filled entirely with the fullness of God.”

So continuing on the theme of prayer, let’s start with a question. Why do you pray? Besides Jesus telling us we ought to, I mean. Why do you do it? Do you even do it? What do you believe you are accomplishing when you pray? Do you think you can change God’s mind? Do you think that your own heart is being changed? Do you believe that by praying you can change the world? Others may scoff and scorn, saying that prayer is superstitious, an abdication of our responsibility to participate in making the world a better place by claiming it’s in the hands of a higher (imaginary) power. I ask this question because what we believe about prayer has a tremendous impact on its effectiveness.

We can’t talk about belief these days without also talking about the brain: a factory for thought thinking, desire driving, emotion feeling, fear fostering, doubt dealing, faith forming, purpose crafting, and prayer praying. The brain is an incredible tool. It is a complex collection of neurons, synapses, and nerves connected through all sorts of systems and networks that help us, somehow, figure out us where we are, and what we are experiencing, while also letting us ponder who we are, and how we got here. Different parts of the brain are designed to regulate and accomplish different tasks, some which happen even without our having to think about them, like our heartbeat. But I want to look at the brain functions which we can (kind of) control—the parts of the brain which are activated and deactivated through the practice of mindfulness, meditation, and prayer.

If you look at a brain through an MRI scan, you can see different areas and networks lighting up as the person whose brain is being observed is asked to perform different physical or mental tasks. But let’s say you were to look at a normal, resting brain, you would still see activity. This particular network is known by psychologists as the default mode network, or DMN. This is the mind in a neutral state without a mental or physical, or I might add a spiritual, focal point. This is what enables us to daydream, remember, and imagine.[1] When people say, “My mind is racing,” this is the network responsible for that.

Matt MacKinnon, MD, offers this example: “imagine that your significant other just broke up with you. You are sitting on your couch at home, ruminating about all of the ‘mistakes’ that you made leading up to the break up. Considering that one of the biggest predictors of depression and anxiety is a pattern of self-blame and rumination, you will likely not be surprised by the feeling of sadness that arises as you obsess.”[2] This is also the default mode network at work.

There is another network, says MacKinnon, which functions in opposition to the default mode. The task-positive network. “These two networks are like the on/off position of a light switch in that the activation of one by definition inhibits the other.”[3] The activation of one network deactivates the other. Why does this matter? Well, say we’re dwelling on the past, haunted by thoughts of shame, or anxious about the future…one of the best ways to calm this storm is to focus on a particular thought or a task to deactivate this default network. Perhaps the prime example of this is counting sheep to go to sleep, or, for all of you White Christmas fans, counting your blessings. This task forces the brain to focus, shutting down the default mode network and all of the worries, and woes, and distractions that can sometimes keep us up at night.

This is also how focusing on the breath works to calm us down. It focuses our thoughts and deactivates the sometimes-anxiety-producing default network. MacKinnon even went so far as to liken the mutually exclusive relationship of the DMN and the TPN to the relationship between inhalation and exhalation: the two cannot exist simultaneously.[4]

I don’t talk about my divorce often, but I feel it is worth mentioning, now. Because my divorce drove me to a very deep depression. I moved out of the house and spent the next two months in a townhouse surrounded by boxes I had no motivation to unpack. I would put off writing my sermons until last minute and drag myself to church because…I kinda had to be there. And something incredible would happen. I would always leave church feeling better, happier, more hopeful about the future. Could this have anything to do with the fact that leading worship forced me to focus in a way that temporarily deactivated my default depression? And then in January, I started the long healing journey out of depression which began with unpacking all of my boxes, cleaning my townhouse, and obsessing over running a disc golf tournament: I had something to focus on and obsess over that deactivated my default dwelling on self-blame and self-pity. I was interrupting “my ability to ruminate by sheer biological constraint,” says Matthew MacKinnon, MD.

Our attention can be fickle, however. We try to focus on our breath, focus on a task, focus on our prayers, but soon find distracting thoughts creeping back in. This is why meditation, and yoga, and prayer are considered “practices.” We must train ourselves to remain focused and strengthen our task-positive network to ward off reactivation of the default mode system for longer and longer stretches. This is not saying that the DMN is unimportant. But there ought to a natural, healthy balance between inward-reflection and external-focus.

Something is throwing off that balance, though. It seems like society at large spends more time being mindless than mindful. And, for the most part, we aren’t training ourselves to be mindful, but giving in to mindlessness. How? You ask. Not to sound like an old curmudgeon here, but I feel like submission to technology plays a major role in our mindlessness. While there are helpful and mindful ways to use phones, computers, and social media…we default to using these tools mindlessly. How often do you pull your smartphone out to check an app out of habit, not realizing that you had just put your phone back in your pocket because you had just checked that app and there was nothing new there? Unlike the focus and obsession required to activate the TPN, this habitual dependency on technology has become default behavior rooted in our default mode network. I’d argue this is a driving factor behind rising depression rates in developed countries, especially among teenagers. We are turning our brains into prisons of self-doubt, self-deprecation, guilt, and low esteem and spending very little time training and strengthening that which can set us free.

There is also a flipside to the prison of self-doubt. Because of its involvement in remembering and reflecting, the DMN is associated with awareness of the self. This is the portion of the brain that constructs what psychologist Sigmund Freud popularly termed, “the ego.” Self-doubt, self-deprecation, guilt, and low esteem are all related to ego, our sense of self. On the flipside, so are self-confidence, self-appraisal, shamelessness, and pride. An unchecked ego doesn’t always slip into depression, sometimes it can become narcissistic. Depression and narcissism are symptoms of the same disorder: unchecked mindlessness and untrained mindfulness.

Paul did not have terms like DMN, or ego to work with, but I find, in his writing, an awareness of the concept. Paul used the Greek word, sarx, often translated from the as “flesh,” and his use of the term carried a negative connotation. I wrote a paper in seminary arguing that “selfishness” is often a fitting translation of sarx. Too much mindlessness can lead to depression or narcissism, but in both instances our focus is purely on self. Selfishness carries with it a negative connotation, the implication that the person being described as “selfish” has control over their thoughts and behaviors. Depression can often result from a chemical imbalance that traps us in self-deprecation and despair. We wouldn’t describe this as “selfish,” but is a form of imprisonment in the self, the ego, the default mode network. So is narcissism. And in both depression and narcissism our capacity to empathize with and relate to others is tremendously impaired. And for a people who are called to “love their neighbors” this impairment can be problematic.

Paul did not have access to our science and medicine, yet he still had a solution. Prayer. Take prayer seriously. This is a practice. This is training ourselves to be mindful. This is time spent detached from our egos in which we allow our thoughts to be guided by something other than our default opinions, default doubts, default desires and seek out the ultimate antitheses of selfishness: God, who “is over all, in all, and through all.”[5]

Just to be very, very, clear: I am not saying that prayer replaces medicine. What I am saying however, is that prayer is a lot more powerful and important than most of us give it credit. I shared these thoughts with a medical professional who sat and thought deeply. “The medical profession,” she said, “seems to be more interested in treating symptoms than root causes.” Medication is, for many of us, a necessary treatment of symptoms. I was on antidepressant drugs for a few months following my divorce. But could it be that prayer is a treatment of the root cause?

Jesus’ own practice of prayer is shown to explicitly protect him against the influence of evil and the temptation of becoming imprisoned by his ego. At the end of his 40-days of practicing prayer in the wilderness, he is approached by Satan, who tempts him with: 1) hedonism (satisfaction for his hunger), 2) egoism (power and might and invincibility), and 3) materialism (kingdoms and wealth). These are temptations that pervert the human characteristics of emotion, desire, and thought which were believed to originate in the heart, soul, and mind. Jesus was able to overcome each temptation because he had trained himself to love God with all of his heart, soul, and mind…a practice which he wanted his disciples to take up as well, evident in the first of his great commandments.

The research on the default mode network and the task-positive network merely gives modern credence to the wisdom of Christ. We are called to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind as a means of training ourselves to activate the task-positive network and deactivate the DMN, which coincidentally could phonetically pronounced “demon.” And what is the demonic but that which distracts, and distorts, and manipulates our ego to serve non-Godly purposes? And when these manipulations are deactivated, we are empowered to respond to purposes which extend beyond ourselves, such as the loving of a neighbor. The whole DMN/demon thing is a pure coincidence…the love God/love neighbor thing is not. Jesus knew what he was asking us to do. His teaching, wisdom, philosophy, and spirituality have survived nearly 2000 years because they withstand and are even endorsed by new discoveries in modern science. Think about that. And now think about this, again: why do you pray?

[1] MacKinnon, Matthew. “The Neuroscience of Mindfulness.” From Psychology Today. [online] <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/neuraptitude/201512/the-neuroscience-mindfulness>

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ephesians 4:6