God, face to face in one another...
A reflection on the readings for Proper 24B: Job 38:1-7, (34-41); Mark 10:35-45 I was fascinated this week to watch a video that originally aired on the science channel with Dr. Andrew Newberg, the Director of Research at the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomson Jefferson University Hospital and Medical College. Dr. Newberg has studied the neuroscientific effect of religious and spiritual experiences for decades. In the video Dr. Newberg explains that to study the effect of meditation and prayer on the brain, he injects his subjects with a harmless radioactive dye while they are deep in prayer / meditation. The dye migrates to the parts of the brain where the blood flow is the strongest, i.e,. to the most active part of the brain. He was then able to observe the brain in action while the person prayed or meditated. The red portion of the scan indicated greater activity in areas of the brain. In this case, increased activity was observed in th...