Lions and Tigers and Bears

I'll start, you finish:

Lions and Tigers and Bears...

In one of the most famous lines from the 1939 classic, The Wizard of Oz, three protagonists enter a dark forest while chanting about the wild beasts they might encounter and, oddly enough, skipping.

Around the same time as Dorothy, Tin Man, and Scarecrow were traversing the scary woods on their way to meet The Cowardly Lion, surgeons were developing a risky new procedure known as a sympathectomy where they severed the nerves that trigger our sympathetic nervous systems, popularly called the fight-or-flight system.

Oh my!

Don’t mess with the sympathetic nervous system. When we face a dire threat and need to reroute all our available resources to survival, our attention narrows, our hearts pump faster, we become self-focused, our pupils get bigger to let in more light, and blood vessels that supply muscles also dilate to get more oxygen where it might be needed as the bronchia in our lungs expand to collect all that extra oxygen. Thank God for the sympathetic nervous system because it helped us survive earlier days when we encountered more lions, tigers, and bears. Even now it helps us survive the worst moments of life. (1)

Then, eventually, we calm down. The parasympathetic nervous system is the yin for the sympathetic nervous system’s yang. Our muscles relax, pupils contract (along with major blood vessels), heart rates slow, bronchia shrink, we start to notice others again, and we return to a normal state of calm and quiet. Thank God for the parasympathetic nervous system also. Otherwise we would be in constant a state of hyperarousal and fear. And that’s no way to live.

Sympathetic Nervous System in the 21st Century

Thus far, the 21st Century has been rugged, filled with lots of sympathic nervous system moments. In preparing for a talk last week I found an image of Hurricane Helene's devastation, but by the time I gave the talk another hurricane (Milton) was ravaging the southeast. These days we don't worry so much about lions and tigers and bears but wildfires and hurricanes and earthquakes sure get our attention. Along with natural disasters we've had economic challenges, too, from the dot com bubble to the mortgage crisis, the Great Recession, the Great Resignation, then rampant inflation. Then there's the stunning political polarization of our century, and that's probably enough said about that three weeks prior to an election. War and conflicts rage throughout the world.

And there was the pandemic, the crisis our great-grandchildren will talk about someday, where coffee shops emptied along with the roadways, where people died alone as an eerie melancholy settled over a sullen and isolated world.

It's been a banner century for the sympathetic nervous system. Oh my.

But Wait...

It's been a rugged century, but that's not the whole story.

Good things happen around our world every day, bringing us delight and hope and drawing out the best of human nature.

It’s not just that we are stressed. We are also resilient.

We still love and work and play and laugh. We put gratitude apps on our phones so we can remember to be thankful, our kids laugh on the playground, and they play soccer for fun as parents and grandparents huddle around to cheer them on. Drivers are often courteous on the highways; families and friends gather for good food and conversation. We meet together, sing praise choruses, engage in meaningful conversation, offer loving acts of kindness to people we know and some we don’t. People make homemade sugar cookies and sourdough bread and delight in wood-fired pizza.

This morning I sat with ten Friends in unprogrammed worship where we pondered a passage by Jan Richardson, titled Blessing in the Chaos (2). The first and second stanza ministered to me in the silence:

Let there be

a calming

of the clamoring,

a stilling

of the voices that

have laid their claim

on you,

that have made their

home in you,

that go with you

even to the

holy places

but will not

let you rest,

will not let you

hear your life

with wholeness

or feel the grace

that fashioned you.

I wonder, what would it mean to experience a "stilling of the voices that have laid their claim" on any of us? To hear our lives "with wholeness or feel the grace that fashioned" us. These words have reverberated today, each time coming with the calming solace of the parasympathetic nervous system.

It's Relational

The sympathetic nervous system often separates us from one another. In contrast, the calming work of the parasympathetic is fundamentally relational.

Meaningful conversations, times with friends and family, meeting for worship, these things slow us and help us feel the grace that fashions us.

This current series of blog posts is introducing a book that Lisa Graham McMinn and I have written called An Invitation to Slow. It's not so much about doing less, but more about slowing down the stress hormones that rage in our bodies, drawing close to God and to one another through spiritual practices and engaging in calmer, more relational ways of being in the world (3).

Jan Richardson ends her powerful blessing with an invitation: "Let there be an opening into the quiet that lies beneath the chaos." May it be so today as we move in the world and in those relationships that give meaning and hope to our lives.

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1. This paragraph and several others in this blog post are adapted from the introduction to An Invitation to Slow.

2. From Richardson's book, The Cure for Sorrow.

3. The print and electronic versions will be out in November, with the audiobook following in December or January.

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