By Marcel Duclos

I consider exhaustion one of the divine gifts bestowed upon humanity by the merciful one. Let me admit, up front, that I most often resist such a gift by pushing on. I wring the last droplets of energy from my abused body, stubbornly holding fast to the illusion that I can create and direct my life with my mind. At first, I appear to succeed. I wear my well-developed mask of serenity. Disaster looms around the corner. An insidious pride takes over and deadens all my senses. I fall into the sinful pit of dualism. I lose my connection to me body. I no longer live in the grounded world of time, space and energy. I become insane.

Enter the merciful gift of exhaustion. Enter the mystery of the Triune God. Enter the blessings of heresy. Enter the moment of choice. Enter betrayal. Enter passion.

Hardly able to move, I breathe only at the rhythm of my mournful sighs. I lay on my bed being divested of my defense structures, my conscious cosmology and theology, even my self-awareness. I am being thought, felt and sensed more than thinking, feeling and sensing. I could slip into death without resistance. I actually stray into the allure of its potential pleasure. Exhaustion steals the fleeting solace and returns me to the world below the line of consciousness. I may or may not be in a dream when the following sweeps over me.

Who were they who thought up the mental construct of the Triune God back then in the early Christian era? What was the shared experience that could have led them to such a theology? Did they know the power of the dynamic (3) three? And what about the Judeo-Christian belief that we humans are made in the likeness of the divine: women and men equally in body and soul? Did this play a role in the ultimate design of the ultimate metaphor: the Mystery of the Holy Trinity? They did not know of the triune brain. They lived by its grace. They lived life then, as we do now, in and through and by the marvelous triune brain: a still mysterious holy trinity.

I awake startled by the dream person’s heretical musings. The reptilian brain fathers the life-sustaining unconscious functions of activation, arousal, and homeostasis. The paleomammalian brain provides for learning, memory and emotion. The neomammalian brain fuels conscious thought and self-awareness. There it is: Father, Son and Holy Ghost! We are made in the likeness of God!

In the dream-like state, this feels so plausible. Did Jesus have an inkling of this as a monotheistic Hebrew of his day? He surely was versed in the wisdom literature that portrayed his God as maternal. He spoke of us as sons and daughters of God. If we are like God, then God is like us. If our bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost, would not the cerebral cortex and the corpus callosum, which allows for a far-reaching conscious influence down to the brain stem, be the transformer of energy for an undefended life in the Spirit. God is pure energy and so are we.
Thoughts tumble across the networks of my mind, as do the weed boulders across the plains. I am drawn to follow their path, touching down now and again. I can only see some contact points.

The brain is dynamic, not static. It conserves itself and modifies itself. Interpersonal relationships sculpture the brain. We change because the brain changes. God changes us. We change God. God metabolizes God. All of this happens directly in unseen intimacy in the body’s Holy of Holies.

Heretic! Betrayer!

Breathing tide-like now, I console myself. Am I not in good company? Am I being invited into the company of those who dare to be exhausted, depleted, emptied to make place for the unexpected and the new? I think ‘Unless and until I am willing to betray others, I cannot be true to myself.’ This has to do with a radical preference: to prefer self to any other, even those who present as the keepers of the right and the good, as absolutely of God and from God. Nothing is more sacred than the absolute freedom of conscience to choose. Choice is the antidote to tyranny, that maker of insanity.

The prophet from Nazareth chose. He chose to listen to and to engage with the One who lived in his somatic temple and to suffer the consequences at the hands of his religious authorities.

Such is the passion for the truth. It draws and quarters.