Neurochemicals and the 23rd Psalm

a sermon on still waters for incarcerated women

Psalm 23

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He makes me to lie down in green pastures: he leads me beside still waters.

He restores my soul: he leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

This week as I read this beautiful psalm over and over I had one major question:

But what about in here?

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.

When I was growing up I literally thought the beginning of the 23^rd Psalm meant, The Lord is my Shepherd…who I shall not want.  As in, I shall not want the Lord as my shepherd. 

Of course that line really means that The Lord is my shepherd who has my back and provides what I need in life. But as I studied this Psalm for today, I began to reflect on my own history of anti-shepherdtarianism. I thought about how I do not like being told what to do.

And I thought about how that instinct served me for a while…I mean if you are raised with the kind of religion I was, it’s a form of self-preservation to develop an issue with authority. But sometimes there’s a point when the thing that protected you, eventually starts to harm you. For instance, as I’ve talked about before, the fiery anger I had about the circumstances of my girlhood actually protected me, but when that same anger got mixed with drugs and alcohol it nearly destroyed me¹.

I know enough of your stories to suspect that I may not be alone in that sort of thing.

Because this thing happens when we have not always been safe, especially when we were not safe when we were young – which is that our brains respond by flooding our bodies with adrenaline – creating what you may have heard called the fight or flight response.²

I’m not a neuroscientist, but from what I have read, if we were in situations that were not safe - especially during the time when our brains were still developing - those automatic reactions of fight or flight that saved us then, can sometimes screw us later on - our brains can get kind of stuck and keep reacting as if everything is a threat even if it’s not. We fight when we don’t have to, we run away when it’s not called for.

Adrenaline may have helped us survive truly dangerous situations then, but pushing people away who could actually love us now, and posturing so we don’t feel vulnerable, and always running away - those reactions may be echoes of what we needed to survive in the past but they may not be the path of healing we need in the present.

So back to my main question about this beautiful Psalm - what good is it in here?

I cannot pretend to know what it is like to live here, but I don’t see a lot of green pastures and still waters around us.   

So where is the rest and comfort and safety of the 23^rd Psalm to be found in this particular valley of the shadow of abuse, the shadow of trauma, the shadow of addition?

So where is it to be found if like, a nature hike isn’t an option?

I think that in the same way that you didn't need to go get adrenaline at the mall to survive in the past, your creator has already given you what you need to survive your present. Because here’s something else Neuroscientists have discovered about how miraculously God created us – just the simple act of slowing down our breathing can help us hijack our brains back into reality when those brains start trying to tell us to fight or to run– when we do not have the luxury of mountain lakes and nature hikes available, we still have a reset button available in the breath. Your own breath can lead you to still waters. It may sound a little woo woo like suddenly your pastor just turned into a yoga teacher, but doesn't it just kind of make sense that the breath is so powerful when breath is literally how God gave Adam a living soul in Genesis chapter 2:

…then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

We, all of us, are made of dust and the breath of God.

And the gift of that is a miraculous one– think about it - we have a lot of systems in us that keep us alive, our heart beats and our blood circulates and our food digests and our lungs take air in and out - all without us having to remember to do any of it. It all happens on auto pilot – but one of these automatic systems God gave us we can actually control if we choose to -  and it also happens to be the very same thing God gave us at the moment of creation – and that is this: we can learn to control our breathing. Deep breathing can lower our heart rate, lower our blood pressure and lower our stress level. And you know what else, that shit is free and cannot be controlled or regulated by the criminal justice system. It’s yours for keeps.

And speaking of gifts God gave you in how you are created, here’s another one: your truest self. I’m talking the part of you that is created in the image of God, the part of you that is connected to the divine, the very purest part of you – you know what? It cannot be harmed. By you or anyone else. How good is God that you have inside of you something that will always remain unharmed by violence or neglect, unharmed by addiction, unharmed by the prison industrial complex. None if that can get to the most essential part of you. The part God claimed in you when you took your first breath, the part that reunites with God when you take your last breath is as close to you as your next breath –

Let us pray,

Good and gracious God, I give thanks that your rod and staff always stand guard around the truest part of us, I offer thanks that what is most tender in us is unreachable by the hands of our enemies, even when that enemy is us. And Lord I give thanks that you breathed life into each and every one of the women in this room. Thank you for helping us survive our childhoods and that you lead us on new paths of healing.  Help us all remember to breathe this week. Amen.

1. Neal Allen has a book coming out in December called Better Days: Relax Your Inner Critic which offers amazing insight into the Superego that I found helpful when thinking about this sermon…

2. It’s actually Fight or flight or Freeze or Fawn.