Over the past several decades, neuroscientists have been gathering a lot of data about how brains work. They’ve managed to map where some specific functions like movement, speech, and visual processing seem to happen, but our understanding is still about as nuanced as a child’s intro to the rest of the body; this part is where food goes, this part helps us walk, this part helps us hear sounds. We know that the millions of neurons that exist in the brain connect in such a way to contain everything from memory to consciousness to creativity, but the more neuroscientists have tried to dig into the particulars, the more complicated the picture becomes. 

In an interview with a colleague, neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman was asked if he thought we’d ever really understand the brain, and he said that the brain made us radically reconsider what we even meant when we said we understood something. 

He said that asking if we understood the brain would be like asking if we understood New York City. It’s not that we don’t have access to all the information, it’s that there’s so many things happening at one time, that are always changing, and so complex, that the idea that we would one day completely understand it challenges the very notion of understanding. Even if we did manage to hold all of it in our brains for a moment, by the time we grasped it, it would have changed and we’d have to start over.¹ 

It’s an interesting analogy, because it also suggests a path forward. While you can’t hold every nuance of every detail of New York City in your brain, you can, in a sense, get it. If you live there or grew up there, you are able to navigate it, you do know how it works, you can sense the patterns in how it moves, even if those instincts can’t be easily explained. You can get around, you know the place, and even you’re on a street you’ve never seen before, you can still feel at home.

Those of us in the business of God should know the feeling.

Anyone who’s been to seminary knows that “the bible clearly says” just about nothing. That translation and interpretation and context mean that even the seemingly clear declarations of scripture are a lot murkier than they first appear. Like an impressionist painting, the closer you draw to our scriptures, the more the picture blurs. If that’s true about the scripture, the part of faith that we do have written down, how much more is it true about those broader questions of faith, of questions that transcend our holy texts about the trinity, about the problem of evil, about justice, mercy, love, and the answer to where this is all headed?

All of us who are in ministry, who ostensibly understand this stuff the best, know that actually understanding God, faith, scripture, the church, or our call as people of faith is like understanding the human brain, like understanding New York City. 

So what do we do, as those who others look to for answers? 

Maybe we can act as tour guides, as New York City natives. We don’t know every beat of every alley, we don’t know who lives in every apartment, but we know the neighborhoods, we know where to look when we want to find something, we know the smells and sounds and patterns of this place. We have some tenets to fall back on, the city’s grid system made at the intersections of God’s love and our freedom, its heartbeat, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, the scripture, a road map of lines that people take from place to place. 

Maybe we can help people navigate the neighborhoods they were once afraid of, show them that it’s not as scary as someone told them, that there is hope and light and love there too. And maybe we can be comfortable with uncertainty, with the beautiful reality that even if we knew every single thing, it would change. That we don’t need certainty to call a place home, or to feel like we belong there. 

Maybe God isn’t meant to be understood, God is meant to be lived in. Maybe a relationship with the risen Christ is a humming, breathing, changing thing, always the same and ever-expanding, already here and not yet arrived, and the most faithful thing we can do is extend an offer to those we lead to come explore the city streets with us, so that we can discover even more together. 

1. All of this is from this fascinating article. ↩︎