The explainer for brain lateralization (i.e., the tendency of one hemisphere to specialize in certain processes) does typically runs along this line:

• Right hemisphere: spatial awareness, face recognition, emotional cues — more receptive and synthesizing, so to speak
• Left hemisphere: language, logic, sequential processing — more active and analytical, so to speak

That people are either right-brained or left-brained has been proven false. In reality, both hemispheres fire and work together throughout the thinking process. In this sense, both hemispheres are involved in the act of knowing, so it’s not the black and white: “he is right-brained,” “she is left-brained.” Commenting on the neuroscience in general (and Iain McGilchrist’s work more specifically), Rod Dreher explains:

Neuroscience knows that the brain’s left side is where abstract reasoning happens, while its right hemisphere is where we receive pure experience and where our capacity for intuition and empathy resides (the biblical term for this faculty of noetic knowledge is “the heart”). In a healthy brain, both hemispheres work together to give a person a more-or-less accurate picture of reality. To put it crudely, the right brain receives information, sends it to the left brain for analysis, receive the left brain’s report, and integrates it into a holistic picture of the world.¹

Apart from those who have suffered certain brain injuries, we’re whole-brained. This may be true in terms of what the hemispheres do, meaning both hemispheres are involved in any act of knowing and not just the right or just the left. However, how each hemisphere attends to the world differs greatly. To be intentionally redundant, McGilchrist argues that what each hemisphere does (i.e., its involvement in knowing) doesn’t vary greatly, but the way in which each hemisphere approaches reality does. McGilchrist explains: “You could say…that the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us apprehend—and thus manipulate—the world; the right hemisphere to comprehend it—see it all for what it is.”² This is likely too simplistic, but the left hemisphere takes (or grasps), while the right hemisphere receives.

Why does this matter?

In The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist riffs on a parable from Nietzsche and uses it to illustrate a problem in brain lateralization. In the parable, a ruler’s kingdom grows to such a degree that he needs to dispatch his representative (an emissary) to govern the far reaches of the land. The narrow-minded emissary comes to believe he’s smarter than the master and usurps the master, becomes a tyrant, and eventually leading the once-flourishing kingdom to ruin.³ McGilchrist applies this fable to the brain and describes the right hemisphere as the master, the wise one who sees the world as a whole, and the left as the master’s emissary who is given a particular responsibility of executing tasks (abstracting, analyzing, categorizing, etc). The left hemisphere can’t see the whole picture. It loses the forest for the trees. And it’s myopia becomes problematic. Yet, in the modern world (say, the last 500 years — though I think this has been going on for longer than that), the left brain has usurped the right — the emissary has overthrown the master. The cultural results, as we’ve seen have been disastrous.

This is not the space to deal with all the ramifications of this takeover. The Enlightenment, rationalism, the hyper-emphasis on STEM, and so forth could all be part of the conversation. Because the left hemisphere tends to abstract, isolate, and grasp, we can conjecture it plays a role in shaping society’s individualistic tendencies and preying on a desire for control. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes this trait of modernity, saying, “The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern’ is the idea, the hope and desire that we can make the world controllable.”⁴ This is quite a task and one that causes some anxiety. Rosa observes that “we invariably encounter the world as a ‘point of aggressions’ or as a series of points of aggression.” This leads to “anxiety, frustration, anger, and even despair, which then manifest themselves, among other things, in acts of impotent political aggression.”⁵

Back to the brain. I believe most of us have a sense of what we think about in a given day (e.g., baseball, kids, what we’re eating for dinner, and a hundred thousand other things); few of us consider how we think. My own story may help to illustrate this point.

As I wrap up my 17th year in the ministry field, I find it interesting to think about my own experience in ministry along the line of hemispherical difference. When I first began, I was a wide-eyed twenty-two-year-old. I didn’t know up from down or right from left. I was just going. And I was going hard at it. Lots of Holy Spirit fire and stuff like that. And, I saw God doing amazing things in the lives of teens (I was a youth minister at the time). Then, somewhere around 2012 or 2013, I was neck-deep in my MA in Theology and the New Evangelization became popular. FOCUS was making waves in college campus ministry and discipleship became all the rage. (Weddell’s Forming Intentional Disciples was published in 2012, for added context.) I got all caught up in this. The admixture of my academic pursuits, my shiny, new archdiocesan job, and the discipleship craze pushed my experience of ministry into a world of abstraction. Everything became linear and had to follow a kind of logic: process of evangelization; pathway for conversion; discipleship roadmap; discipleship thresholds; the divine renovation of a rebuilt parish. All of it has some value, but, for me, it caused analysis paralysis out the wazoo. I would draft schema after schema, each one innovating on my prior innovation. I studied the stats. I could spew them out and defend my plans. But, at the end of the day, it was all analysis, abstraction, and aggression. And it was dry. And I was dry. And tired.

How I approached ministry had changed. At first, it was all relational. Build relationships. Grow networks of relationships. Christ was the connective tissue and friendship was the engine. It was amazing. I was amazed, actually. I was amazed at the expansiveness of ministry and the transformation I was seeing. Then, something changed and I tried to map everything. It was like killing the frog an dissecting it rather than watching it in its natural environment. Sure, I learned a bunch at the micro level and I could explain a lot about the mechanics of discipleship, but I lost a sense of the living whole and mired in a world of abstraction. Sure, I loved all my new plans and insights, but, in retrospect, I think it was a kind of intellectual necrophilia.

One day, in the midst of my ossification, I realized that it had been years since I’d actually walked with someone through the process or even witnessed a conversion. I was just talking about it all the time. But, I didn’t get into ministry to talk about encountering Christ, but to help people encounter him.

Eventually, I stepped out of my archdiocesan role and got back into the wilds of parish ministry. The change of context helped get me “closer to the ground,” but, almost by default, I kept trying to force fit all my theories and strategies. It was like my operating system froze. The harder I tried to make my schema work, the less it seemed to work and the more stuck I got. So, I was back with real people in a real situation, but it was almost like I couldn’t quite remember how to do real ministry. I was trying to impose certain organizing structures for evangelization (or a preconceived interpretive grid) down onto the thing before the thing had a chance to spring up out of the soil and reveal itself. The harder I tried, the less it seemed to work. Then, I quit. I had grown jaded and I was burnt out. And it wasn’t till I quit and did something totally different for about a year (i.e., digital marketing sales) that I finally understood what was going on.

Have you ever had the experience of trying to figure out something at your desk and it isn’t till you get up and go for a walk that you “get it?” Or you’re trying to remember something, like “Jim’s last name,” and the harder you try the more the name evades you. Once you stop thinking about it and go back to whatever you were doing previously, then the forgotten name floats back into your memory. The neuroscience behind this phenomenon goes something like this. The more you focus attention on one particular thing, trying to “produce something,” the more deliberately you narrow its range. This is left hemisphere space. Once you broaden your attention (like going for a walk or getting back to whatever you were doing before you tried to remember “Jim’s last name”), you allow the right hemisphere back into the action, which allows the “more remote or tenuous associations of thought” to be made.⁶

By getting away from ministry for a bit and letting my mind relax from its hyper-focused state, I could finally see again. I could see more of the whole picture. For example, I could see that the linear thinking behind discipleship pathways breaks down quickly in the wild. I know plenty of missionary disciples who just met Jesus and plenty of people who have heard the Gospel and are living a converted life who need to hear it again and again as if for the first time. I am one of these people. I know people who have encountered Jesus as if for the first time through what we’d map as “perfective catechesis.” So, I think the whole thing is way more mysterious than our models and pathways and processes allow. This isn’t to say the analyses and models are bad or altogether unnecessary, but that they’re not the whole thing. And when they become the whole thing, they eclipse the real thing I had forgotten: relationships.

Being away from ministry liberated the clutches of my mind from its kind of death grip on discipleship in the abstract. I remembered that people aren’t pawns and that strategies can only go so far in ministry, if they go anywhere at all. It was almost like enchantment.

So when I returned to parish ministry a few years later, I ditched all the mapping, strategies, processes, and pathways almost entirely. Or, I should say, I’m not building everything on them. I think they have some, but minimal value. Instead, I’m back to a very human, very organic approach again. It’s quite dialogical, really. And, it feels natural. Feels more like friendship than an exercise in evangelical robotics. Yes, it’s hard to explain the strategy, because there isn’t one, in a sense. How do you strategize friendship without killing its very possibility? No, I couldn’t box it up and take it to another parish and scale it and ship it out across the nation as yet another consumable and vaguely capitalistic venture in the “new evangelization market.” Authentic relationships always involve a process of discovery and surprise. And it is wonderful, freeing, and even enchanting.⁷ You can’t package that up and sell it.

None of this is to say that left-brained approaches are bad or unnecessary. They are necessary. But they have a place and bad things happen when we make them the whole thing. When we turn everything into maps and quantifiable datapoints. When we turn everything into consumables and base success off people consuming those consumables. When we try to make people analyze their own spiritual lives and map themselves. Who really knows where they are, anyway? And the more we think we know where we are, the further we probably are from where we think we are. Maybe allowing some mystery into the mix is okay. Maybe allowing things to be a little messy is okay. Maybe being more whole-brained, or putting the right hemisphere back in charge would go a long way. Maybe we need to decommission the tyrannical emissary and stop foisting 500 years of modern, “left-brained” thinking onto evangelization. Maybe widening our attention and remembering, say, Jesus, and the non-mechanics of relationship, maybe that’s okay. Maybe letting the Spirit move outside the models we try to map him in, maybe that’s okay, too. So, sure, maybe there is a process of evangelization or a pathway of conversion, and maybe these are helpful tools in some cases, but they’re not the whole thing, or the only thing, or everything, or the first thing, or the last thing. You can’t engineer evangelization. You can’t reduce it to a series of techniques. An evangelist ought not become a technocrat, because evangelization lives in the wild realm of relationship, charity, and freedom, and not in a contrived space where the evangelists acts like a wizard trying to pull all the right levers.

Okay, enough.

Just so we don’t lose the point, I’m arguing that the dominant left hemisphere approach to evangelization, which is symptomatic of modernity, arrests evangelization from its broader, dynamic, and organic context of friendship, charity, and freedom. It does this through a process of abstraction and then reduces the whole thing to its part. Or, said another way, it projects an aspect of evangelization as the whole thing. This isn’t to say there is no value in articulating a process of evangelization, but that it needs to be re-situated within its broader context and instead of claiming to be the whole. And within the broader context, we begin to see its helpful, but limited value.

I’ll conclude with a couple of passages from Ratzinger I’ve come to appreciate:

After the end of the apostolic age the early Church had as yet developed only relatively little in the way of a direct missionary activity as a Church, that it did not have any particular strategy for proclaiming the faith to the heathen, and that nevertheless this became the age of the greatest missionary success. The conversion of the ancient world to Christianity was not the result of any planned activity on the part of the Church but the fruit of the proof of the faith as it became visible in the life of Christians and of the community of the Church…The Church’s community of life invited people to share in this life in which was revealed the truth from which this kind of life arose. On the other hand the apostasy of the modern age rests on the disappearance of the verification of faith in the life of Christians…The new evangelization we need so urgently today is not to be attained with cleverly thought out ideas, however cunningly these are elaborated: the catastrophic failure of modern catechesis is all too obvious. It is only the interaction of a truth conclusive in itself with its proof in the life of this truth that can enable that particular evidence of the faith to be illuminated that the human heart awaits: it is only through this door that the Holy Spirit enters the world.⁸

And…

I think that organization should follow life. It is better, therefore, to see how life evolves, without rushing to tackle the organizational questions.⁹

1. Dreher, Living in Wonder, 44. ↩︎
2. McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, ↩︎
3. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 14. ↩︎
4. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, 2. ↩︎
5. Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, 4. ↩︎
6. McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 41–42. ↩︎
7. See Dreher’s book Living in Wonder. ↩︎
8. Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, 34–35. ↩︎
9. Ratzinger, New Outpourings of the Spirit, 73. ↩︎