Transcendent Kingdom(52)

“Come in,” I said. Kathy had dropped off one of her cakes earlier, and it sat there on my desk, beautifully wrapped, taunting me.

“I’m headed to Philz for a coffee. Can I get you anything?”

“Aw, thanks, Han,” I said. “I’m actually going to go home soon.”

“Wow, Gifty taking the rest of the day off?” he said. “What’s the occasion?”

I swallowed hard. “My mom’s in town,” I said. “I was thinking we’d split this strawberry cake Katherine made.”

I knew it was magical thinking, but it made me feel better to say it, to imagine my mother and me sitting on my small balcony with two forks and a fat slice of cake.

    Han said, “See you tomorrow, then,” and I packed up the rest of my stuff and drove home. When I got there, I set Kathy’s Cake down on the nightstand next to my mother and picked up the Bible. I started reading to her from the book of John. It was her favorite Gospel, and, though it seemed like forever ago, it had been mine as well. I wanted to read to her about Lazarus, the man from Bethany whom Jesus had raised from the dead.

Even when I was a child, this miracle had seemed like a stretch to me, too miraculous an event in a book filled with miraculous events. David and Goliath, Daniel and the lion’s den, even Jonah and the whale, had seemed plausible, but Lazarus, four days dead, then beckoned back to life with one “Come forth” from Jesus, seemed like a step too far.

The problem for me then wasn’t that I didn’t believe that Jesus could do it. It was that I didn’t understand why he would. I’d spent every Easter of my childhood in a pastel-colored dress and white patent-leather shoes, scream-singing “He is ri-i-i-sen, HE IS RI-I-I-SEN, AND HE LIVES FOREVERMORE,” celebrating with relish the resurrection of a man whom death could not conquer. And so what to make of Lazarus’s coming forth? Why would Jesus steal his own thunder in that way, and why did we not sing songs for Lazarus, the man who God thought deserved to live again?

“Our friend Lazarus sleeps, but I go that I may wake him up,” I read, but my mother didn’t stir. I put the Bible away and went back into the kitchen to put a pot of tea on. Thinking about Lazarus has always led me to think about what it means to be alive, what it means to participate in the world, to be awake. When I was a child, I wondered how long Lazarus lived after he died. Was he still among us now? An ancient, a vampire, the last remaining miracle? I wanted an entire book of the Bible to be devoted to him and to how he must have felt to be the recipient of God’s strange and amazing grace. I wondered if he was the same man he was before he cheated death or if he was forever changed, and I wondered how long forever was to a man who had once been asleep.

    Looking back, I could see that I was so easily psychoanalyzable. I stirred my tea, thought about Katherine, thought about Lazarus, and played therapist to myself, recognizing the cliché of picking the book of John, picking Lazarus, for that particular moment in my life.

“Do you believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ as evidenced by the Holy Spirit?” I asked myself, laughing alone in my kitchen. I didn’t bother answering.



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In Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Bennett and Hacker write:

    What [neuroscience] cannot do is replace the wide range of ordinary psychological explanations of human activities in terms of reasons, intentions, purposes, goals, values, rules and conventions by neurological explanations…For it makes no sense to ascribe such psychological attributes to anything less than the animal as a whole. It is the animal that perceives, not parts of its brain, and it is human beings who think and reason, not their brains. The brain and its activities make it possible for us—not for it—to perceive and think, to feel emotions, and to form and pursue projects.



While there were many “philosophy and the mind” or “philosophy and psychology” courses offered when I was an undergrad, there were few philosophy and neuroscience courses to be found. Bennett and Hacker’s book was recommended to me my junior year by a TA named Fred who had once called me “unnerving and untraditional,” which I took to mean that he thought I asked too many of the wrong kinds of questions. I’m fairly certain he gave me the book to get me out of his office hours, if not forever, then at least for the length of time it would take me to read it. I had never thought of my scientific questions, my religious questions, as philosophical questions, but nonetheless, I went back to my dorm’s common room, opened the book, and read until I was bleary-eyed and exhausted. I was back in Fred’s office the next week.

    “I know that psychology and neuroscience have to work in concert if we want to address the full range of human behavior, and I really do love the idea of the whole animal, but I guess my question is that if the brain can’t account for things like reason and emotion, then what can? If the brain makes it possible for ‘us’ to feel and think, then what is ‘us’? Do you believe in souls?” I was breathless. Fred’s office was a long walk from my last class, and I had jogged there to try to catch him before he left for lunch.

“Gifty, I actually haven’t read the book. I just thought you might like it.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I’ll give it a read if you want to talk about it with me, though,” he said.