After living nearly five score years, I am asked many questions about life. Often they have to do with change. What is different from the past, both in affirmative and negative ways? Some changes have been for good and some to disadvantage for individuals and society. One negative, in my view, has been the growth of emotional interests at the expense of intellectual ones in the general society. The point is, for the inseparable mix, which of the two, intellect or emotion, is most important and dominant to an individual, or the society. Factors can usually be analyzed separately even though they are indivisible in related actions and experiences.
As a point of illustration we have the story of a man, John Nash, a Nobel Prize winner who was highly creative in mathematics, even to changing some theory and practice in the field. His story is told in a book, A Beautiful Mind, made into an Oscar winning film for 2001. For many years Nash struggled with schizophrenia, and suffered countless horrors under the illness. In an interview he ascribed his near total recovery to two things that happened to him. One was the winning of the Nobel Prize. He and others discovered in this dramatic way that recognition can cause recovery of persons from various physical and emotional problems. The second was, in my view, the greatest acknowledgment – that he became disillusioned with his illusionments (that which deceives the mind with false impression). By mental exercise he was able to overpower the illness, what some called evil that had plagued him for decades. He said that schizophrenia can’t be cured, but by the exercise of mental processes, the problem was muted for him and life became worth living. He learned that doubting doubts is at least as good as doubting beliefs.
Isaiah began his prophecy with the invitation, Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord. The phrase is followed by the main point a person must face – though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow. But my purpose here is not to accent the promise of redemption, but the reasoning method, a procedure so great that it can manage the processing of the salvation of mankind. If immortality can turn on the argument from God that he can and does forgive sin, if
I open my mind to faith, then what must happen if my mind goes to work on lesser problems, like schizophrenia – or some other of many human plagues that include scurvy temptations?
Many years after our marriage, my wife appeared before me one Monday morning with an animation I had not seen before. She suffered all her life with depression. As a teenager she had contemplated suicide. She sometimes became physically rigid, for no apparent reason. On occasion, I held her in my arms through the long night. This morning she said the struggle (not the depression) was over. I had spoken the day before on the theme: Action or Reaction. She said: I determined, as you talked, that I would decide against my reactions leading to depression and take the actions my mind tells me I can and ought to take. Thereafter her life dramatically changed. The mind, rightly directed, is a marvelous resource to aid healing. Those who practice the life of faith should also practice the life of the creative mind. Faith is partly a product related to the creative mind in a world of sensory evidence. Never in history have we had so many tools to address our concerns for life. The citizenry ought to examine the evidence for current faults and afflictions. They are exacerbated by our acceptance of them, perhaps by our failure to work on them from inner resources. We will discover some remedies in our faith that will astound us. They can and do work, and they are our own – personal. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020