Juggling as Salvation

Ginger read an article that stated emphatically that learning to juggle could extend your life and protect your high-functioning mind. So, who would not want to juggle? This morning walking in Brandy’s neighborhood I pondered the process of learning to juggle and found it to be a great metaphor for the salvage work God does in our lives, the great dance of mind and body.

Our progress in juggling, as in salvation, can be frustratingly slow, because we cannot rely solely on our brains; our bodies must come along and that takes time. This was Paul’s lament when he said that his spiritual nature “gets it” but his physical nature is slow to learn.

Our brains can comprehend something before our bodies can be trained to automatically do it. Pilots, gymnasts, musicians, and others have to train their bodies bit by bit to do things that are not instinctual. Jugglers do too. The brain “gets it,” but actually moves too slowly for the rapidity needed by the body. The balls answer the call of gravity too fast for our plodding logical mind. Daily business progresses too rapidly for our moral consciousness; we need spiritual reflexes. Therefore, the conscious, rational mind grasps the steps, but only for that thin slice on the edge of our body’s learning. The rational mind must constantly focus on the tiny changes required in that thin slice while the body works to make those changes reflexive and habitual. Only repetition—repeated failures, repeated corrections, repeated small advances—can weave a new physicality into those neuropathways deep in the lower reaches of the brain; the places out of the reach of the prefrontal cortex which is the home of the rational mind.

Imagine seeing an immense brush fire from an airplane. You see the unburned grasslands, and you see the blackened acres where the fire has been. Between the two you see a very thin line of orange flames. This is the process of learning. The grasslands are things yet to be learned. The blackened acres are those things which have been mastered. The rational, understanding mind is that thin line of orange scrutinizing each blade of grass. In its wake lies this vast and growing body of “conquered knowledge,” that stuff that has been worked into the body for easy execution. There is no magic, just deliberate progress. Each time the body masters what the mind has already figured out, the mind is freed to inch forward and logically grasp the next step and to wait for the body to come along.

As we learn to juggle we think about how we must throw one ball and where it must land so the other hand can easily catch it. But no matter how well we “know” what is needed, we have not “learned” it until each hand can give that special toss—just the right power, just the right trajectory—so that the ball falls effortlessly into the relaxed and waiting other hand. There is no magic here, no genetic advantage, just repeated effort for every learning juggler.

Malcom Gladwell says that the key is 10,000 hours. Time spent in repetitive practice makes the difference between the hack and the pro, the sinner and the saint. Our rational mind is too proud to admit that mere knowing (its forte) is not enough. It is offended to think it must wait for the body to engineer all those new neural networks. So in impatience it puts down the balls and say, “I’m not gifted in this.” Yet the people who seem “gifted” have simply brought neural networks they formerly developed in other play. It’s called “transfer.” Even for them, each new level of skill requires the same “figure it out in the logical mind, move it into the reflexes” effort. That simply requires time and repetition. There is no shortcut, no golden path for anyone. It all comes from focused work over time. The mental mind has to cool its jets while the physical mind does the rewiring.

So it is with salvation. Some of us come to it with some previously learned habits of lifestyle, habits of attitude, that make a new, more-godly practice easier. But for everyone who is thirsting after God’s kingdom and righteousness there is a painfully slow process of “getting it” in theory and then failing repeatedly in practice; grasping it logically and then thoughtlessly letting old physical scripts run which are not aligned with our new vision. Only time and consistently returning to that place of learning will change the flavor of our lives.

It wounds our pride to think we can be so “dense,” but the faithful body is doing what it does, building slowly but building well. How often our offended and impatient rationality grabs control back from the body before significant progress can be made. It thinks, “Better to discontinue the effort than to live in that painful gap between rational understanding and physical accomplishment.” Just so our wounded spirit can give up the struggle towards righteousness: “Better to pretend it doesn’t even matter.”

So in reality it is our proud rational mind that is the flighty one. Its attention can be drawn to this thing, then to that thing. And the poor body tries to find the averages. So in juggling as in sanctification, the key is keeping the conscious mind committed over a sufficient span of time so that the physical mind can make the changes that actually enable the rest of the body.

Then in a great irony, as the flighty mind waits for the plodding body, the body prepares itself to perform at a speed too fast for the mind. In time, the body combines all the motions into the graceful, rapid, complex process we call juggling. The conscious, logical, nit-picking mind has to shut up and just watch the thing of beauty, scarcely able, anymore, to separate out all the learned parts. The whole has become something more than the sum of the parts. Such is the final speed and genius of the body. Such is the righteous life.

And it’s only our physical being that brings our truth into the physical world.