Fight
or Flee
“The
way I see it, our natural human instinct is to fight or flee that
which we perceive to be dangerous. Although this mechanism evolved to
protect us, it serves as the single greatest limiting process to our
growth...”
Charles
F. Glassman (Brain Drain)
“Gospel
calls you to a major change in thinking,
a
giant shift in understanding,
a
massive leap in how you see yourself...”
Rob
Bell (What We Talk About When We Talk About God)
We
humans...we see ourselves as superior animals, “smarter than the
average bear,” as Yogi liked to say. And yet, if we glance around
the planet on any given day in the 21st century, we'll see
that we are not so advanced as we think. We still have not figured
out how to override our lizard brain; how not to fight or flee, but
to stay and confront in a constructive way. I believe that the
opening up of our world is Earth's attempt to help us do that. People
are more intermingled than they have ever been. Due to the influx of
people from other lands with other languages, all of us are
forced to change and accommodate. We are learning from each other out
of shear necessity.
Our
first response to “otherness” is to fight or flee, because that
is the way our brain is constructed, with the amygdala picking up a
perceived threat first and sending the signal to the rest of the
brain to go on high alert. But it doesn't have to stop there. We can
remind ourselves, “Oh, yes, that's my sympathetic nervous system;
it reacts that way to every perceived threat.” Then we can use our
considerable brain power to think of other ways of responding to
“otherness.” We can teach them, they can teach us; we can learn
their language, they can learn ours; we can see that their children
are precious to them, as our children are to us, and we can begin to
understand their world view, and they ours. Such exploration helps us
to see that differences are usually only skin deep; that there is far
more “likeness” between us.
We,
who think of ourselves as Christian, will be familiar with Jesus'
admonition to his disciple who struck one of the High Priest's men
who came for Jesus, “Put your sword back in its place! For all who
live by the sword will die by the sword.”(Matthew 26:52) We seem to
overlook that mandate in our own time, feeling that while it may have
been right then, it does not apply to us now. But we should ask
ourselves deeply and truly, “Is it time to put away our weapons and
extend our hands instead?” I think the answer is “Yes.”
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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