HomeSomething to Think AboutHealth, Memories, and the Spiritual Life

Health, Memories, and the Spiritual Life

interior of "Remember Us with Smiles" book by Grace and Gary Jansen
Interior of Remember Us with Smiles book by Grace and Gary Jansen

What do inflammation, memory, and spirituality have in common? Quite a bit.

Inflammation is our body’s attempt to protect itself from invading pathogens. For example, if we fall on the ground and scrape a knee, our body reacts instantly to protect us. White blood cells rush to the scene of the accident like super-fast emergency workers. Once there, they release chemicals to keep harmful substances from entering the bloodstream. That red, irritated-looking area surrounding a cut is inflammation doing its job. Without it, our bodies would not heal.

However, inflammation can become chronic. Sometimes our bodies trick themselves into thinking that we are constantly under attack, even when we aren’t. Our bodies are continuously in defense mode and begin turning on themselves, attacking normal tissues like foreign bodies. This overreaction can cause arthritis, heart attacks, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.

We don’t know entirely why chronic inflammation happens, but genetics, our reactions to stress, a lack of sleep, and poor diet all appear to play a role.

What’s this got to do with a person’s spiritual life?

Just as our bodies act against injury by producing inflammation, our souls react to stress with patterned responses. We become anxious when a loved one is sick. We feel irritated after an argument. Insomnia develops because we’re having problems at work. Our feelings are natural responses to the spiritual breaks, cuts, bruises, and threats we experience. They alert us when something is wrong.

Problems arise when those emotional and spiritual reactions turn chronic. Anxiety, fear, and stress take charge even during what should be downtime. Few of us want to deal with these emotions, so we bottle them up and try to push them down as far as possible. But repressed feelings can lead to arthritis of the soul; our minds become rigid, and our hearts harden. We fall into inertia, laziness, and depression, which prevent us from loving God and those around us.

Caring for our souls can be challenging if we’re exhausted from a newborn who refuses to sleep, suffer from chronic disease, have recently experienced a setback at work, or feel fed up with the daily stresses of 21st-century living.

Remember

When times like these arise—when our souls are raw and inflamed—let’s try to remember who we are. Sometimes the best way to do this is to find something we love or once loved to do. Maybe it’s reading, making soup, putting together a photo album, exercising, or spending some relaxing time with loved ones.

Moving the body, stimulating the mind, and engaging in conversation might not sound like ways to ward off spiritual inflammation. But these acts help us recover a feeling of possibility and connection. Often our souls need a reminder that our lives are bigger than what we can imagine when we are tired or stressed. Sometimes going for an early morning walk or remembering a particular time with a family member is enough to spark our weary souls.

Recently my wife Grace and I wrote a children’s book entitled, Remember Us with Smiles, about a family remembering some of the good times they spent together. Memory can heal us. We’ve discovered that revisiting the good old days has helped us get through some not-so-good days. Positive memories have a cooling effect that can ease painful moments.

Today, remember who you are by remembering who you were and what you loved. Think back to when you were a child or a student or a new mother or father, and then spend some time with those memories. Remember a time you ate pizza with your family and the laughs you shared. If you loved John Coltrane when working at your first job, then listen to Blue Train again.

Revisit your memories, not to dwell on the past or dig up old hurts, but to remember who you are and what you love. Those precious moments can ease some of the painful and inflamed times that many of us are struggling through in our lives.

Gary Jansen
Gary Jansen
Gary Jansen is a popular speaker and the author of several books, including the multi-award-winning MicroShifts, The 15-Minute Prayer Solution, Station to Station, Life Everlasting, and the memoir Holy Ghosts. Jansen has appeared on A&E, the Sundance Channel, the Travel Channel, Coast to Coast AM, CNN.com, and NPR. His writing has been featured in the Chicago Sun-Times, USA Today, Huffington Post, Thrive Global, Angelus, and Religion Dispatches. Jansen worked at Penguin Random House for 25 years, where he was the editor on several New York Times bestsellers. He is now the Executive Editor of Acquisitions at Loyola Press.

6 COMMENTS

  1. Thanks for the post Gary. Memory is a priceless resource. Good old memories are hard to forget. They are like burning candles pointing the way ahead.

  2. I really appreciate your post today. I can relate to your post in many ways. I have Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (which also deals with inflamation, along with burning pain) and in February I had spinal surgery. And after a malfunction of my spinal cord stim device, basically tazing me, I’m painfully learning to walk again with a walker.After that trauma,my anxiety attacks returned. My therapist suggested that I choose something I love to do and I could control,since nothing with my health is right now. After praying I knew that I would go back to short virtual visits with students talking about my Mom’s experience in Hiroshima during WWII. Definitely reminded me of who I am and where I came from.I know I couldn’t do this with out the Lord’s strength. God bless.

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