IN SYNC WITH A DEEPER RHYTHM
As I was finishing dinner last night, I realized the sun had already set by the time I put down my fork and knife. A few weeks ago, the sun was still shining long after we finished dinner. Not so much now. Yesterday, the sun set at 7:22 p.m. and the day was 13 hours and 2 minutes long. A month ago, the sun set at 8:08 p.m. on August 1 and the day was 14 hours and 20 minutes long. Autumn may not be here yet; but shortening daylight hours are announcing its rapid arrival.
Shorter daylight hours trigger important in nature. Shorter daylight means less warmth. The longer, cooler nights thus trigger less production of chlorophyl, which is what turns leaves green. With less chlorophyl, leaves begin changing to the reds, yellows, and oranges we so love to observe in the fall. The cycle of daylight and darkness, which is called the circadian rhythm, doesn’t just affect tree leaves. It affects almost everything else on our planet as well.
Through billions of years our planet has changed form many times. Mountain ranges rise and sink; seas emerge and disappear; rivers change course; continents smash together and then break apart. But one thing has remained more or less constant: The cycle of day and night. The sun has always risen in the east and set in the west. The first cyanobacteria that emerged on our planet 2.5 billion years ago woke up in the morning to gather the light’s energy and then shut down when the sun set. They eventually became the building blocks out of which all living things developed into our present world’s amazing complexity and diversity. And the biological clocks inside those 2.5 million-year-old cyanobacteria are still embedded in the cells of every living thing. From hedgehogs to human beings, every living thing relies on tiny cellular clocks to regulate and coordinate their functioning in the world.
These cellular clocks do not operate by gears and cogs. They do not have hands that circle around a numbered dial. They instead operate by proteins within each cell that are produced and broken down over a 24-hour cycle. All these cellular clocks in each cell of our bodies are coordinated by a central clock in our brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus which is also attuned to the 24-hour circadian rhythm of daylight and darkness.
Unfortunately for us, all these tiny cellular clocks that regulate and coordinate our bodies’ functions can fall out of sync with each other. When they become dysregulated communication between cells and organs in our bodies breaks down. We feel the negative effects. There’s increasing evidence that this de-synchronization at level of our cellular clocks accounts for many of our physical and mental ailments. People who work night shifts, for example, are known to have more health problems because their bodies natural circadian rhythm, which is attuned to the cycle of daylight and darkness, is disrupted. One way we all observe this effect is when the time changes each spring and autumn. Our cellular clocks are attuned to the sun and stars, not to official rules about whether it’s standard or daylight savings time. They are attuned to the rhythm of sunlight and darkness, not to the artificial light that lights up the night sky or that glows from the screens we stare into both day and night. And we feel “out of step” for a few days. We feel like our rhythm is off.
What does all this have to do with our spiritual lives? Long before researchers discovered how our physical health and emotional well-being depends on the synchronization of all our cellular clocks with their circadian rhythm, our spiritual tradition understood the importance of attunement and synchronization. We call it “harmony.” We call it “communion.”
We even honor it in the rhythm of our songs: “Come, thou fount of every blessing. Tune my heart to sing thy praise.” Our deepest longing is to be in communion with – attuned to – the One who is the very heart of Being itself. We all know what this sense of communion or attunement with God feels like. We also know what its dysregulation or absence feels like. We feel “out of sorts” – the expression itself suggestive of what is happening at a very deep level of who we are. It’s like when those tiny cellular clocks in one part of our body fall out of sync with the cellular clocks regulating other organ in our bodies. We no longer feel at ease with our lives, which is ultimately the meaning of dis-ease.
Christian spiritual practices like worship, prayer, silence or stillness, mindfulness, and service to others all seek to draw the living rhythm of our hearts and minds into that eternal rhythm which is the heartbeat of God. Spiritual practices seek to establish harmony between heart and mind, word and action, being and doing so that we feel at-one within ourselves. The rhythms of weekly worship, daily prayer, intentional silence and stillness, and active service function in our lives just like the “grandfather’s clock” cell in our brains that synchronizes each cellular clock to all the others, so our bodies and minds stay healthy and well-balanced.
In our off-balance and dissonant world we desperately need this harmony. Christian spiritual practices foster an inner and outer communion in which our hearts gradually come to beat to the rhythm of God’s own heart. This doesn’t happen all at once. We can also fall out of rhythm with ourselves and our world even under the best of circumstances. But we can also grow toward a deeper synchronicity, a deep communion, with the center of our lives.
My invitation to you as summer turns into fall is to join us for worship and tune your hearts to move in rhythm with the heartbeat of God.
Don’t believe me about the power of synchronicity to bring harmony to lives? Watch this video where a researcher starts multiple rows metronomes at different times and see what happens in just four minutes: 32 metronome synchronization . . .
And then imagine what the power of synchronicity, of harmony and attunement, might look like in all our lives and in the life of the world.
With prayer,
Pastor Thomas