I interrupt my series of essays on 21st Century Missiology with this Lenten meditation. I was honored to be invited to bring a meditation to the Wednesday night Lenten Series at First Baptist Church of Peoria. My assigned topic was “Wounded in Our Thoughts.”

A Beautiful Mind stars Russell Crowe in the role of John Nash. It won four Academy Awards in 2001, including the Oscar for Best Picture. Both the movie, and the book on which it is based, are fictionalized drama inspired by the life of a very real person.

The story opens with John Nash arriving at Princeton University as a new graduate student. He has already been honored with the Carnegie Prize for mathematics. He is quickly recognized as a mathematical star. While brilliant, Nash is eccentric, socially awkward, and extremely competitive.

Nash completes his doctoral studies and accepts a prestigious position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is joined there by two colleagues from Princeton. Together they work on breaking Soviet codes for the Pentagon. John also meets and marries Alicia.

Now the story grows dark. Nash’s work with the Pentagon becomes increasingly secretive and threatening. His behavior becomes erratic and paranoid which alarms his friends.

Eventually he is forcibly sedated and sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Viewers are stunned to learn that many events and characters in John’s life are the creation of his debilitating mental illness. Nash loses just about everything but his wife and child.

With some frightening treatments, Nash’s schizophrenia is brought under control and he is released on the condition that he continue to take antipsychotic medication. However, those drugs have serious side effects on both his intellectual functions and his relationship with his wife. Frustrated he secretly discontinues the medication.

Soon a psychotic relapse is in full swing with terrifying consequences. This is the crisis point in the story. Will John Nash be buried in some psychiatric institution for the rest of his life or sedated beyond recognition?

In a dramatic scene, John is confronted by Alicia and by his psychiatrist. We are given a glimpse into the inner life of a person struggling to maintain identity and purpose despite overwhelming psychiatric problems.

John Nash, the mathematician, argues that he has always solved problems with his mind. His hallucinations and psychoses are just another problem. With determination he can work through it using his mind.

The psychiatrist simply replies, “John, your mind is the problem!”

It is painful to watch the decades-long struggle that follows. John refuses to speak to his imaginary “friends,” but they never go away. He learns to depend on persons known to him to verify the reality of strangers. Ironically, it is a new kind of paranoia—he is fearful that anyone new in his life may just be a manifestation of his diseased mind. With newer medications he eventually returns to the classroom.

We may be tempted to focus on the redemptive ending where John Nash is awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics for work done nearly 50 years earlier. We might like to interpret the story as a herculean triumph of human will. Or we might challenge the wisdom or accuracy of medical practices and decisions in the story. But that is not my point. My point is that critical moment when the psychiatrist says, “John, your mind is the problem!” It is a moment of clarity and challenge. That simple fact frames a confession which is the first step along a tortuous path to a managed—but never completely cured—life.

At least two things about that confession challenge me.

First: The story challenges the idea that my thoughts don’t hurt anyone.

Ever since the Enlightenment, the freedom of the mind has been celebrated as the highest virtue in the Western world. Christians consider it one of the great gifts of God. Consequently, I hold tightly to my freedom to think anything I want to think. After all, it is only my thoughts.

But A Beautiful Mind illustrates how my thoughts can wound others. Friends and family around John Nash were wounded. Relationships were broken. Even more seriously, physical injury and the potential for death were consequences of his troubled thoughts.

But of all those wounded by my thoughts, the one most injured and the one I am least likely to consider is God.

There are no thoughts hid from God. God sees through all the sham and façade and illusion and delusion and pretense and rationalization to my very heart and soul. In their raw, untamed, unedited form God sees my thoughts. More than seeing, God feels my thoughts. No wonder Isaiah would say of the Christ:

He was pierced BY our transgressions,
He was crushed BY our iniquities.
(Isaiah 53:5)

That same Christ radically extended the definition of “sin.” In places like the fifth chapter of Matthew we read Jesus saying Anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judement; and Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Sin is no longer merely what I do (or don’t do). Sin includes what I think. Indeed, thinking is often the precursor to the doing of sin. And every thought adds another lash, drives another
spike, thrusts another spear at the Christ on the Cross. Every day, every moment I am crucifying Christ again in my thoughts.

The Apostle Paul understood the consequences of this when he declared All have sinned, and went on to weep What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

My mind is the problem.

Second: The story challenges the idea that my thoughts can be trusted in isolation.

This idea is closely related to the first. Not only do I hold fast to my freedom of thought, disregarding its brutal effects, I am arrogantly confident that my thoughts are true and worthy. I require no verification but my own.

The visions, voices, and interpretations of John Nash were certain and real. People lived, moved, and spoke in his mind. But that was the only place they existed. John needed others to help him discern what was real.

John struggles with the unreliability of his own thoughts and his ability to discern what is real. There is a scene where John’s wife, Alicia, takes his hand in hers and places them on John’s heart, saying “This is real.” Then she places his hand on her own heart and says, “This is real.” Confronted with a different “reality,” John chooses not to speak with his mental residents, regardless of how much they protest.

In one revealing scene much later in his life, he is approached by a representative from the Nobel Prize Committee. He ignores the person and asks one of his students: “Do you see him, too?” The student answers, “Yes.” Only after this verification does Nash agree to speak and interact with this new person. It is a painful revelation that a person who “lives” in his mind—a mathematician—has learned to be suspicious of his own thoughts.

This may be part of the motivation when the Apostle Paul wrote: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment. And immediately after that spoke about the body of Christ with many members and gifts. The church is the community of confirmation. We confirm reality to one another. Our worship service is the setting where we remind one another what is real. The Cross is the inescapable touchstone of reality.

Because of the unreliability of the isolated mind, the Apostle Paul admonished: Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing, and perfect will. (Romans 12:2)
Actually the word is stronger than mere refurbishing. Paul is talking about a radical re-engineering of the mind. This is necessary because my mind is the problem.

In closing, I suggest that we are all suffering from a kind of spiritual schizophrenia. Our thoughts wound those around us. We even wound ourselves. But most of all we wound Christ. The irony is that in receiving our wounds Christ makes our healing possible.

That healing involves a radical reworking of our minds so that we begin to discern reality. The healing process requires a community of faith in which we constantly confirm the reality of the
Cross to one another. Like John Nash, we will struggle with that discernment until the day we die. But we are promised that God will make all things—including our minds—new.

Until then, we encourage one another with the words of Paul from Philippians 4:

Whatever is true,
Whatever is noble,
Whatever is right,
Whatever is pure,
Whatever is lovely,
Whatever is admirable
--If anything is excellent or praiseworthy—
Think about such things.

Please join me in an old Celtic prayer:

O Son of God,
Perform a miracle for me:
Change my heart.
You, whose crimson blood redeems mankind,
Whiten my heart.
It is you who makes the sun bright
And the ice sparkle;
You who makes the river flow
And the salmon leap.
Your skilled hand makes the nut tree blossom,
And the wheat turn golden;
Your spirit composes the songs of the birds
And the buzz of the bees.
Your creation is a million wondrous miracles,
Beautiful to behold.
I ask of you just one more miracle:
Beautify my soul.

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