´óÏó´«Ã½

Good Morning

‘The broken illuminated the unbroken’.

I underlined these words in a book I’m reading about the early history of neurosurgery. It’s built around the story of two men:  the author’s grandfather, a brilliant, maverick neurosurgeon, and a young man called Henry Molaison, whom he operated on.  Henry had severe epilepsy, and the operation didn’t cure the seizures.  It did, however, leave Henry with profound amnesia, unable to form new long-term memories from the moment he woke up from the operation.

The author, Luke Dittrich, weaves together many threads of story.  He uncovers dark aspects of his own family history, and explores the mysteries of the brain and memory. But, above all, he describes, with humanity and compassion, the hundreds of patients whom his grandfather operated on:  their brains were lobotomised and cut, in a genuine, but appallingly destructive, effort to cure them.

All these suffering men and women living in asylums, whose neurological illnesses became the means of discovering how different areas of the brain worked.   The broken illuminating the unbroken.  It’s an upside-down truth which also speaks to me more generally about how we live, by contrasts. How we work for peace only when we experience conflict. How we cherish what is good, only when we have to defend it from evil.  And how we recognise grace and comfort, because we have experienced darkness and loss.

God, who is wholeness, who is perfect love -  heal us, mend us, we pray.  God, who is light, show us the truths beyond our partial sight.

AMEN