“The left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome.”

—Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Maybe you’ve heard this story: Jesus is out doing His Kingdom of Heaven thing when some religious leaders decide to test His theology and ask, “What’s the greatest command?”

A lawyer asks Jesus, “Which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus famously replies (Matthew 22:36–40) that we must “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “love your neighbor as yourself.” In Luke 10:27, the same call to wholehearted agape appears, and Luke adds one more word: “with all your strength.”

Jesus tells us to love God with every part of our physical and metaphysical being: our emotions and will (“heart”), our life’s essence (“soul/spirit”), our physical vitality (“strength/body”), and our thinking (“mind”). These words have been debated in theology for millennia. Ironically, it’s basically the same debates Science, Christianity, and the Western world are having in 2025. We don’t have time to pin down each of these words for every possible reader of this, so we’re going to try it another way.

In the center of this command is the hearer of it—the “Simon” (meaning “listen”)—who must be able to surrender to this command. This is the human who hears the command and, then, must decide to listen and follow it. We are that which is in between. It’s the Self, the “I” we navigate the world with and experience life through. You and I are not these four parts.

The original Hebrew context of the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:5) anchored this in totality, and Luke’s inclusion of ischys—strength—pulls the physical body into the spiritual mandate¹. This historical and systematic nuance echoes the contemporary crisis over the nature of consciousness, mimetic theory, and worldly distractions. The Mind/Body debate that Western academia keeps trying to solve by dissecting the “soul” out of existence is very similar to centuries of debates about the nature of the soul in Christendom(s).

We won’t unpack the obvious “why” of these verses, or how the two commands hang together. We’ll also set aside traditions and attempt to skip everything in between. All of that will probably come up again. Just the words and the neuroscience happening in you and me—right here and now.

It’s more of a nerdy meditative practice, or an analytical mystical frame, so we can all set aside debates and engage with all parts of our being. Let’s pause on each part of Luke’s Gospel narrative and ask, “What does it look like to love God with each part of me?“—as opposed to what it means for “them.” This could be a blockage and plank removal opportunity.

Not a checklist or an exam but an invitation to do a quick spiritual detox—harder addictions run deeper than chemicals. It’s an honest exploration of wholeness.

“The glory of God is man fully alive.” 

— St. Irenaeus

The human being is a Holon—made up of parts and a whole in itself, while simultaneously a part of larger wholes. To love God wholly means becoming whole ourselves. Complete faith and surrender in His presence and providence. To walk humbly with Him in every moment. Healing and the hard work leading to confession and acceptance. Grace and confidence merged in one. Wrestling with Truth (it always wins). Waking up dormant capacities. Living authentically and integrating every corner of our being into love. When the light of God breaks in, it exposes our shadows and works away pride and insecurity until we stand on the ground of souls remade, bearing confidence not as forced bravado but as a grounded by-product of transformation.

To love God wholly, and neighbor likewise, requires every part of us: especially the neurology, including logic, the right hemisphere, our sexuality, and the gut.

An American Pathology: When Fear Pathologizes Love

While I was beginning to piece life back together in recovery, America felt like it unraveled more: Left vs. Right/Progressive vs. Conservative/Everyone in between and outside. Churches fracturing into ever-smaller denominations. Identity politics, academic politics, PC police, conspiracy spirals, culture wars, performative piety, government dysfunction. Each division mirrored the same internal struggle: our refusal to walk the full, logical conclusions of agape. Our inability to be whole internally spills onto the public stage as fragmentation. Our fear of love is being pathologized as a nation.

The American Church and nation collectively have been bearing the fruits of its flesh for more than a few decades (Galatians 5:19). Humans, such as you and I, are in the mix too, somewhere, and the plurality of divisions out there and within our families was the inherited psychological framework. The entire Western world could use a dose of metanoia² and ego/emotional/dopamine management. It can feel like a bunch of chickens running around with their heads cut off, as if there’s “the risk of danger every hour” (1 Cor 15:30).

This is partially the fallout of the crises of globalization. Technological reliance and comfortable routines can make it easy for us to let it go unnoticed. Experts and leaders across industries and traditions talk about it and the nihilistic climate we’re all in. Christian leaders and ministers are speaking about it in their congregations. We’re navigating overlapping pain remedies, quick fixes, tribes, resentments, schisms, 10-year plans, controversies, priorities, budgets, and parties. It’s fractured our worlds of Human Experience, and the cacophony is driving us into a psychic crisis that began a long time ago. Keeping the focus here, in our backyard, America has played no small role in globalization, and we’re all aware of the constant distractions and availabilities.

Against that noise, and from within His first-century historical and cultural context, Jesus’ simple answer to the Lawyer was staggering. Love God with heart, soul, strength, and mind. Not egoic or intellectual assent. Not blind agreement or loyalty: Wholeness. And love your “neighbor” just like it.

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity… If we want deeper spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”

— Brené Brown

A Fourfold Exploration: Heart, Mind, Strength, Soul

Heart (Limbic System & Emotions)
The heart in biblical thought is the seat of will and desire, corresponding roughly to the limbic system and right hemisphere (roughly). Love is relational and dares vulnerability. It risks honesty and wonders at mysteries. To love God with the heart means shadow work—facing trauma, shame, and repressed drives. It means braving bravery and accepting authenticity. It means learning how to see past our fight, flight, fawn, and freeze responses. This entails learning how to slow down and get past discomfort, initial impressions, and the surface level. It means we don’t hide behind rationalities when we can feel the “crazy” inside. Love is putting down the pitchforks.

Mind (Intellect & Divided Brain)
The left hemisphere’s obsession with certainty has shaped Western theology: dogma, proof-texts, systematics, tribal correctness. It dissects faith into abstractions and misses the Person. The right hemisphere, by contrast, sees the terrain behind the map—it apprehends context, paradox, relationship, depth, and mystery. It is one of the conduits for the Spirit, the part of us that can stand in worship or silent awe.

To do this, to break the mastery of the left hemisphere, requires personally resisting vacillating between false heroism and self-pity, between slave and master, between depression and grandiosity. Stopping it at the source is an inside job. Avoidance and denial harden the heart. Agape softens it through confession and acceptance. It’s through this process that hardened adults can have child-like hearts again, and deep scars of trauma can begin to heal. “We can’t serve two masters” applies to a lot.

We’re just beginning to understand all of this, but the right hemisphere has been neglected by humanity for far too long, and the Left has been driven mad. Discipleship demands we reconcile the two: Monday morning faith more than Sunday morning belief.

Strength (Body & Embodiment)
Luke drags the body into discipleship. Addiction, stimulation, gluttony, sexuality, trauma, and physical health—none of these can be treated as optional or “extra credit.” We all know better. The body is where memory lives, where the gut brain whispers, where trauma lodges. It’s where we experience and meet life and reality. It’s god-given and a part of Nature. To love God with strength is to let the Spirit rewire our habits and physicality into alignment. Somatic wholeness, recovery, self-control, and embodying wise eating habits are aspects of Christian discipleship.

Soul (Essence & Consciousness)
And then the soul—the most contested word of all. Is it a dichotomy? Trichotomy? Consciousness emergent from matter? Or spirit as irreducible? Protestant arguments over “soul vs. spirit” mirror today’s neuroscience arguments over consciousness itself. Whatever “it” is, you and I are it. Life works better when we’re one with it.

Jung’s archetypes and Girard’s mimetic crises suggest what’s at stake today: our inability to love God or neighbor flows from our inability to integrate ourselves. When Jesus cried, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,” He was modeling the solution to our inability to grasp forgiveness. He accepted falling into the hands of fate and humanity, being crushed by the gears of empire and human scapegoating, while being fully alive and free (Jesus was brilliant). By naming the same blindness that drives them, we can begin to remove the scales from our souls and see clearly.

To be whole is to stop scapegoating. To stop outsourcing our shadow onto enemies. To do small and big things. To be content with our own responsibility. To do good when we don’t feel like it. To be honest and risk misunderstandings. To have faith in doubt. To let God integrate the fractured pieces of our being until our soul becomes a conduit, not a mask.

The Call to Wholeness

To love God with all is to love wholly. And to do that fully, a human must be whole. The path to becoming whole is the cruciform pattern of spiritual transformation: the intentional dying of the old ego to make room for the integrated Self. Sanctification is the process of spiritual transformation. Discipleship is an intentional way of life in a vulnerable, healthy, and interconnected community and relationships. It’s an inside-out thing.

This is not about slogans, politics, or preaching. It’s a cruciform discipline that keeps one on the path (Hebrews 12:1-3, c.f. Romans 12:1-2).

Wholeness is the crucifixion of the ego and the resurrection of the true self. It is the metanoia Jesus preached—a turning of the mind, heart, and spirit so radical that it feels like death. The early church called it sanctification. Kierkegaard called it the leap of faith. Jung called it individuation. Paul called it being “crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live.” The Apostle also commanded, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” It’s the same thing.

Whatever the vocabulary, the reality is the same: to love God wholly, we must die to the fragmented, performative self that props itself up on fear, certainty, tribal loyalty, and scapegoating.

Love is The Cost of Discipleship

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

—Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

Discipleship begins when we stop pretending faith is belief³, when we dare to confront the darkness in our own limbic shadows, left-hemisphere constructs, comfortable bubbles, apathetic hearts, bodily and psychological addictions, and splintered souls. It starts when we recognize that loving God is not sentimentalism but transformation—the daily, mundane, painful work of letting love rewire every layer of being.

Your false self will not survive the journey. Richard Rohr said, “Your False Self is who you think you are. Your thinking does not make it true. Your False Self is almost entirely a social construct to get you started on your life journey.” And Jesus said it sharply: “Pick up your cross and follow Me.“

This is the work. It’s not about kings, systems, or end-time charts. It’s not about arguing doctrine or polishing denominational banners. It’s about becoming whole human beings who can love in truth. It’s about daring to love God with every firing neuron, every scarred synapse, every muscle, every tear, every doubt, every burst of joy.

The command was never abstract. It was always flesh and blood.

So, start with our neighbor. Start with our mirror. We stop scapegoating. We stop faking it. We take one step at a time, one act of love at a time, one surrender at a time.

It can be a trudge on this road of destiny. It’s doable, and another side to it.

“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”

– Dalai Lama

Footnotes:

1. Perhaps for his Greco-Roman audience, who leaned more toward the helonistic and outward side of life…nothing like today. ↩︎
2. Metanoia (μετάνοια) is often translated “repentance,” but the Greek term is richer and more expansive: literally, “to change the mind” (meta + nous). In the New Testament, it implies not mere remorse or moral regret but a fundamental reorientation of consciousness—a turning of the whole self toward God, truth, and life. Early Christian mystics and teachers understood metanoia less as a singular act of contrition and more as an ongoing transformation, a conversion of vision and being. Richard Rohr emphasizes this wider sense: a movement beyond ego and survival thinking into a spacious awareness that sees reality as it is and participates in divine love. In this way, metanoia describes the inner shift that underlies the “mystic awakening” explored in my book: repentance not as punitive shame, but as the radical openness to death of the false self and the birth of a new humanity. Mental health is a part of metanoia. ↩︎
3. The Greek word for “faith,” pistis (verb: pisteuō), means trust, loyalty, or faithfulness—not mere intellectual assent. It names a relational dynamic of fidelity, as when Abraham entrusted himself to God’s promise (Rom. 4:3). By contrast, the modern notion of “belief” often reduces faith to left-hemispheric assent, groupthink, or cognitive bias—closer to Gnostic intellectualism or group loyalty than to authentic spirituality. James insists that such “faith without works” (Jas. 2:17) is dead; true pistis is embodied trust and covenantal faithfulness. ↩︎