Soulful Sundays: Faith

“The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns." -Anne Lamott

Among the many complexities of the human brain, few are more fascinating than the corpus callosum — a thick band of white (myelinated) nervous tissue that connects the left and right hemispheres of the cerebral cortex in placental mammals. Once thought to facilitate communication between the hemispheres, its primary role is, in fact, the opposite — to inhibit signals from passing back and forth too easily.

The left and right halves of the brain share little in common. Their differences evolved early in vertebrate biology as solutions to opposing challenges of survival — gathering resources vs. avoiding danger. Pursuing vs. perceiving. Doing vs. being.

The left hemisphere acts as a reducing machine, simplifying sensory input into its most relevant components and then acting upon its conclusions. As the seat of language, it’s concerned with clarification, categorization, and certainty. The left side of the brain controls the right side of the body; thus, right-handedness — a preference conserved across most of the animal kingdom — arises from this hemisphere’s mastery of fine and repetitive tasks. It was this specialization that allowed our ancestors to choose the appropriate food, tool, or mate again and again through countless iterations.

The right hemisphere, by contrast, takes a more global and inclusive approach. It scans the environment for potential threats and mobilizes the whole organism — largely unconsciously — to respond. Often called the intuitive brain, the right is anything but irrational. In fact, it’s vastly more intelligent in its pattern recognition and contextual awareness. Because it does not rush to reduce variables or force conclusions, it perceives a larger truth. People with right-hemisphere dysfunction are far more prone to disorders like schizophrenia, OCD, and delusional thinking. Damage to the left, however, often allows for a mostly normal life.

This brings us back to the corpus callosum — and its quiet role in our daily lives. By inhibiting signals between the hemispheres, it allows each side to specialize without interference. Ideally, we would live with the right hemisphere leading, delegating tasks to the left only when necessary. The left brain is a wonderful tool but a terrible master. Spiraling thoughts, anxious rumination, and self-destructive narratives all arise when it takes command unchecked. The left seeks certainty. The right lives in faith.

Unfortunately, we live in a culture that is almost entirely left-brain dominant. The ability to see things as they are — not merely as we wish them to be — is becoming rare. We are programming ourselves and our children to over-focus on the minute, believing every problem can be solved by detail alone. We have become a society of specialists rather than generalists, of data collectors rather than meaning-makers. We outsource our thinking to machines, surrendering the struggle that once made us wise. We chase certainty in a world that has never offered it.

To shift this balance, we must reclaim what rightfully belongs to the right hemisphere —

By developing a deeper relationship with our souls and the higher power.

By embracing uncomfortable situations instead of rushing to simplify them.

By doing the hard work of staying present in all we do.

Faith, then, is not about closing our eyes to the unknown — it’s about learning to see with both sides open.