The Two Walls

The wall that should never have been built, and the one that must be.

By David Wade Pope · Bio-Spiritual Archaeologist · Founder, The Entheos Project · From Book Three, The Entheos Project

I have been hard on the cut. Now, to be precise, because there are two walls in this story, and if you confuse them you will tear down the one that is keeping people safe and leave standing the one that is killing them.

The first wall is the one that should never have been built. It is the wall that told medicine the soul was not its business, and told the church the brain was not its business, and told each of them to stay in its own wing of the building and never open the door between them. That wall is the cut. It fragmented the care of a whole person into departments that stopped speaking, and it is the reason people fall through the middle. That wall has a body count, and this book exists to take it apart.

There is a second wall, and this one is not the cut. This one is a discipline, and it has to hold.

For years I have said a sentence to anyone who would listen. The clinic is never the church, and the church is never the clinic. Now, that sounds at first like the cut talking. It is the opposite of the cut. Here is the difference, because it is everything.

The cut says the body and the soul are separate worlds, and you must choose between them. The discipline says something completely different. It says the body and the soul are one person, and the help must be joined at the person. Joining is not blurring. A clinic that starts preaching stops being a clinic you can trust with your body. A church that starts practicing medicine stops being a church that is safe for your soul. The recognition crosses between them freely. The truth travels. The person is held by both. What never crosses is the apparatus. The clinic keeps its clinical discipline. The church keeps its sacred one. They meet at the person, and nowhere else, and that meeting is the entire point. In the language of this architecture, the recognition crosses the wall, and the apparatus never does.

One thing must be very clear, because the old wall trained you to expect a fight here, and there is no fight. Medicine is not the enemy of the sacred. I have watched a magnetic pulse quiet the storm in a person's brain until, for the first time in their life, they could sit in silence and finally hear the still, small voice they had been straining toward for forty years. That is not medicine replacing God. That is medicine in service of the sacred. Not instead of it. In service of it. We do not refuse to set a broken bone because we believe in divine healing. We use the tools God provided through medicine, and we pray, and the bone heals, and God is glorified, and no one calls the cast a failure of faith. The construction that sets the doctor against the altar is a false construction, and I am removing it from this book on purpose, because it has done nothing but make wounded people choose between two things they both needed.

Keep both walls straight, because everything that follows depends on it. Tear down the first wall, the cut, the false separation that fragments the person and lets him fall. Hold up the second wall, the discipline, the honest boundary that keeps the clinic a clinic and the church a church so that both can be trusted at the one place they meet. The wall that fragments must fall. The wall that keeps each helper honest must stand.

Here is the last question of this first movement. Carry it into the next one. Have you ever been told, out loud or in silence, that you had to choose between your doctor and your God? If you have, ask the harder question underneath it. Who taught you that was the choice, and what has believing it already cost you?

Now that you have seen the cut, I can show you the repair. We start where every repair has to start. With one person. With you.

By God's Design.

This teaching names a tool by kind. Each tool is a single member of a class, Neuroplastic Therapeutics, among many that exist now and many more on the way. Magnetic stimulation, the pulse here, is cleared for treatment-resistant depression; it is named for depression and never as the work itself.