I. for biblio.com


SACRED DESIRE is a collaboration between two psychiatrists and grows from their scientific monographs.

Underlying focus is on healthiest human living from womb to old age. The authors' thesis is that all goes well when the wee womb dweller is begotten by loving parents and immersed in love from birth. Things go badly to the extent that the pre-born is not wanted or loved.

No young human can possibly survive to adulthood if someone, somewhere in her nearest environment does not love her and give her an opportunity to love them back. Parents may mistreat us. But if we are alive, there had to be a grandmother or a neighbor or a caregiver nearby who was kind to us, accepted us as we were.

Love keeps us in our First Nature. Abuse drives us into a wounded, hostile Second Nature. Personal maturity and even the creation of a just, happy global order demand that we find ways to repair our wounded Second Nature and live as much of our lives as we can in caring, generous, empathetic First Nature.

We are "hard-wired" for loving and being loved. The authors root our need for love in psychology, physiology and neurology. There is much talk of right brain, left brain, mirror neurons, oxytocin and their working together to point us humans toward transcendent love of a God who first loved us. There are charts showing interconnected stages of growth in both love and physiology.

The book, SACRED DESIRE, includes dozens of case studies and examples: including a rabbi chaplain who bonded with a patient embarrassed to talk in her hospital gown by putting on a hospital gown himself. Most impressive to me was the lengthy treatment of Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, his slowly achieved recognition of his evil Second Nature during 20 years in Spandau Prison and his ultimate return to the primal innocence of his First Nature.

This is an ambitious book aimed at several audiences, far from easy reading. Five years from now it will, I fear, probably seem crude and medieval. That is because there are so many people now researching and writing about mind-body-love connections that new hypotheses spring up almost weekly.  -OOO-

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 II. for amazon.com

for amazon

title of this review: Was God mean to Adam and Eve?, May 23, 2009

Reviewer's rating of SACRED DESIRE   * * *

In SACRED DESIRE: GROWING IN COMPASSIONATE LIVING, two women, psychiatrists both, collaborate to explore human and divine love and their argued for "hard wiring" in the human body, mind and psyche. Through charts, glossary, bibliography, case studies and genial reasoning Drs. Nancy Morrison and Sally Severino plot out ideal and real human lives from womb nearly to tomb. (If they spent ink on dying, that did not register with me.)

For whom did Drs. Morrison and Severino write?

Any literate adult can follow their case studies, life stories and philosophical/ethical/theological speculations. But only persons with at least a B.S. in anatomy or advanced training in psychology, neurology or other human-explaining sciences can do justice to their science.

Much space and invented jargon goes to anatomy, the nervous system and brain functioning. Thus they style the biochemical oxytocin "a holy nectar." Oxytocin gives us the confidence to bond with others and luckily:


The authors emphasize our first experiences in the womb.


Life can be very good for us, as well, right after birth. We are loved by and recognize our mothers. We respond to "the-world-according-to Mother." We are in our innocent First Nature, what some might call the latency period of childhood, before we grasp the painful reality of personal evil.

That being so, how come so many people all around us are angry, even dangerous and homicidal? That is because not every child was wanted. Not every child was treated well by its mother or father. But, the authors argue, someone in our earliest environment must have been nice to us, given us role models. Or we would never have reached adulthood half-way sane, with an ability to evaluate and repair our wounded Second Nature. We have to have other people who love us. We have to have other people to love.

On the interactions between human growth, theology and science, the argument goes like this. If God had not wanted us to recognize and love Him, He would not have built into us oxytocin, prefrontal cortexes, mirror neurons, the ventral vagal system, a right brain growing faster for our first 18 months, then the left brain doing its thing to catch up, etc., etc. Scientists have measured the brain waves of Franciscan nuns and Buddhist monks during contemplative prayer. The results are in: "The Divine lives in our DNA." We are "hard-wired" for God. Q. E. D.

Individual happiness, and ultimately world peace, abolition of hunger and other global goals can be attained only by people living as little as possible in their wounded Second Natures and as much as they can in their pre-wired healthy, spontaneously empathizing First Natures. God has built in a nervous system designed to make not only all these good things feasible but also loving union with His Ultimate Reality.

This is a very rich book with a tempting bibliography. Its arguments are not obviously self-contradictory. They are therefore to that extent plausible, if not compelling. SACRED DESIRE is a snapshot of the currently feverish, enthusiastic little world of empirical hard scientists researching the Holy -- a domain hitherto reserved to theologians, anthropologists and historians. In five years the book will, I predict, be replaced by something a little bit more current. This is the world of science lite.

I also suspect that others will be like me in finding themselves provoked to re-express the authors' jargon ("holy nectar," "redemptive attuning, "secondary incentives for good," "Second Nature Worldview" in something more personally salient. The authors' perspectives, it strikes me, are overpoweringly feminine: the world according to caring mothers. Men think and react differently.

Finally, although the two authors invoke the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, they do not mention Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, or dwell on Original Sin. Why?

It seems obvious enough that the book of Genesis covers much the same ground the two authors do. Why therefore don't they invoke these ancient images? Perhaps because the God who created Adam and Eve was mean to our first parents, did not follow the advice of SACRED DESIRE. Yahweh did not lovingly empathize with our first parents' disobedience. Rather He punished the hell out of them. He drove them from the womb of Eden into a world of pain and death. He left them so enfeebled a Second Nature that no amount of unaided human help could restore them to their intended First Nature. For that the supernatural Messiah of Israel was required. -OOO-


Your Tags: mirror neurons, oxytocin, womb, ventral vagal system, book of genesis, good samaritan, adam and eve

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III. for epinions.com

Title of this review: "We are made so that we can't run out of love"
Written: May 23 '09

Reviewer's rating:  * * *  average


Pros: Makes a plausible, logically coherent case that our bodies and minds are structured for God.

Cons: Draws upon and applies recent hard science about the nervous system. Will soon be obsolete.

The Bottom Line: Neuro-scientists might lift their eyes from their microscopes and see where their hard science could be leading them: to Moses's God or Plato's Idea of the Good. Great case studies.

aohcapablanca's Full Review:

Nancy K. Morrison and Sally K. Severino - SACRED DESIRE

In 1995 Professor Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma discovered mirror neurons. His "womb experiences" had been in Kiev, Ukraine. His name does not appear in the 2009 book SACRED DESIRE: GROWING IN COMPASSIONATE LIVING by psychiatrists Nancy Morrison and Sally Severino. But their book would be nowhere without Rizzolatti's mirror neurons.

In her part of the Introduction to SACRED DESIRE, Sally Severino traces the origin of her book to the discovery of mirror neurons ("special cells that activate in our brains when we see another person do or feel something, just as they activate when we do or feel the same"). Sally was then in her late 50s when she grasped that "Here was my biological link to others and to God." At the same time Dr. Severino also began daily contemplative prayer. For the first time her hitherto separate professional lives -- psychiatrist and believer -- merged.

Roman Catholic Nancy Morrison became a psychiatrist because she could not be ordained a priest and did not want to be a nun. She loved studying the mind and became a psychiatrist. She tried to heal broken patients. After a bout with cancer, she sought spiritual counseling from various Catholic nuns. Contemplative prayer then lifted her life to a higher plane. And it benefitted her patients, too.

The two psychiatrists share a belief that desire, outreach to and loving need for others, also leads us to God or the Holy. Our evolved nervous systems make this possible. They agree with C. S. Lewis:


Recent science, they argue, suggests that God gave us a body made to order to seek Him. If he hadn't intended us for himself, God would not have implanted within us mirror neurons, the ventral vagal system, oxytocin, prefrontal cortexes, right and left brains and on and on.

All these discoveries are explained and properly bibliographied. Thus oxytocin reproduces itself, making sure that "we never run out of love!" And therefore "The Divine lives in our DNA."

We are led from womb to old age by the two M.D.s through case studies, bibliography, lucid charts and graphs and finally via a glossary of such invented terms as attuning, fear for goodness, redemptive awareness, secondary incentives for good and transformation/rebirth from fear to love.

The philosophy, theology and soft science embedded in SACRED DESIRE are easily enough grasped by literate adults in the tradition of Western Civilization. That God makes us hungry to be one with him is familar from Saint Augustine's CONFESSIONS, Pascal, Cardinal John Henry Newman and many others. The hard science invoked by the two psychiatrists we laymen have to take their word for, unless we first elect to take a degree in biology, neurology or the like. And new hard science insights, like the 1995 discovery of mirror neurons, are meanwhile coming at us fast and furious. A book like SACRED MIRROR may fascinate for a year but will be obsolete in three.

The authors take the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan as an example of non-Samaritan professional persons who have not followed the good First Nature they were born into but have earlier in life been shocked and confused into a Second Nature that makes them prefer professional goodness to compassion.

But, and this seems odd to me, the two psychiatrists do not mention Biblical Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden for disobeying God. It is not, I suggest, simply because SACRED DESIRE is out to prove that the nervous systems of Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists, agnostics indeed of everyone incline us all -- like Plato's SYMPOSIUM characters -- to rise from matter to the vision of the Good, that the two women ignore the Genesis story. It may be because God does not behave in accordance with their suggested paradigm for loving and healing.

Admittedly, God gave our first parents the original spiritual womb of wombs: Eden. Life was pleasant. God loved Adam and Eve and they loved each other. God did well when he simply acted like the mother who told 17-month old Susie not to run out into the street to play: the traffic was dangerous.

But God and Susie's mother parted ways when Susie did run into the street. Susie expected Mom to share her enthusiasm for a newly discovered wider space. She had not anticipated Mom's fear and her shouted NO! Susie grew confused, frightened, tumbled into her Second non-innocent Nature. Had Mom stopped loving her? Why the disharmony?  Here is the explanation: "This is how dissonant attuning leaves us -- as it did Susie -- in a split internal state." "What happens next is crucial. Mother runs and snatches Susie into her arms and kisses her as she explains, "You must not run into the street; it's dangerous." Susie is growing up and Mom's NO shows that more is expected of big girls.

God, by striking contrast, did not rush to hug and kiss Adam and Eve after they ate the forbidden fruit. He tossed them without ceremony out of that cozy "we-womb" called Eden. He might instead have immediately showed the first man and woman that he loved them unconditionally for themselves. But he waited millennia before sending the Messiah of Israel to let bygones by bygones. There is, I fear, no room in SACRED LOVE for so much love so long deferred in the name of justice.

The case studies in SACRED DESIRE are often fascinating. One that will stay with me for a long time is the long meditation on the conversion during 20 years in Berlin's Spandau prison of Hitler's architect, Albert Speer.

If I could find a copy costing less than $45, I would buy the authors' source: Miriam Pollard: THE OTHER FACE OF LOVE -- DIALOGUES WITH THE PRISON EXPERIENCE OF ALBERT SPEER (NY, Crossroad Publishing, 1966). Speer, never in quite the same selfish monster class as Goering, Goebbels and other top Nazis was reborn from evil to good. With the help of prison guards, his reading and iron discipline, Albert Speer healed the wounds of his acquired bad Second Nature and was reborn into his First Nature as a man who saw his crimes, repented of them and spent the rest of his life doing good.

SACRED DESIRE abounds with stories of conversion, empathy and its power: e.g. of the rabbi who stripped to his underwear and donned a hospital gown to help a woman patient similarly dressed who was too embarrassed to talk to a man in a suit and tie.

The two authors tackle important issues in an adult way. They develop their own jargon which readers may or may not find helpful. They give us a snapshot at a popular intellectual level a bit above NEWSWEEK into the current laboratory/seminar rooms whirlpool of hard scientists at work looking for connections between our nervous systems and our gods.

The book deserves more than one reading. But by the time we have plumbed its depths and its bibliography, three years might have gone by, and SACRED DESIRE will have been made obsolete by new science if not new jargon.   -OOO-