To me a human being is "all connected up". By that I do not mean a person as having connections. I'm not talking about someone of influence who has friends in high places; I'm talking about a person as a holistic being.

My anklebone is connected to my shinbone, and my shinbone is connected to my thighbone, and so on and so forth.

More than that, though, my physical body is connected to my mental and emotional sense of self, and both my physical body and my mental and emotional self are connected to my spirit.

When my body touches the world, my brain whirls into action, and that action creates my sense of self, which is my mind at work.

When my body and mind are touched by God, my spirit whirls into action, creating my knowledge and appreciation of God.

That is not something the mind can do on its own.

Just as the brain-mind connection is what allows us to investigate our world and to make sense of it, the body-mind-spirit connection allows us to investigate the things of God and to make sense of them.

Spirit is the medium through which God communicates with human beings, and it is not the kind of connection that is compartmentalised. That is, you don't have the things of the mind over here and the things of the spirit over there. You don't have spirit sitting on a throne above mind, with mind bowing to the things of the spirit.

My spirit needs my mind, and both of them are hosted in a physical body. We are all connected up. I can read the Bible without spiritual understanding and it will not make a lot of sense; it may even seem laughably simple-minded.

I can read the Bible with a very simple-minded spirit, and I can experience closeness with God that is still impoverished by the inability to describe, explain, or relate what I experience to anyone else.

I can know things about God without really knowing God directly; in fact, many religious scholars have done so. Just so, I can know things about the mind without understanding how body, mind, and spirit are all real capacities in the whole person.

With my mind I can examine my world and see how things work, but it takes a spirit in touch with God to be in awe and worship through what one finds in nature.

For instance, recently I shared with my colleagues in clinical psychology and psychotherapy my amazement over the bacterial flagellar motor, but some found analogies in nanotechnology and still reiterated their conviction that with enough time and/or with just the right circumstances, such irreducible complexity could emerge spontaneously.

When I look at the bacterial flagellar motor, I see a sub-cellular machine, and I know that machines don't make themselves, and I find myself, almost without the ability to stop myself… I find myself mumbling, "Oh … my … GOD!"

These all-connected-up awarenesses of God come in the flow of everyday life, and they also occur when we purposefully attempt to make them happen by going to church.

Speaking of which, where were your body, mind, and spirit on Easter?

I went to church with my wife. There was singing, flag waving, music, drama, dramatic reading and people moved so much they were virtually shaking.

The pastor worked himself into a sweat. Afterwards I told him I liked his shoes; they looked like something Elvis might have worn.

He smiled. People were hugging one another and enjoying the day tremendously.

For almost the entire service the pastor's four-year-old grandson sat on my lap.

He is a tender little boy who buries his face and smiles instead of looking at you and talking, but for some reason he wanted to sit on my lap – a virtual stranger.

Now, Easter service with a four-year-old in your lap is different from Easter service as an individual of grandfatherly stature, sitting calmly, whose family is all hundreds and thousands of miles away. His tiny fingers.

His non-verbal way of being there, present but silent, pointing and showing but not speaking.

Smiling timidly. Eyes meeting mine only just a little at a time, and then, towards the end of the service holding my gaze longer and starting to talk to me.

While the pastor shouted out the glory of the Lord, his little grandson bounced on my lap and then went to sleep next to my wife. This touched me. The little boy resurrected what it was like for me when my own children were that small.

You go to a church service and hear a message about God, and perhaps to experience God's presence itself. To meet with God Himself.

So, there was Jesus bouncing on my lap, and God might as well have been saying, "I love you; I gave you children, remember? So, you can come bounce on my lap too sometimes. Even if all you can do is bury your face and point to the sky. Okay?"

My mind knows it. My spirit connects with it, but sometimes it takes my body to feel it. That's because I'm all connected up.