Psychology and spirituality
Sources for healing in complicated lives
This room smells like beeswax candles, black tea, and paper. Bookshelves, full to the brim, line two walls. Cellos and violin hum out familiar hymns. I curl under a blanket on the striped couch. It’s my grandparent’s library.
I’ve healed from two surgeries, taken countless naps, and read innumerable books in this very spot. At Christmastime, this couch holds six or seven now fully-grown grandchildren, happily piled atop each other.
Across the red carpet my grandmother naps in her plush leather chair, chin resting on her delicate hands. These pale hands have penned multiple novels, stirred hundreds of stews, applauded children and grandchildren on stage, and rested on hips in sarcastic humor. Her knuckles are thicker and arthritic, now, but beautiful.
My heart feels tender and heavy. On each wall of this room, a story hangs. Each bookshelf is filled with literature and pictures of family and pieces of art from some trip across the world. Each object brings memories.
I come from a large and close-knit family. By “close,” I mean that I babysit my second-cousins-once-removed. I never pass through a town with extended family without stopping in for dinner. I’ve already had conversations with fellow grandchildren about who wants to name their kids after which ancestors—“Jasper” is taken. Two cousins got out of their college classes yesterday and drove six hours roundtrip to pick me up from the airport.
It felt painful being so far from all of these people I cherish. Not to say that I was unhappy—I am mostly joyful and curious, especially during these last few months in Thailand. But this separation from my close kin was (and will always be) a kernel of discontent as I explore the world.
I’m so filled with softness and love and comfort at this moment in this room. But there is also an undeniable sadness. The distance meant that I didn’t have to bear witness to the successes and sufferings of my family. Everyone is still shaken by the loss of their daughter, sister, aunt, and friend.
Being in this room has a twinge of melancholy that I wouldn’t find anywhere overseas. Because here, in this room, it feels like my mother could walk in at any moment. And it hurts to know she never will. She’ll no longer stride in with an iced tea and pluck a book off a shelf, fold herself into her father’s armchair and begin to read.
In Thailand, her loss lived only in me; in my reflections and conversations. Here, even the physical spaces feel altered. The hole is apparent in the very fabric of the family. It’s not just me, alone, longing for my mother.
It’s comforting to feel connected in this particular flavor of pain. But it also means I’ve reentered a world of navigating other people’s suffering, not just my own.
Nina, the name I call my grandma, sleepily blinks herself back awake. We look at each other in silence for a while. We’re both so glad to be in the presence of the other. She’s smiling a little, but her eyes are sad.
When Nina was a little girl, her daddy, my great-granddaddy Waylond, was a farmer in eastern North Carolina.
He was beloved, the youngest mayor in America when he was voted into office at age 21 in the 1930s. When he died, dozens of people came to his funeral and spoke of how he’d helped them harvest tobacco or loaned them money when they needed it, all without a word.
But Waylond had dark spells. Depressive times when, as Nina remembers, “He just wouldn’t get out of bed one day.” It’d last a few weeks until someone drove him out to the nearest psychiatrist in Raleigh. He’d be uplifted again, for a little while. And then slowly sink back again.
Nina’s childhood response was to immerse herself in the Bible. “I think on some level,” she said to me, “I knew I’d need it.”
Growing up with a depressed parent, as she and I both did, makes you a high risk for depression, yourself. The regions of the brain that thin with depression can actually thin in the children of the depressed, as well. How much of this connection is genetic or an effect of being raised in an environment of someone who’s depressed, we don’t yet fully understand.
Regardless, why are my grandmother and I different from our parents? Yes, we both have our worries, our existential questions, our somber moments, and our dark thoughts. But why have neither she nor I have become bedridden by them?
There are many reasons, probably. But one connection that’s intrigued me comes from the book I’m currently reading, The Awakened Brain, by Dr. Lisa Miller.
Dr. Miller founded the Spirituality Mind and Body Institute, the program at Columbia’s Teacher’s College I’m applying to attend. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of her research. Likely because it’ people like me that she’s studying.
In her recent inter-generational study, she found that high-risk people like my grandmother and myself are 90% protected from major depressive symptoms by having a strong spiritual life.
On the old pedal organ sitting in her library, there’s a little altar made up of Ganesha, a menorah, Quan Yin, a crucifix, and Buddha. On one shelf, there’s a book of Healing Mandalas and another of Jesus & Buddha: The Parallel Sayings, with a Janis Joplin magazine squeezed inbetween.
"I almost wish I’d been a theologian,” Nina admitted to me at the close of an online course she took. It was a weekend-long program about Julian of Norwich, an English nun and mystic from the middle-ages. She filled a whole binder with notes.
Nina’s faith is an inspiration to me. It’s not blind. It’s a probing, intellectual curiosity about religion and meaning. Be it biblical scripture or any other religious text, she lets the words wash over her. She’s unafraid to ask questions, whether philosophical or historical.
Throughout her life she’s been held in a robust spiritual community, namely through her church, St. John’s Episcopal, and her late husband, who was a decades-long practicioner of Zen Buddhism. And, most important of all, she has a deeply felt, personally embodied feeling of connection to the universe and its Creator.
Now, I don’t necessarily identify as Christian. But if I did, I’d want to be Nina’s sort of Christian. The type that is open to all walks of life and interested in many modalities of thought and prayer.
In Dr. Miller’s study, the focus isn’t on what demonination or practice you have. It’s just about having a spiritual life.
“The subjects for whom spirituality and religion were highly important had a healthier neural structure than did those for whom spirituality and religion were held at medium, low, or no importance.”
—The Awakened Brain, Chapter 11
But Dr. Miller’s work wasn’t just about MRI scans and brain activity. It was a longitudinal study of over 30 years. She got to look at the same subjects again and again; as well as their children and even grandchildren. How did all of them respond to negative stressors in their life? And how did faith come into play?
Dr. Miller and her fellow researchers found spirituality to kind of be like a muscle. If people who were high risk for depression built up that muscle in response to painful events, they were then more buffered from depressive spiralling when faced with future suffering.
And these results were most profound with my grandma and I’s demographic: We who are closely familiar with depression and have experienced it ourselves.
"It was as though their sensitivity to and familiarity with mental suffering enhanced their capacity to marshall a deeper spiritual response to life’s challenges.” —The Awakened Brain, Chapter 11
In teenhood, I mostly distanced myself from religion. Christianity, where I come from, looks a lot like people using biblical interpretations to validate their hatred for others. Not my thing, I thought. Until I lost Quentin. Death faces you with the usually avoidable questions of “What happens next?” and “What’s my purpose?”
After mom died, my personal faith deepened further. More questions arose, more grappling with fate and fury and feelings of despair. And more meaning came of it, too. I had already seen how, with Quentin, his loss spun my life around to a fundamentally different (and ulitmately healthier) direction. Mom’s absence, somehow, I have to trust, will do the same.
One thing I already see she’s changed in my life is the way I regard tiny moments. The goodbye hugs before plane rides, the evening walks on well known streets, the quiet naps on rainy afternoons in the library. Before, I would’ve taken them as assured things. Now I want to notice them, cherish them, thank them wholeheartedly—these small memories with people who I’ll one day be separated from. These miniscule moments that meld into an entire, meaningful existence.
That last paragraph.🤎