Manic Pixie Dream God
The mind is mystical by default.
–Andrew Newberg
The three children who saw visions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima tied ropes around their waists so tight that they bled. They believed–rather, they were told–that humanity had a lot of atoning to do. They were shown the reality of hell, of souls falling down as thick as snowflakes. They were aged seven, nine, and ten. The Catholic Church would ultimately confirm this vision as divine, and permit and promote devotion to Our Lady of Fatima. Pope John Paul II credited her with saving his life when he was shot on her feast day.
Growing up, I never questioned that ordinary people had divine visions. I knew it wasn’t common, but I never imagined it was impossible. I prayed to receive one myself. Nothing seemed as sacred as sight. Mary never appeared to me, but when I was in seventh grade, sitting in religion class while Mr. Kontoes droned on about something, I did have what I would call my first spiritual experience. I was hungry, and my head was pounding, and my hands were tingling, and I began to see everything around me bathed in golden light. Everything looked different, transformed, and I knew it was God’s way of revealing himself to me.
In 1978, the Church published a document called Normae Congregationis. When you read it, it seems cautious, almost defensive. The clerics writing it perceived a danger of false cults rising around visions that weren’t legitimate. These norms were created to establish borders, to determine when an apparition was real and when public devotion should be permitted. One criteria for a vision to be deemed true is that the person receiving the division must have “psychological equilibrium.” In other words, the divinity you see must be from without, rather than from within. Not the product of a distorted mind, but the product of God’s true revelation. That there is something extrinsic about God that cannot be replicated by anything coming from our own selves.
In Why God Won’t Go Away, Andrew Newberg complicates the question of an empirical, external god with his discussion of the neurological and biological processes that occur when we have spiritual experiences. Something distinct happens in our brains when we encounter divinity, whether that divinity is real or composed of our collective imagination. Newberg doesn’t take a side on this question, but he makes me wonder whether it matters:
If God does exist, for example, and if He appeared to you in some incarnation, you would have no way of experiencing His presence, except as a part of a neurologically generated rendition of reality…Whatever the ultimate nature of spiritual experience might be–whether it is in fact a perception of an actual spiritual reality, or merely an interpretation of sheer neurological function–all that is meaningful in human spiritually happens in the mind.
For a long time, this would have seemed sacreligious to me. Following my first spiritual experience, following that golden light, God’s presence was reaffirmed to me. Most often in Adoration, when the Eucharist sits on an altar as the true presence of Christ, I would feel filled with certainty: he is with me. It’s a feeling I used to note in my journals as ‘full to bursting.’ I felt close to God through my teenage years and into college, not all the time, but often. St. Ignatius of Loyola came up with a clean binary, because saints love nothing so much as binaries: consolation and desolation. What I felt sitting in front of the Eucharist at Church camp, knowing God was with me, he would call consolation. What I felt sobbing in front of the Eucharist in college, knowing God had left me, he would call desolation.
I love how dramatic it sounds to say I was in desolation. Even more dramatic is Ignatius’s definition:
I call by the name of desolation…darkness and confusion of soul, attraction towards base and earthly objects, disquietude caused by various agitations and temptations, which make the soul distrustful, without hope and love, so that it finds itself altogether slothful, tepid, sad, and as it were separated from its creator and Lord.
I felt desolated occasionally throughout high school, but it was in my sophomore year of college that it began in earnest. I suddenly felt a vacuum where God used to be. I remember singing the closing hymn at evening Mass one night, a song about God’s love always holding us safe. I began to weep. I went outside and sat next to the art museum crying, rubbing the cuff of my flannel shirt against the red brick wall, barely able to breathe. It simply didn’t feel true anymore. I didn’t feel held by God. Every time I wore that shirt for the next two years and felt the hole I had worn in the sleeve, I was reminded that God was nowhere to be found.
According to Ignatius, there are three reasons we might enter a period of desolation. One is that God is testing us. This is the Job theory of faith. Another is that God is reminding us that all consolation comes from him, and can be taken back at any time. Third, and most powerful for me at the time, is that we are slothful and unfaithful in prayer. In other words, when it feels like God is far away or even dead, it’s our fault. This is what I thought for those two long years of desolation. Ignatius says that when we’re in a period of desolation, we should become more devout. So I did. I went to retreats, I prayed, I served on committees, I led a Bible study. It never occurred to me that Ignatius’s definition of desolation looks suspiciously like clinical depression.
***
“This is how God Wants it?” is an article by Janis H. Jenkins, somewhere between anthropology and psychology. Jenkins spent years talking to psychiatric patients, most of them Mexican-American in LA. This chapter is about Sebastián, a young man who hears the voice of God. Sebastián describes this voice as unified, a middle-aged man, “dictatorial and cruel,” much like his own father.
Jenkins never questions that what Sebastián is experiencing is a delusion. The division between mental illness and religious experience appears clear. I saw it like that, too; I never thought that the visions at Fatima were the results of mental instability. But lots of people have religious delusions, or experiences we classify as religious delusions. For Sebastián, his experience of God is mediated not only through his mental illness, but through his experience of his father: a harsh man who beat him and kicked him out. The God Sebastián hears is cruel, demanding, and belittling.
According to its norms, the Church would not verify Sebastián’s experience, because of his psychiatric history. There’s a hierarchy, then: three children see Mary, and that is real; a young man hears the voice of God, and that is not. This hierarchy presupposes that God not only exists, but that we can know what shape God takes. Of course the Church believes that; they’re all about certainty. They know the shape of God, and the shape of God is not the same as the shape of Sebastián’s delusion. This hierarchy of god, codified in documents and doctrine, centralizes what is an incredibly individual thing. But I have to confess that to me, Sebastián’s experience doesn’t sound divine. Am I prescribing the same categories?
After reading that article, I tried to think of a taxonomy of religious experiences, in order to classify what is “of God” and what is of the mind. This is hard, because I don’t necessarily believe in God now, but I came up with something fairly simple: if it brings good into your life, it is divine, and if it brings harm into your life, it’s not. This doesn’t track with how I was raised, with the notion that suffering is divine, but I have a hard time conceding to any notion of divine suffering these days. But despite that, I remember the children at Fatima, hurting themselves with ropes tied around their waists to atone for the sins of the world. My Catholic instinct has always been that those apparitions were truly divine, but ny my own rule, they can’t be.
I wrote a piece last year about the notion that we create God, rather than the other way around. I wonder if this is true. We take in everything the world throws at us and we alchemize it into something we call divine. Sebastián synthesized his troubled relationship with his father into a God that taunted him and ordered him around. The children at Fatima, living in the midst of the greatest war humanity had seen to date, created a vision of the Virgin Mary warning of hell and even greater catastrophe.
This doesn’t mean these perceptions aren’t real, or that they’re all in our head. Or rather, they are all in our head, in the same way that everything else is. So then I came up with another possibility: nothing about God matters except for our perception of God.
***
It’s true that I’ve never had a vision, but when I was nineteen, something else happened. This was in the midst of my desolation, when I was still trying. But God wouldn’t talk to me. A youth minister had long ago told me that she liked to listen for the voice of God in secular music. So in August of 2018, I was listening for God in the music of David Bowie. I had recently become obsessed with him. Within two days, my thoughts followed these steps:
God, please speak to me
God, please speak to me through Bowie
God, is Bowie speaking to me?
Bowie, please speak to me.
And he did. I sat in my bed filling out a crossword and listening to Station to Station, and I realized that David Bowie was telling me something in the song “TVC15.” The song, if you’ve heard it, is nonsense, the story of a man whose girlfriend gets eaten up by a television set. But to me, it was sacred, because David Bowie was sending me a message through that song. I left my dorm and walked the street, barely able to breathe as I tried to understand what he was saying, bare feet slapping against brick and pavement.
I was scared. It wasn’t that David Bowie had, in the past, written this song for me; it was that a divine Bowie was using the song in the present to speak to me. I have always had a lot of insight, and I knew that I was having a delusion. But I still hoped it was real, and for a moment, it was.
A year later, it was this delusion and the days surrounding it that cemented my diagnosis of Bipolar II. In 2022, many more people understand that this illness is not necessarily characterized by rapid, minute-to-minute shifts from happy to sad to angry (though that can be part of it, for some people). Rather, Bipolar is about mood episodes lasting days, weeks, or months. In a manic episode, a person can feel unstoppable. Carrie Fischer described the feeling: “God, if you will, is saving you parking spots, songs are being played on the radio for you. You’re just so enthusiastic about everyone, and everyone must be enthusiastic about you.” In a depressive episode, a person can feel like they aren’t even a person. Empty, numb, catatonic. Everything slows down. This has been my experience of the last four years.
St. Ignatius’s notions of consolation and desolation, when I read them in preparation for this essay, made me laugh. With simple word substitution, he could be talking about Bipolar. I’m not saying the two paradigms are interchangeable, but I am saying that when I was suffering from severe Bipolar depression, I could not feel close to God. And I thought it was my fault for being slothful.
***
The question that prompted this essay was this: if God is constant, why does my mental state alter how I perceive God? Years ago I would have said that God is absolute, unchanging, unfailing. But I don’t think so anymore. My perception of God is God, or at least, it is as much of God as matters to me. Nothing outside the mind matters. When I was in high school with a terrible headache, I looked up migraines and read about auras. Tingling, vision change, bright spots. In seventh grade God had revealed to me the world bathed in golden light. Or, I had a migraine. Did God give me the migraine, and in so doing reveal Himself to me? I tried to believe so. But one of the most significant experiences of my young life had to be reconsidered as something neurological.
I was discussing this essay with a friend and I told him about another experience, in the summer of 2019. I got out of yoga class and I felt completely revived. Alive, joyful, invigorated. In the car driving home I played “Fill Your Heart” by David Bowie and sang along. I felt like I was soaring through the air. This is God, I thought, laughing as Bowie sang, “Fear is just in your head, only in your head, just forget your head and you’ll be free.” I felt free.
I was having a manic episode. I didn’t sleep, I wrote thousands of words, and yes, I thought I touched God. When I told my friend all this and explained how it made me wonder whether I could call God real when my fiercest experience of God was induced by brain chemistry, he was thoughtful. “Just because you were in an elevated state doesn’t mean it wasn’t real,” he told me.
Maybe it’s all real–Fatima, Sebastián, Bowie. Maybe it means that it’s real and in our heads, and neither negates the other. That God emerges from my experience. That God has no power outside of the power I give God.
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