making sense of our lives

One thing I love about this blog is the way you all help me think about and process the various inchoate thoughts floating around in this brain of mine.

After writing my last post on lessons from the PhD, my therapist friend (thanks Erin!) told me I should look into the work of Dan McAdams, the leading voice on narrative psychology – that is, the study of how individuals form narratives and make sense of their lives, as well as how that meaning-making correlates with measures of mental health (specifically generativity, which is the commitment to provide care for and make significant contributions to future generations).

After perusing through several articles of his (this one is a good summary of his work) and a highly informative chapter of the book “Turns in the Road: Narrative Studies of Lives in Transition“, the main takeaway I drew from his body of research was that we can categorize the way people narrate life events into redemption or contamination sequences.

Redemption sequences are ones where the individual is portrayed as “growing, moving forward, making progress over time” and the narrator is able to extract a positive meaning from seemingly terrible events, a concept that reminded me of post-traumatic growth and its relationship to resilience.

On the other hand, in contamination sequences, “good things do happen, but they are often eventually ruined by bad things.” They end in “despair, hopelessness and the endless repetition of a negative past.”

Not surprisingly, McAdams finds that individuals who tell more redemption sequences score highly on measures such as generativity and many other measures of psychological wellbeing.

One aspect I found particularly interesting is that McAdams emphasizes that whether or not the narrative is a redemption or contamination sequence does not depend on the nature of the events that actually transpired but how the person chooses to construct his or her reality.

Where the explanations stop short, however, is answering the question –

what then causes someone to narrate their life as a redemption instead of a contamination sequence?

And how do we know if the stories we tell ourselves are in fact true to reality, or just constructs we make up to make ourselves feel better?

Granted, McAdams probably isn’t too interested in the second question – narrative psychology has a distinctively postmodern flavor to it (i.e. who cares about “reality” as long as it helps you feel less depressed?)

But as a scientist, I feel that coherence to reality is an essential part of good “meaning-making” – what use is it if I make up a really good story that doesn’t actually explain what is going on?

So, these are the questions to which I now turn.

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It was about a week ago when Peter left the house one evening for a guys’ board games night and I was home alone with my thoughts.

The house was quiet, the baby asleep, and it was then that I felt a melancholic sadness come visit me, like an old friend I hadn’t seen since my days of singleness.

In these moments, I am learning to fight the initial urges to instantly distract myself with a feel-good TV show or an activity to busy myself (what new recipe can I bake tonight?) and instead invite the Holy Spirit to minister to me.

So I sat on our living room couch and just quietly sang whatever song came to my mind. It so happened to be “Spirit Song”, a 1979 Maranatha Singers oldie that my parents love and used to sing with me as a young child.

Although part of the sadness was inexplicable (I normally attribute this part to fluctuating hormones lol), I think part of it had to do with the major life transitions I had been experiencing.

I was no longer a PhD student, I now had a job – and part of me didn’t know what to do what that change in identity.

Who was I when I wasn’t perseverating on a failed experiment, as my brain had gotten used to doing over the past 8 years?

Could I really just do the task assigned to me that day instead of think of a thousand other ways to “further myself” and advance all the other projects I was simultaneously working on?

And maybe the larger question looming in my head – is this all the PhD has amounted to?

I was brought back to periods in my life when the goals and aims in life seemed to have a trajectory.

I did all the science fair and debate leadership stuff in high school so that I could get into a school like Princeton.

I did Princeton so that I could learn to give it all up and be a missionary in China at a special needs’ orphanage.

But then that’s where the narrative started to get cloudy – why did I come back from China to do a PhD? What happened to “being a missionary”?

Did I have to do a PhD? What was all the pain and struggle for?

Obviously, there were ways I grew in the PhD, but my narrative-seeking, meaning-desiring self was struggling to put everything together in a way that didn’t leave loose ends, every turn in the road neatly explained into a coherent story.

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The other time I distinctly remember struggling through meaning-making was right after I had experienced a miscarriage of my first pregnancy.

In the span of a day, I had gone from a mother-to-be to not, and both my body and spirit were reeling from the whiplash of it all.

I remember people saying to me things like “everything will be okay, it will all work out in the end” – though surprisingly, those kind of answers came more from my non-believing friends, perhaps from a desire to say something meaningful in the face of suffering.

I know they meant well, but everything in me wanted to retort, “But what in your worldview actually supports that? What shred of evidence do you have that things will work out in the end?”

Back to my first question of what causes people to create redemption instead of contamination sequences.

I think we all – I include myself, my well-wishing friends and most likely you in this “we” – desire to see the good out of the bad.

The question is – what in your belief system actually supports that?

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You see, if you are an atheist, the universe is comprised of blind, meaningless chance collisions. There can be no meaning out of the freak accidents and suffering of the world. It just is.

If you believe in some higher power, or a force that holds the universe together, what makes you believe that force is good? What makes you think it has any interest in our small, indifferent lives or any power to work things out in our favor?

If you believe it is on us humans and our inner capacity (resilience, motivation, self-determination whatever you call it) to make things turn out for the better, do you actually believe we have the power to turn our lives around ourselves? To lift ourselves out of deep depression?

If you are a Buddhist or Hindu, karma says that you deserve the suffering in this life because of what you did in past lives. There is no “working out for good at the end” because you deserved it in the first place.

If you are a Jew or Muslim, you believe in the justice and sovereignty of a good God. There had to be a reason, though out of your comprehending.

And only a good and powerful God is able to work things out in our lives for an ultimate good. Thus, our goal in suffering is to submit to God’s purposes for our lives.

The Christian narrative takes that one step further.

Not only is God perfectly just and sovereign, but instead of standing indifferently apart from our suffering, He entered into it.

In fact, the focal point of Christianity is the cross where God Himself hung – but the story doesn’t end with Good Friday.

The story doesn’t end with death and suffering and submitting ourselves to the justice and sovereignty of God.

Because then came Easter Sunday – the ultimate redemption sequence – when what should have been the sad dissipation of a band of poor fishermen who believed in a Jewish rabbi who died at the hands of the powerful Roman empire ended up becoming the start of the largest movement in history.

Because one man rose from the grave and declared sin and death to be no more.

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As a pastor’s wife, I have the privilege of listening to sermons before they go live.

So yesterday, amidst Noah telling me his chin is red (we think it has something to do with his teething :P) and trying to get the peacock puzzle piece to fit into the hole right, I helped Peter workshop his Easter sermon on the historicity of the resurrection.

I think the data points – the empty tomb, the conversion of the scared disciples, the eyewitness accounts post-resurrection – all need to be seriously reckoned with, and there are many great resources out there for those who have doubts and questions on the resurrection (check out Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig, Lee Strobel for starters).

But back to my second question of how do we know if the narrative we are telling ourselves is based on reality.

I think it depends on whether the larger narrative within which your life story is based upon is real or not.

And if you are a Christian, whether or not you have the nitty gritty answers to the meaning of each twist and turn in your life, the truth is your story is encased within this larger arc of redemption.

That your life has hope not because you desperately want it so nor because you are concocting some sort of redemption sequence that stars you as the protagonist-hero of your life, but because there is One who has the power to make all things right, if not now in your current situation, then at the end of time.

The resurrection tells us that the arc of history bends towards redemption and points us toward His return.

He is not dead or impotent, but alive and reigning.

He is not deaf to the cries of our suffering, but is present, with us, and promises that one day, He will make all things new.

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Of all the memories I have of the few months after the miscarriage, as clouded as they were by my unanswered questioning, wandering and silent grief, the most salient one in my mind was the night we came back from the hospital.

I was still in the hospital gown stained with splotches of blood and my purple socks decorated with umbrellas of different colors.

Someone from church had bought us Thai food that was waiting in greasy takeout boxes at our doorstep when we got home.

And all I remember was sitting cross-legged next to Peter on our grey IKEA pull-out couch as we both gratefully tugged at the sticky Pad Thai noodles with wooden chopsticks, feeling the Holy Spirit present in a way we hadn’t felt in a very long time.

And in that moment, no answers were needed – the only thing we needed to know was that He was there with us, and that He was holding us together.

There was Good Friday pain, but there was also a tinge of Easter hope.

In a day, everything we had hoped for felt like it was falling apart but underneath that we had fallen onto a bedrock of hope that felt strangely more secure than any of the hopes we had constructed for our own lives.

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I am awake currently at 3:05a.m. writing this partly because I’m 34 weeks pregnant and apparently babies think between dinner and breakfast is too long to wait before a meal, but partly because I woke up just thinking about the resurrection and its implications and was too excited to fall back asleep.

But I probably should get back to bed so I actually have enough energy for our Easter service, so I will end my thoughts here.

Wishing you all a wonderful Easter – my prayer for all of us (including me) is that today we encounter the One who makes sense of our lives more than any narrative we can construct on our own.

Ending here with one of my favorite songs of late: