Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [71]
Because of the spiking, all these normal emotions have an exclamation point after them. They’re scrawled in huge red capital letters. People may hear music or words, presumably from their memory bank—and instead of being just snatches of remembered sound, they are music from the heavenly spheres or messages from God. They may see flashes of light and interpret it as an angel visiting from heaven. They may feel a sense of unreality and disconnection from the world and believe that they are experiencing an alternate reality. They may sense the presence of another being and believe that presence is God, or the devil. They can feel terror or (in very rare cases) ecstasy. And these sights, sounds, and feelings have cosmic weight, because the storm in their brain is telling them so.
If this electrical storm rolls through often enough, it physically rewires the brain. And in this may lurk a clue as to why many people—Christian Pentecostals, Orthodox Jews, Sufi mystics—seem to look at the world through the prism of faith. It may be that their brains are tailor-made for God.
Tailor-made for God
On January 22, 2007, I drove into the sprawling complex of Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. The day was bitterly cold, gray, with snow flurries threatening a storm that would soon drop a foot of snow on the city. Yet this was nothing compared with the neurological storms that I was about to witness. Dr. Gregory Barkley, the director of the epilepsy clinic, had graciously set up appointments for me to interview patients whose epileptic seizures had transcendent elements.
One of them was Mary. In the photo I took of her, Mary wears a royal-blue turtleneck and black pants. Her brown hair is streaked with gray and worn in a pageboy style reminiscent of the 1970s. Her head is cocked to the right, her narrow shoulders droop, and her lips press together in a sad, straight line.
The picture deceives.When Mary talks, she springs to life, a jack-in-the-box whose dramatic gestures sweep you into her sphere and shower you with a joy that belies her chronic disease. Mostly you feel her obsessive love for God.Very few sentences pass her lips without mention of the Blessed Sacrament or Jesus, the lives of ancient saints or present-day nuns.
Raised Catholic, Mary suffered her first tonic-clonic seizure when she was fifteen years old.With aunts who were nuns and a cousin who became a Jesuit priest, Mary was rich soil for a bumper crop of Catholic faith. I saw something urgent about Mary’s spirituality: it saturated her life, it dominated her vision, it drove her relentlessly to share the Gospel. As she described her life, it seemed that every moment contained dual meaning—in this world and in the spiritual realm.
Nothing was coincidence. She recalled one afternoon when her seizure lasted only about thirty seconds.“And then I came to, and I said, ‘Well thank you, Lord, I didn’t even bite the sides of my mouth, Jesus!’ And then a week later, I read that a man who had written a book on prayer that I had read, Father Ed Farrell, had died in his afternoon nap. I thought that was so neat, that maybe that was part of the repository of grace in the world. I believe in the mystical body of Christ, so maybe that [brief seizure] was required of me for his happy passage.”
Or consider the day in 1985 when she was diagnosed with cancer.
“You want to know something neat?” Mary asked, leaning forward. “They operated on me on August 15, which is the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary! And I didn’t pick that date. They did. And the first time I was seen by the surgeon afterwards was the first Saturday in May, and the month of May was dedicated to the Blessed Mother. And then my last appointment with the surgeon was on the feast of the Epiphany.”
In recent years, researchers have searched for a reason why temporal lobe epilepsy would render a person hyperreligious.