The Journey to Jesus
How family breakdown ignited my spiritual search
Although my father took my sister and I to church when we were young, I had no real understanding of the Christian faith. Church felt rather like a boring Sunday obligation. There were no discussions of matters of faith in our home, which might have had something to do with our mother not being a Christian. My father once told me that he and our mother had made the decision not to baptise us because they wanted us to make up our own minds about Christianity.
When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in her early fifties it came at a time when the relationship between my parents was strained. I remember sitting with my sister in our living room watching television and hearing my parents arguing in the kitchen and there being many uncomfortable silences at the dinner table.
My mother’s illness caused her to begin to explore matters of spirituality. She became interested in meditation and alternative therapies and paths to healing. She was determined to recover. And as the bad news related to my mother’s health came again and again, she went further and further in her spiritual efforts.
Being especially close to my mother, I took an interest in the spiritual teachers and practices she was exploring. Both my mother and I were fascinated with audio recordings by Deepak Chopra, Alan Watts and others. I know that my mother found a great deal of hope and inspiration in these teachers, but they didn’t provide her with the answer of how to heal from her cancer.
My mother passed away at the age of 55 in 2003. She had been incredibly brave throughout her illness and a real inspiration to her family. In the years that followed, the spiritual journey that my mother had undertaken continued to influence me greatly and I immersed myself in a quest to understand illness and healing, a quest that eventually led me to attend psychotherapy for the first time.
Attending psychotherapy was hugely transformative. I had so much repressed emotion that I didn’t know how to express. I had no sense of the boundaries that are important in healthy relationships and no idea how to understand and express my feelings. My psychotherapist taught me a lot about these things, and I’m incredibly grateful for the sessions we had over a period of several years.
While my experience with psychotherapy was very helpful, I struggled with poor mental health in my twenties and experienced a great deal of depression. I had been affected by the breakdown of my parents’ relationship and my mother’s illness more than I thought. In 2007, at the age of 25, I experienced an episode of psychosis and ended up being admitted to psychiatric hospital.
My admission to psychiatric hospital proved to be a major turning point in my spiritual journey, and quite unexpectedly. I had previously had little real interest in the Christian faith but on this occasion I asked the staff on the ward for a Bible. In retrospect, this was a huge blessing and mercy, and in the weeks I spent reading that Bible in my hospital room I experienced a transformation of my heart and developed a strong faith in Jesus and a personal relationship with God.
Becoming a Christian was the culmination of a spiritual journey that had been ignited by my mother’s illness and which had led me to explore Eastern philosophy and the New Age spiritual movement. I was fortunate enough to find the peace that I had been searching for, and which I suppose my mother had been searching for, in Jesus Christ.