Living the Good Life
By Leif Gregersen
A young man struggling with schizophrenia found belonging in churches ranging from the Pentecostal to the Catholic, and everything in between.
It was a sunny summer Sunday and I had long, luxurious weeks to go before there was anything urgent to do. I had recently returned from Vancouver, BC, to Edmonton, hoping I could return to St. Albert, where I was born and raised. I missed my hometown. It was an affluent suburb and life was idyllic there. I had friends who I had known forever, and an active social life. But the sad truth was that, while St. Albert was a good place to grow up, I was now fully grown and had academic goals and dreams, like studying journalism. So I ended up in Edmonton, the nearby major city. It was hard facing up to no longer being a part of my hometown, and I have to admit I was more than a little lonely in Edmonton, not having family and friends nearby.
I had left Vancouver because I had a nervous breakdown that coincided with losing my best friend and ending a relationship with someone very special. I had been having the time of my life on the coast, attending commercial pilot school, pursuing a dream I had since my early teen years of being a Sergeant in the Air Cadets. But now I was broken and at rock bottom. Something about my life, beyond mental health, beyond looks or money, was missing.
In leaving Vancouver, I had made a decision to accept treatment for my schizophrenia, something I had been in denial of for years, and to establish myself as a respected member of a community. It seemed, now that I had received treatment and was on my way to recovery, that the chance of life getting to be as good as when I was growing up or when I was living on the coast was finally possible. One life lay behind me and another stretched out in front. I walked through the neighborhood that hot day with a mind open to the endless opportunities that a summer Sunday holds for a young man ready to do whatever it takes to build the good life.
I made my way to the edge of the low-rent neighborhood I lived in. A church, built in the shape of a pyramid, was located there. The parking lot was at full capacity, and I could hear singing—joyous singing!—going on inside. I had been there before and a sign had said: “Sunday service, 11:00 a.m.—all welcome.” So, I took it as an invitation. I walked in the doors and my life changed forever. Up until then, I had no clue as to what could truly make me a good person. I did have some faith in God, but no real way of knowing how to nurture those feelings, and I certainly hadn’t had the chance to fellowship with others my age who felt the same way.
The first thing I did was sit down in an empty pew. An usher quickly came up to me and asked me to move. At first, I thought I had done something wrong, but what he wanted was to seat me where the other young people sat.
The service was incredible. I followed along with the songs as best I could, and I felt a kind of glow in my heart, being in a place where over a thousand people were praising and worshipping God together. I had been to churches before, but this place was new, uplifting, and invigorating to me, and there were a lot of young people there. The usher who seated me told one of them I had just walked in off the street, and he made a point of befriending me and inviting me to a gathering after the service. In addition to encountering people I had known from St. Albert, I met Christians that day who I am still friends with now, 31 years later.
Over the coming years I would walk through the doors of many places of worship and meeting places.
Over the coming years I would walk through the doors of many places of worship and meeting places—each experience, each new interaction revealing to me a little more of the good life I was searching for but had yet to fully understand.
I had gone to churches before. As a teen I went to youth groups with my sister until she moved on from her faith and moved out of our house. Later, I had gone to services with my brother, mostly when I was grounded, knowing the only way I would be allowed to leave the house was if I went to church. Recently, a friend had taken me around to a few services—some Catholic, some Baptist. Everything I saw in this new church seemed to be what I was looking for. A place to feel at home, a place to have a sense of community and to focus on what was important—the love of the Triune God, and fellowship with other believers.
After attending the service, I felt moved to study the Bible more. I tried learning just by reading, but I was lost. I didn’t know there was an Old Testament and New Testament. I didn’t understand that, woven through the fabric of all sixty-six books of that NIV Bible, was a thread of Jesus: prophecy about Jesus, the birth of Jesus, his life and death on the cross and resurrection told in four Gospels, finishing with letters to the early churches and the Revelation to John. It took years for me to learn this on my own, but going to this church helped.
One of the main problems at that time was that I had little structure in my life. Some weeks I would make it to church, other times I wouldn’t show up for months. Friends and family would remark that I seemed to do much better when I was in regular attendance. My habits made it hard for me to get involved in anything more than the frequent gatherings in restaurants for fellowship, which was basically “hanging out” with the other young people in my church. Often after the Sunday evening service, the youth would go to another service that brought together young Christians from all over the city called “Glimpse of Glory,” which was all praise and worship. There were also smaller Bible studies and fellowship gatherings at different church members’ homes.
At the time, I was suffering from schizophrenia and anxiety and needed a lot of medications. Though I did what I could to hold down jobs, I was unable to work full time and was on disability benefits. Some of the people at church seemed to judge me for this; it was hard to fit in with the largely middle-class, privileged youth who had no concept of someone having a mental illness. They constantly seemed to try to find some way to blame me for my shortcomings. Towards the end of my time with that church, I would spend hours each night listening to radio Bible study programs and services, more hours reading the Bible, and then some time reading other books or operating my computer—but still never feeling like a true part of the church.
I came to what I felt was a point of stagnation. It didn’t seem that the church had much more to teach me. By some odd quirk of fate, I was visiting with my cousin in a popular area of Edmonton where many artists congregate, and two young women who were Catholic walked up and introduced themselves. One of them had been in Air Cadets, as I had been, and we became instant friends. They talked with us for a long time over coffee, and then invited us to their Bible study. I welcomed any chance to learn about the Bible, and I admit I had the idea in my head that I would go there and minister to the poor, unsaved Catholics. Instead, I met some of the most wonderful people I had ever come across in my life. They were kind, dedicated to caring for each other and the needs of everyone, especially the poor, the sick, and the marginalized. Until I went there, I had no concept of the depth of the love of God those people embodied.
I had been yearning for belonging.
Then, one day during a Bible study, they showed a video of a theologian who talked about a lot of things I thought Catholics had gotten wrong. The narrator in the video answered every question I ever had about holiness and the Catholic faith. I was so blown away that I needed some private space to think. I excused myself from the meeting and went home, not knowing what to do or say. I called up a friend’s mom, who I knew was a devout Catholic. She was very kind but didn’t really know how to help me. Within a few weeks I was excited to sign up for a class called Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA), the course one takes to become a Catholic.
It is possible I was never destined to finish the course. Once again, my mental health took a turn for the worse. I became very delusional and erratic and needed to go back into the hospital. But this time, it was worse than ever before, and I had the bad luck to get a doctor who I just didn’t get along with. I spent six long months in the psychiatric hospital. But one good thing came of it. I met the hospital chaplain, who was a Catholic nun. I had told her about being in RCIA and she told me that RCIA was something that Christ himself had begun, by trying to help people become part of a community. I realized when she told me those words that all my life, even when I lived with my family, I had been yearning for belonging, no matter where I found it.
One of the things that originally caused me to steer clear of Catholic churches, despite how beautiful and holy I found them to be, was how it seemed priests and nuns were being asked to do impossible things, like never marrying, never falling in love or having children. How could they understand those they ministered to? My whole life had been ruled by my connections to the opposite sex; I just couldn’t conceive of what priests and nuns gave up to be servants of God. It didn’t seem to make sense. But after getting to know a few priests and nuns, all of my misgivings went away. I found a beauty in what they did, what they sacrificed in their lives to better connect with God. In a strange way, the Catholic church, after I got to know those in it, seemed to have an element of stories I had read or seen in movies about castles and knights and the simple truth of God’s love. I just wish I had learned this before seeking community in bars and pool halls in my youth.
At the end of my six-month hospital stay, I went to a group home for people with mental health difficulties. With all the quirky people in there, I didn’t think I would last the night, but I ended up staying for 15 years. There is something truly healing about being in a place where everyone is either a person with a mental illness or a staff member trained to deal with mental illnesses. In a place like that, there is no judgment and very little stigma. This means a person is free to make friends (no one is better equipped to be a friend to someone with a mental illness than someone else who has one) and to live however they choose. I had found my community, and it allowed me to go 20 years without needing to return to the hospital, and then only for a short time to adjust one of my medications.
Soon after arriving at the group home, I sought out a church in the neighborhood to attend. In a way, it felt good to be in the group home and be able to make a fresh start. There would be no one to judge me and no one to say one church was better than another. With a newfound sense that I wanted to worship God and face him as an adult, not a youth, I found two churches that were to become influential in my faith journey. One was the small Danish Lutheran church I was baptised in as a baby, whose pastor I talk to often, and the other was the Sacred Heart Church of the First Peoples. This is the only Catholic church dedicated to serving indigenous people. The priest was an amazing man who had been a convert himself. He had even been in the military before becoming a priest, something that helped us connect. I will never forget the kindness he showed me when I needed shoes and he gave me, at no cost, a recent donation of expensive sneakers, or when he counseled me after the death of my mother.
I now go to church for different reasons than when I was 20.
I now go to church for different reasons than when I was 20. I go to pray, often to light a candle. I go, even though I am not a Catholic and may never be. I like to feel the joy in the air as the congregation shares the songs, words, and phrases of the mass. I like to go because I feel that priests and others in church vocations are caring, dedicated, holy people. When I line up to receive communion, instead of partaking in the sacrament of the body and blood of Jesus Christ (a sip of wine and a small wafer), I put my hand over my heart and ask to receive a blessing. Every time I attend a mass, I feel changed. I also love that there are people I have known since I first moved to this neighborhood who join hand-in-hand with me to celebrate God’s glory. I have to confess that when I was younger, I attended church for all the wrong reasons. I wanted friends, I wanted connections that would help me get jobs. More than once, I faked a stronger belief in God than I really had. It was only after years of searching that I started to live my life as a spiritual person, and I have found that attending a Catholic church is something that came at the right time and the right place for me to nurture that part of my life.
The Catholic Church has gone through some difficult times recently. There is much evidence of abuse from priests, and in Canada we are just now beginning to understand the scope of what was done to indigenous children in residential schools run by Catholic and Anglican churches. Last year, churches were burned to the ground by angry people, and even the Sacred Heart Church of the First Peoples was defaced.
Despite horrible abuses and the failures of the corporate church, I have found that what it all comes down to, whether one is attending a Pentecostal church or a Catholic one, was told to me by one of my favorite people from the church in my old neighborhood where I went for eight years: “Don’t let people color your beliefs about God. People suck. It’s God that’s good.”
Now, as I look back on a 31-year journey of faith, there are a lot of things that have changed. I began my adult life as a student pilot with ambitions to join the Air Force and become a jet fighter pilot. I had been flying one kind of plane or another since age 12. I was a good pilot and I learned fast. There was every chance of me accomplishing my dream—that is, until schizophrenia sidelined me. In a way, I see my disability as a blessing.
If I were still a pilot, I would be an empty human being, feeding my ego, hoping to beat the odds of not being involved in a war or an accident, always chasing a new thrill. Now I am a much more spiritual person, albeit a flawed one, feeding my soul. I do this by volunteering, by giving of myself and of my resources. I claim very little for myself, and I feel that by “grounding” myself constantly in prayer, worship, and fellowship (all of which come with regular church attendance), I stay healthy, sane, and fulfilled. And I never have to worry about being cared about or loved. These things just come with living the good life.
Photos by Unsplash Photographers.
Leif Gregersen lives with a mental illness which prevented him from completing a degree program, but doesn’t prevent him from teaching creative writing and current events to patients in his area psychiatric hospital, through The Learning Centre Literacy Association. Leif also speaks to high schools, colleges, universities, and even The Edmonton Police Recruit class about mental health, stigma, and his own experiences through The Schizophrenia Society of Alberta. Leif is an avid reader and lifelong learner and currently also attends Toastmasters.