Of Spiritual Feeling

Reckoning with the large, the small, and the good life. 

By Evan Rossi

Illustration by Isabelle Oh

On a gloomy October night in the heart of St. Paul’s Chapel, four musicians handling a violin, cello, clarinet, and piano attempted to conjure the end of time. The theme of the concert was spiritual music, and the quartet had decided on Quartet for the End of Time composed by Olivier Messiaen. Conceived inside a German prisoner-of-war camp, the eight-movement work is a figurative gesture toward revelations large and small. Messiaen was inspired by capital-R Revelation—on the sheet music he wrote of the vision of the Angel of the Apocalypse descending from heaven in blaze of glory—but also by those everyday, fleeting moments of light he experienced within the bleak confines of Stalag VIII-A. Messiaen and his fellow prisoners found hope in their music as they wrote and rehearsed for months. The guards, out of a sick sense of humor, or perhaps the desire to appear lenient and indulge the camp with artistic vitality, let them cheat their work. Then came one dark, frigid January night where the musicians debuted their ethereal quartet for a crowd of 400. The piano was out of tune, and some say the cello was missing a string. Yet for 50 minutes the musicians gave life to their creation, and for 50 minutes their world stopped on its axis.

I attended the concert of Messiaen’s masterwork out of a desire to slow down and deepen my own fledgling sense of spirituality. Columbia Religious Life had promoted the performance and arranged for a pre-concert lecture to accompany the music. I figured that the event could be an opportunity to cultivate some intention and reflection in my week. Such moments are hard to come by at Columbia, in New York City, and as a young person striking out into a world careening from crisis to crisis. A personal project of mine over the past year has been to apportion time mindfully, training myself to feel comfortable with allowing my attention to roam without distraction. The practice involves more than just setting my phone out of reach. I will myself to listen to the wind brushing through trees, the insistent cries of car horns and sirens, and the thoughts bubbling up unbidden from my unconscious. At times it is frightening to let myself be still in such a vulnerable state. Yet in these empty spaces, new shoots of spiritual emotion have quickly grown and blossomed. Within the silence I begin to make out the outline of something, a force that lies outside the limits of my understanding.

I’m certain that my past self would be shocked more than anyone by my increasing openness to spirituality. Throughout my time in high school and the beginning of college I had let an impassioned yet superficial skepticism serve as my ideological anchor. Revelation had little to no room to make an impact upon me. If anything seemed to be outside the reach of reason—an abiding hypochondria, bouts of infatuation and love, quantum mechanical uncertainty—I knew that the key to making sense of it was only to improve my own knowledge. The scientific method was my faith, and the holy texts, arXiv and Khan Academy. When we came to study Descartes in Contemporary Civilization, I stopped at the end of each section to summon up my mental bulwarks. He must be wrong about God. Right?

This attitude was somewhat preordained. My parents had brought me up squarely within the bounds of a Reform Judaism that said “Yes” to temple on the mornings of Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur, but “No” to any restrictions on using phones, cars, or maintaining an anxious link to the worldly life. In middle school, I carried myself through bar mitzvah preparation with a distinct type-A energy. Hebrew text and trope markings offered a chance to demonstrate my mastery even over a foreign medium. I didn’t quite know what I was saying, other than that it had something to do with conducting a laborious census of the twelve tribes of Israel. A few years later, I approached my confirmation class less out of a desire to reaffirm my faith as an adult and more to show off my burgeoning political consciousness. Arguing with my rabbi over the merits of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign seemed like the best use of my time on weeknights. Once my institutional journey was over, I was left with a certificate bestowed over Zoom and a spiritual reservoir drained by an all-commanding reason. 

My arrival at Columbia didn’t change much until my journey of intellectual inquiry crashed into the brick wall that is life. Over Thanksgiving break of my freshman year, I received news of my childhood friend’s death by suicide. For a while afterward I was left with an empty hole where my heart used to be. I became acquainted with a numbness that settled like fog, lacking any solid points to grab, strike or resist. Eventually time and communal support worked their will until the question “why can’t I cry?” was replaced with “where do I go from here?” I didn’t experience any apparent revelation following on the heels of my grief. But perhaps within there was already something growing, something mysterious and illogical—the preparation of a sense attuned to all that I couldn’t yet grasp, inspired by the intimate ties binding grief, communal ritual, and spirituality.

What was true for me in my grief is also true for other members of the Columbia community. Dr. Karissa Thacker, Pluralism Associate at Religious Life, says that spiritual staff and advisors on campus tend to be visited most during life’s most difficult moments, including profound loss. “When people are grieving, cynicism isn’t there,” Thacker told me. Those who I spoke to at Religious Life understand their dual roles as counselors confronting tragedy as well as stewards of resources dedicated for spiritual communities. Rev. Dr. Ian Rottenberg, the Dean of Religious Life, says that a central goal is to create a “space for students to gather and think together” as they take a pause. Students here are driven, ambitious, and career-oriented, but often fail to take adequate time to reflect, Dean Rottenberg acknowledged. The programming at Earl Hall, St. Paul’s Chapel, and other multifaith spaces on campus aims to fill in the gap, or rather, to create a gap where collective silences can foster personal healing. 

Religious Life staff have also identified a key trend at Columbia that applies to campuses around the country: a substantial population of students don’t subscribe to a specific religion, but feel connected to larger, unexplainable forces nonetheless. They point to recent surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center which found that 65% of 18-29 year-olds nationwide consider themselves very or somewhat spiritual, even as only 54% belong to traditional religious communities. This broad sense of spirituality has created new opportunities for faith groups on campus to program for a generation seeking more pluralistic opportunities and practices.

Thacker is spearheading one attempt to capture this energy: a group titled “Coffee, Conversation, and Spirituality” that meets each week in Earl Hall to discuss life’s largest questions from diverging angles. In the sessions I’ve attended, the topics have ranged from the Buddhist principle of nonattachment to the modernist compromise that is Alain de Botton’s Atheism 2.0. The participants are wonderfully diverse and hail from around the globe. As a consequence, each session the room is filled with pure experience—individual struggles, personal religious epiphanies, and cultural wisdom blend together to create a technicolor quilt of shared spirituality.

In Thacker’s words, “Education is not just about the intellect. It’s about the whole person.” I see the truth of this statement each week in the midst of conversation. My peers and I gather together out of a desire to develop some nagging spiritual theme lodged in our thoughts. We seek out theories and traditions of the past that may shed wisdom on the not-so-unique struggles of modernity. After sharing our feelings, we continue on with our lives but now buoyed by the process of finding truth through dialogue. I believe in the potential for a spiritual consciousness fostered through community to serve as a counterweight to the incessant stressors and demands of being a student at Columbia. Ultimately, as Thacker explained to me, the question is whether we are “human beings vs. human doings.”

And so, seeking a respite from the chaos, I let myself be led along by Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.” In the manner of many modern composers, the music was largely discordant and abstract. Imitation of birdcalls by the clarinet tended toward shrill melodic fragmentation. Heavy rhythmic ostinatos in the accompanying instruments established a sense of impending doom yet left me flagging and uneasy. Then came the fifth movement, Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus, a lyrical duet between the cello and piano which shook me out of my repose with its passionate expressions of harmonic color. I tried to picture Messiaen writing the melodies on musical supplies smuggled across barbed wire fences and prison gates. I struggled to picture him transforming images from Revelation into music within a Europe torn by arrogant attempts to revive a dead culture, to stop the progression of history, and to seek a social purity that cannibalized human life. The demagogues fruitlessly strove to replicate what Messiaen could do only through his spiritual art: achieve the end of time.

Walking out of St. Paul’s Chapel I was left with the kinds of big, unresolvable questions that arise from every great work of art. Was the music an affront to the tremendous suffering of the Second World War or an attempt to communicate the truths behind suffering? Did Messiaen see the destruction of culture and life as the arrival of the apocalypse? Even as I made no progress on resolving these questions, I felt confident that spiritual feeling had touched Messiaen and traveled through his music to me. Through vast reaches of time, we were connected, at least for that night.

As I reckoned with my swirling thoughts on the divine, I reached out to a friend on campus who I knew had had a spiritual awakening of her own. I met Miracle St. Kitts in the first days of freshman year, however we had drifted apart since then as she explored Christian life on campus, while I experimented with theater and the arts. Brought back together under a shared connection to spirituality, I asked her about the ways in which her relationship with the Bible and God impacts her daily life. She explained the “comfort in your own feelings” gained by religious feeling, and her deeply-rooted belief that “your own inadequacies don’t define who you are.” In response to the relentless stress culture of Columbia, she sees importance in the act of “surrender[ing] your worries to a higher power you know loves you and cares for you.” Reconnecting with a close friend between midterm papers and exams, I felt comforted by the idea of such a relinquishment of control.

The “yous” in Miracle’s words may become an I, an us, or a we. They may not. Religion and spirituality defy any one-size-fits-all prescription. As young people we face the question of how to live in the best way that we can. Spirituality of any kind offers one potential light to better guide us. In reducing our place in the face of something vast, we can be freer to sail out into the dark of the night, training our gaze outward, faithful that there is meaning just over the horizon.