FILE PHOTO -- The Flat Hat Jill Rowley

Confusion Corner
Stress becomes religious Experience

By Jill Rowley

Extreme stress can be a religious experience. It's not unlike drugs or church, at least according to my more experienced friends.

Admittedly, I don't have much in the way of formal religious experience, so I can't compare this to the high I get off stress. I didn't really do church as a child. Instead, I spent Sunday mornings taking a pilgrimage on the cartoon express or, later, reading the paper and communing with coffee.

My parents haven't been regular churchgoers since before my birth. My mother is a fallen Methodist. I suppose that wasn't as painful as falling from the High Church, like falling off a chair as opposed to over the side of the Sears Tower. My father views organized religion as the opiate of the masses, in keeping with the communism he somehow managed to pick up while serving in the military during the Cold War. Being a Trotskyite, I guess he had as much ideological beef with Soviet communism as anyone else, but that's a little complex for Army-brand patriotism.

Despite my family's indifference, growing up, I was friends with lots of good kids who made unsuccessful attempts at saving my soul. I went to a variety of places of worship, which were experiences that were overwhelmingly pleasant and forgettable.

These are all completely overshadowed by the Easter when I was seven and went to an especially fundamentalist church with one of my friends. An imaginative and unstable kid, I was a little upset by the graphically violent description of the Easter story this particular Sunday school service decided to read. I locked myself in the bathroom and, cowering, sang breakfast cereal jingles to myself until the thorns and blood and crucifixion part was over and it was time to find chocolate eggs. Stained glass and bunnies still creep me out.

If I hadn't been traumatized by the idea of formal religion, I think the epiphanies and spirituality I would have experienced would be a lot like the feeling I get during the most stressful week of the semester. When I haven't slept for three days, and I have more caffeine in my veins than hemoglobin, I start to get a little weird.

I get very introspective, because I'm not functioning well enough to cope with the outside world. Not being able to form logical thoughts leads to some pretty profound revelations. Only about half of these turn out to be completely insane when reflected on after some sleep.

I also get very benevolent. There's a mean and grumpy stage to being stressed out, but around the time of the second consecutive all-nighter, all your malice melts away leaving just the core nougaty goodness of humanity. I wouldn't go so far as to say I become beatific, though the frizzy blond mess formed by my unkempt hair does have a halo-like quality to it.

More than anything else, what makes stress feel spiritual is the way in which it connects you to your fellow man and grants you a kind of ethereal, illogical serenity.

I observed this during my last econ test. As I sat there staring at the questions, so completely baffled that I couldn't even make up fake answers, a sense of genuine calm came over me. I just accepted the fact that I was going to fail. It was liberating.

I looked around the class, seeing that nearly everyone else was as confused as I. We groaned, shook our heads and lay down our pencils in surrender. But we did it together. I felt bonded to those people like I never had before. I had empathy for everyone, even that girl I usually want to kill for constantly asking dumb questions. She looked up to gaze hopelessly around the room, and we made eye contact. And we understood each other. It was a beautiful moment.

It's almost enough to make me wish I weren't a heathen. But then, if stress is that good, think what a great bonding experience hell must be.

Jill Rowley is the Confusion Corner columnist. God came to her in a dream and told her to write this column, so if you think it's sacrilegious, take it up with Him.