As I describe in The Shape of Joy, meaning in life is highly predictive of mental health and psychological resiliency. In studying meaning in life, psychologists have discovered that meaning in life has three vital ingredients: Coherence, purpose, and significance. Relevant for our discussions about how the modern world lost its story, coherence and purpose are each narrative in nature.
Specifically, meaning is experienced when our lives "make sense" to us. Coherence speaks to how all the parts and pieces of my life are fit together to make a whole. My life feels "connected" and I have the sense that I "get it." Basically, my life is a story and I can trace its plot.
Beyond coherence, purpose speaks to how our story is going somewhere. My life has a direction and a goal. I am here for a reason.
As I recount in The Shape of Joy, when our lives experience narrative disruption, when our lives no longer make sense to us or we lose track of our purpose and reason for living, we suffer mental health consequences. To be sure, we can have coherence and purpose without faith, but these efforts at self-generated meaning and self-selected purpose are provisional and effortful. Mental health becomes skating across thin narrative ice. Your self-curated story works until life rudely interrupts the plot.
Faith, by contrast, gifts you a story. You inhabit it. You don't need to make it up. Consequently, it is the story that carries you, especially those days when you lose the narrative thread of your life. This is one of the key reasons why, as I share in The Shape of Joy, faith and spirituality are predictive of mental health:
Your story is a gift.
