Caregiver's Diary: Spirituality is the Human Refusal to Live Only For Oneself

I was born into a world where religion had shape, sound and smell. It had bells, candles, hymns, incense, feast days, fasting days, Sunday clothes and ancestral memory. In Kerala, religion does not merely live in churches, temples and mosques; it spills into streets, kitchens, conversations, calendars and family histories. It gives names to children, rituals to grief and choreography to hope. One cannot grow up in such a world and pretend to be untouched by it.

Yet, as I grew older, and perhaps as I listened more carefully to suffering, my relationship with formal religion became less certain. I could no longer believe that God belonged to one vocabulary, one building, one denomination, one tribe or one authorised interpretation of the sacred. Too much cruelty has been committed by people who believed they had God securely in their possession.

In my early adult life, as a psychiatrist in London, I met people at times when life had become unbearable. Their suffering did not arrive label­led Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist or agnostic. Depression did not ask for baptismal certificates. Grief did not check theological correctness. Fear, loneliness, shame and despair spoke a language older than doctrine. Sitting with patients, I often felt that the most sacred thing in the room was not a belief, but attention.

Now, in the later season of my life in Kochi, my spirituality has become even quieter. My wife lives with advanced Parkinson’s disease. She depends on care for almost everything that healthy people perform without thought. There are medicines to be given, meals to be managed, movements to be assisted, anxieties to be soothed and small emergencies that arrive without appointment. The day is divided not by bells of worship, but by the needs of another body.

Caregiving is not sentimental. It is repetitive, tiring and often invisible. It has no grand music. It does not always reward one with gratitude, because illness itself can exhaust the language of gratitude. Yet, it has taught me more about spirituality than many sermons I have heard. To lift someone gently, to wait without irritation, to understand a half-formed sentence, to preserve dignity when the body has become unreliable—these are not merely domestic acts. They are, in their own modest way, liturgies.

I do not mean that caregiving makes one saintly. There are mornings when I am impatient, evenings when I am tired, and nights when I wonder why human beings are given so much to bear. But spirituality, as I now understand it, is not the absence of such questions. It is the refusal to let them harden our hearts.

Transcendence in Small Things

Religions often speak of transcendence, but I find transcendence now in very small things: the touch of a hand, the kindness and courage of a nurse, the loyalty of a caregiver, the kindness of a son calling from another country, the fragile smile of a disabled person who still recognises love. These moments do not prove God. They do something subtler. They prevent the world from becoming merely mechanical.

I remain grateful to the religious traditions that shaped me. Christianity gave me the image of a suffering God. Hinduism gave me the sense that the sacred may appear in many forms. Buddhism taught me to look steadily at suffering without ornament. Islam reminded me of surrender. The Dalai Lama and the late Pope Francis, both of whom I had the privilege of meeting, have reinforced my belief that compassion is the deepest grammar of the spiritual life.

But I no longer feel the need to defend one religious enclosure against another. The questions that matter to me now are simpler and more difficult: does a belief make us kinder? Does it help us sit beside suffering without fleeing into easy explanations?

An Unreligious Spiritual Man

Each morning, Kochi wakes with its familiar sounds: birds, traffic, temple music, church bells, the call to prayer and the clatter of domestic life. I hear them all not as competing noises, but as human beings trying, in different ways, to reach beyond themselves. Perhaps that is what spirituality is: the human refusal to live only for oneself. It is the instinct to bow before mystery, to serve without applause, to love when love has become labour and to believe that tenderness is not weakness but wisdom.

I remain unreliably religious, but stubbornly spiritual. I no longer know whether God is best found in doctrine, ritual or silence. But I know this much: whenever a human being cares for another without calculation, the sacred has not disappeared from the world.

George John is a retired consultant psychiatrist from London, now living in Kochi, India