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" Pamay Bassey, 38 Chicago   Before: In the depths of grief After: Found spiritual meaning   Her Journey When her grandmother died in 2009, Pamay Bassey was understandably sad. When her father died of complications from prostate cancer just a few months later, she was bereft. When her boyfriend f four years dumped her soon after that, she was a wreck. She couldn&amp;#039;t find her way out of her funk.   Raised a Christian, Pamay was a longtime member of a church but didn&amp;#039;t actively attend. &amp;quot;I was lazy in prayer,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;You know, it was a &amp;#039;Thank God&amp;#039; before I drifted off to sleep, or a &amp;#039;Please, God, don&amp;#039;t let my father die&amp;#039; kind of thing.&amp;quot; As 2010 arrived, Pamay decided to make spiritual development a resolution and pledged to go to a different place of worship every week. &amp;quot;I was so gutted emotionally. I began to think, Isn&amp;#039;t that what God is for? To help you when you feel emotionally spent?&amp;quot;   So over the course of the year, she meditated with Hare Krishna monks in San Diego, attended a Wiccan festival near Chicago, sat in on services with the people of the Niger Delta in West Africa, prayed at a half-Indian, half-Pakistani congregation on the North Side of Chicago and visited a lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender\u2013friendly Pentecostal church in northwest Indiana, among others.   Along the way, she came to the conclusion that much of religion depends not only on your belief in the Deity, but also in the value of community and culture. &amp;quot;No matter where you go, people are gathering and trying to figure out life. There&amp;#039;s something wonderfully comforting about walking into a place and seeing that everyone is there to help one another with whatever life has thrown at them,&amp;quot; Pamay says. Realizing that everyone had some kind of struggle put her grief into perspective, and the more she understood that spirituality was about standing as a community, the more she realized that she was not struggling alone. She ended up keeping a journal of sorts, which she calls the 52 Weeks of Worship Project (My52WoW.com).   &amp;quot;I was looking for a life vest to get through the year, and it turned out to be my anchor to coming back to who I was before all of this sadness,&amp;quot; she says.   Pamay&amp;#039;s Makeover Tips   Commitment can sustain you: &amp;quot;The regularity of being somewhere every week gave me something to look forward to even when I was in my deepest sadness,&amp;quot; she says. Be humble &amp;quot;You may think you know a lot about life, but when you enter someone else&amp;#039;s house of worship, you realize that you have much to learn,&amp;quot; Pamay says. &amp;quot;That recognition reminds you that the world is bigger than you are\u2014and your problems shrink in comparison.&amp;quot;   Click here to go back to the main story page. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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