We must adopt hope.
- Small Offerings
- Apr 24, 2020
- 3 min read
Friday 24th April 2020 Infrequently I suffer 'panic attacks'. They usually occur in the early hours of the morning. I wake sweating, with a high heart rate and feeling gripped by dread. The dread is often difficult to identify and analyse.
Foolishly last night I watched two television programmes which deeply disturbed me. One was of a 17 year old who killed/ murdered a school girl who refused to have sex with him even though she had with a mutual friend.
It was a thorough analysis of relationships, of denial and of protection, of a sudden blind act with consequences beyond imagining. Somehow the hapless boy, the distraught mother, the respectable step father, the siblings all contributed to a menacing and dark, disturbing drama.
Then I watched a catch up piece about a gay young man living at home, in love with a friend but in the closet as surrounded by a homophobic family and work mates. His coming out caused the most appalling reactions and his exile from family and his loss of friend and his total aloneness.
Together these programmes got under my armour, my carapace, my defences.
Why do I watch them? I always hope for a happy ending but the genres seem dark and forbidding yet I still watch.
Years ago a friend helped with a charity for Bulgarian orphans. A documentary had been made on the plight of orphans in two orphanages. She asked me to watch it with her, a three hour film.
After 20 minutes I felt sick to the stomach and said I could not watch further. She rounded on me: 'these orphans suffer this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year and if they survive maybe as many as 12 years in total if not more. The least you can do is be with them for three hours'.
I can still see the horrors of it. Yet now the charity has done great things and life is better for them.
I am not prone to the "black dog" of depression but I know its effects and have seen them. I listened some time ago to a young man as he described to me the deep black abyss into which he sank utterly bereft of hope, of support and how that abyss had no end, no final destination but grew darker and deeper and heavier.
His description frightened me.
I write of this because this morning I was reading of St John of the Cross and his sufferings in life. He described the feelings of abandonment by God, his Church, his fellow Friars. He described it as the " dark night of the soul". The article mentioned being on the threshold of uncertainty, the chaos thereof and the terrifying paralysis and despair engendered.
Certainly we know of suicides and mental disruption consequent on despair.
We cannot predict the future. We do not know the consequences of the lock down at this time of pandemic. Yet there is one area where although we cannot predict the future we can prepare for it. That is the attitude we adopt.
We must adopt hope.
St John wrote poems of love to his God even as he was imprisoned, flogged and felt the abandonment by God in a real sense and of his church. Those poems have brought hope and solace and conversion from despair to millions of people. Those poems kept him human and sane and even led to his ecstasies and holiness.
Job's wife when Job was surrounded by disaster, bewilderment, grief and loss and misfortune told him to "curse God and die". Rather Job went silent and held faith and hope in his Lord.
We too must hold hope and faith in our hearts.
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