Last night I watched the movie “The Big Chill”, the story of a gathering of friends at a funeral for a friend, who had committed suicide. What was most interesting was the opening scene, where the minister expresses his anger at the despair and the loss of hope in this man. An arresting scene.
I remember my own moment like that. The despair, at the end of my drinking. I felt hopeless. I had lost hope that alcohol would ever again work for me. It had failed me at last. Yet I knew that I was condemned to go on drinking. Hit with this moment of insanity I chose to kill myself.
Thomas Merton described despair as a pride so stiff necked that it would rather choose hell than to accept help from the hand above. I couldn’t or wouldn’t ask for help. I was totally dependent on my own resources and I had none.
Shortly thereafter I was restored to hope by a couple of men, who asked me if I wanted help. For some reason beyond myself, I accepted. Then I heard about the possibility of a solution to my problem with alcohol and the lights went on in the blackness within. Hope.
First I had to lose hope in the one thing I thought could sustain me; alcohol. Only then could I be restored to a new hope within. And that hope was reinforced at my first meeting, when I saw that whatever it was was working in the lives of the men and women sitting at that table. I felt my first real experience of homecoming.
Later I was to learn that hope was the foundation to a faith that worked, which could evolve into the love I lacked. All this premised on perseverance and the discovery of what was behind all this; God. A loving God within whom I could place my hope to raise me from a state of hopeless! ness and transform me into a real person free of alcohol and the life that had led me there.
Each day I live, it is up to me to choose to renew this hope, this pact with God, and strengthen my faith, and to return the love so freely given to me. Each day I must act in gratitude for this way of life and act accordingly by extending to others the possibility of the gift of life. I pray that I may do so always.
This is what I was thinking. Ned