By Linda Lee Albert
But there were challenges ahead. Jim had retired
abruptly from his work, leaving me to handle our
personal affairs in order to save him from stress, and
his longtime trusted assistant to carry on in his behalf
until we could figure out how to sell our investments
and close down the business. He no longer went to the
office and with no retirement plans in place, life
appeared to be over as far as he was concerned. He spent
long days sitting around the house in his bathrobe. I
would try to perk him up by encouraging him to think of
what still lay ahead for us - some of our children yet
to marry - weddings to plan or attend - grandchildren to
look forward to - new places to explore. But this only
appeared to make him feel worse. He felt hopeless, and
was ashamed of his inability to improve his spirits.
Then I learned from a nun, who was teaching a course for
spiritual directors which I was taking at the time, that in
Catholic tradition, hope is not considered something you can
force into being through your own will power, but rather, is
a gift from God that comes through grace. I was stunned to
hear this.
Having grown up with the notion that “God helps those who
help themselves,” I was a strong believer in action, in the
idea that we have to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps
in order for anything worthwhile to happen. But things were
not good at home and I was willing, as I usually am, to
consider any idea that might be helpful. Sometimes the best
gifts come when our backs are against the wall, or from
worlds different than our own.
If it was true that we humans cannot actually will hope,
then my efforts to persuade Jim to feel more hopeful were
clearly failing for good reason. Not only that, they were
undoubtedly exacerbating the pressure he felt under to find
his way when the path he planned to be on had clearly closed
down on him. I returned home, told him about what I had
learned that day in class, and apologized.
If hope could only come as a gift, then there was nothing
my husband could do to be hopeful when hope had disappeared.
There was no point wasting energy beating himself up about
his lack of success in trying to do the impossible. It was
hard enough to be without hope. What he could do instead, we
reasoned, what was still within his power, was to begin to
hope for hope. It was a gentle recognition and a doable one.
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