I love the movie "It's a Wonderful Life". My wife does not. It makes her a little mad really. A lot mad actually. It's always been a mystery to me why she won't watch it with me. In certain areas, we just don't see things the same way. It's a mystery, but not all that surprising. She finds beauty in things that are beautiful. I am ever struggling to see the beauty in broken things. "What's that honey, another black and white picture of a desolate, abandoned barn?" is something she might comment. She mocks with love, but truly she does not "get" it. And she's not wrong in mocking. It's a little indulgent to constantly plunge myself into dark things to find beauty, when beauty is also available in a more obvious form...nearby...easily accessible. But also, it's the way I'm wired. And the way she is wired is very different, and this difference between us is expressed in the way each of us feel about the movie "It's a Wonderful Life".
I talk about this too much, but several years ago I discovered that I was a pessimist. It was such a revelation to me and really freeing in a lot of ways. I don't mean pessimism in a negative emotional way. It's just that fundamentally I cannot help but consider the worst case scenario and then to expect it to come to be. When I'm healthy mentally, that means I am prepared for when things go bad and unfazed by catastrophe. It made me well suited for Restaurant Management. When I am unhealthy, it can be nearly impossible to overcome. I become unable to see any positive outcomes. Being a pessimist makes me cautious and often times unwilling to take a chance. It also makes me pretty steady. The real joy of being a pessimist is the possibility of being overwhelmed by gratitude.
My wife is an optimist. She is the best kind of optimist because she is a hard working, practical optimist. She thinks things can and always will be better...because she's going to make sure of it. She sees things as pretty black and white. Thing either are, or are not. She indulges me, but the "why" of the way I do things will never be obvious. I think she lives in a perpetual state of gratitude, ever moving forward. When she is healthy mentally, she is working toward making things better. She is thankful and wants to make things the best they can be. When she is unhealthy, her potential for despair is crushed by her pure will. She can then become fearful and controlling. Being an optimist makes her productive and because of her heart, and she is always looking to draw people in to her world of making things better. She understands gratitude and her natural reaction to it is to keep working.
When I view late stage George Bailey I see a man who has succumb to the grind of reality. All the promise and potential of his early years are gone. He is burdened not only by the responsibilities of his family and business, but really the whole town. He is not like me, because I would have seen the disaster coming from a mile away.
(I think) When my wife views late stage George Bailey, she sees a quitter. It's the whole point of the movie, but she truly cannot understand why he doesn't see how blessed he is. My wife is someone who is not given to despair. It makes her an extraordinary strength. The few times I have seen her feel defeated have been very unsettling. The feelings that George Bailey is feeling before his adventure with Clarence the wingless Angel are foreign to her...irrelevant almost. She might say, "Be thankful for what you have and work for what you don't".
The hopelessness of George Bailey was, for long periods of my life, almost a default setting for how I felt. Before I felt the love and acceptance of Jesus Christ I relied on self-pity on the low end and delusions of grandeur when my moods swung high to get me through...to make me productive. I loved my family and I worked hard to improve, but my own efforts were not enough. Underneath it all was this baseline hopelessness, the feeling that things aren't going to work out.
I identify with Merton's expression of despair. Not at the time of course, but you get older you can see the mechanics more clearly.
“Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a man (or woman) deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost. In every man there is hidden some root of despair because in every man there is pride that vegetates and springs weeds and rank flowers of self-pity as soon as our own resources fail us. But because our own resources inevitably fail us, we are all more or less subject to discouragement and to despair. Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that God is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny by ourselves. But the man who is truly humble cannot despair, because in the humble man there is no longer any such thing as self-pity.” * New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton, New
I talk about this too much, but several years ago I discovered that I was a pessimist. It was such a revelation to me and really freeing in a lot of ways. I don't mean pessimism in a negative emotional way. It's just that fundamentally I cannot help but consider the worst case scenario and then to expect it to come to be. When I'm healthy mentally, that means I am prepared for when things go bad and unfazed by catastrophe. It made me well suited for Restaurant Management. When I am unhealthy, it can be nearly impossible to overcome. I become unable to see any positive outcomes. Being a pessimist makes me cautious and often times unwilling to take a chance. It also makes me pretty steady. The real joy of being a pessimist is the possibility of being overwhelmed by gratitude.
My wife is an optimist. She is the best kind of optimist because she is a hard working, practical optimist. She thinks things can and always will be better...because she's going to make sure of it. She sees things as pretty black and white. Thing either are, or are not. She indulges me, but the "why" of the way I do things will never be obvious. I think she lives in a perpetual state of gratitude, ever moving forward. When she is healthy mentally, she is working toward making things better. She is thankful and wants to make things the best they can be. When she is unhealthy, her potential for despair is crushed by her pure will. She can then become fearful and controlling. Being an optimist makes her productive and because of her heart, and she is always looking to draw people in to her world of making things better. She understands gratitude and her natural reaction to it is to keep working.
When I view late stage George Bailey I see a man who has succumb to the grind of reality. All the promise and potential of his early years are gone. He is burdened not only by the responsibilities of his family and business, but really the whole town. He is not like me, because I would have seen the disaster coming from a mile away.
(I think) When my wife views late stage George Bailey, she sees a quitter. It's the whole point of the movie, but she truly cannot understand why he doesn't see how blessed he is. My wife is someone who is not given to despair. It makes her an extraordinary strength. The few times I have seen her feel defeated have been very unsettling. The feelings that George Bailey is feeling before his adventure with Clarence the wingless Angel are foreign to her...irrelevant almost. She might say, "Be thankful for what you have and work for what you don't".
The hopelessness of George Bailey was, for long periods of my life, almost a default setting for how I felt. Before I felt the love and acceptance of Jesus Christ I relied on self-pity on the low end and delusions of grandeur when my moods swung high to get me through...to make me productive. I loved my family and I worked hard to improve, but my own efforts were not enough. Underneath it all was this baseline hopelessness, the feeling that things aren't going to work out.
I identify with Merton's expression of despair. Not at the time of course, but you get older you can see the mechanics more clearly.
“Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a man (or woman) deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost. In every man there is hidden some root of despair because in every man there is pride that vegetates and springs weeds and rank flowers of self-pity as soon as our own resources fail us. But because our own resources inevitably fail us, we are all more or less subject to discouragement and to despair. Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that God is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny by ourselves. But the man who is truly humble cannot despair, because in the humble man there is no longer any such thing as self-pity.” * New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton, New
Directions Paperback, first published 1961. Pgs. 180-190.
It's this kind of self indulgent Pride that is an obvious flag to my wife. She sees through it right away. When I had come to the revelation that I was indeed a pessimist, I expressed it to my wife with a sort of giddy excitement.
"Honey, I've realized something pretty interesting about myself that explains a lot...I think I'm a pessimist!"
To which she responded, "Ya think?" in an appropriately sarcastic tone. She then rattled off years of examples of this obvious revelation. This exchange brings me joy...that I'll work so hard to discover something so obvious and she'll still be there waiting for me. There is just something about me that causes me to tease and pull apart, test and purify, to examine and discover things that are otherwise immediately obvious to her. We are both a mystery to each other in that way. As our marriage has grown stronger, we have come to love that about each other. Much like Donna Reed in the movie, my wife is patient, wise, steady and supportive...also stunningly beautiful. Mrs. Bailey, foolishly and hopelessly in love with a fool waits and hopes for her husband to discover what is so painfully obvious to her.
I'll always view the world through a sort of despairing fog. But I also have hope. Because of this Hope, I can push through the fog, knowing that good things lie beyond. I am blessed beyond measure. I am privileged to Love, to be Loved and to have always known Love. It is only through the ultimate Love of Christ that I have been able to accept this. My wife will always work with purpose and duty. It can make her blind to things she does not want to see, it can make it hard to accept things as they really are. But it is her Love for Jesus that calms her and puts her at ease when her own flesh tells her she should be earning his Love. As George Bailey finally realizes how good he has it he is overwhelmed with Gratitude. And it's not just gratitude for what he actually has, but gratitude for the opportunity to see it. This is what gets me, because this happens to me now on a regular basis. In spite of my potential to dip into the dark, there are moments when the beauty of this Life and it's participants just become so obvious that I am crushed with joy. I'm usually the last to go to bed each night. As I'm locking doors and flipping off lights my subconscious does a George Bailey sort of check list of what things could be and what they really are. Yes, there is plenty to despair about but then: look at these children, look at this roof over our head, look at what I have made with this amazing woman. It's the type of gratitude that you just can't work for, you can't count your blessings and talk yourself into it. It's a gratitude that is a pure gift of God. And though I am blessed beyond what I deserve, it is a gratitude that would be present in any circumstances. It's a gratitude I have felt in my darkest moments. I suppose that is why I explore the way I do and plumb the depths of this human condition. It's the strangest sort of optimism to expect to find Hope where there appears to be none...to look for beauty in the broken. It's the strangest optimism and it seems like a contradiction. We even wear a symbol of pain around our necks that represents joy. We look upon a instrument of torture in the cross and see the ultimate hope for us all. We celebrate a baby and call him the Savior. I'm not saying it makes sense, but I am saying that it is true.
It's this kind of self indulgent Pride that is an obvious flag to my wife. She sees through it right away. When I had come to the revelation that I was indeed a pessimist, I expressed it to my wife with a sort of giddy excitement.
"Honey, I've realized something pretty interesting about myself that explains a lot...I think I'm a pessimist!"
To which she responded, "Ya think?" in an appropriately sarcastic tone. She then rattled off years of examples of this obvious revelation. This exchange brings me joy...that I'll work so hard to discover something so obvious and she'll still be there waiting for me. There is just something about me that causes me to tease and pull apart, test and purify, to examine and discover things that are otherwise immediately obvious to her. We are both a mystery to each other in that way. As our marriage has grown stronger, we have come to love that about each other. Much like Donna Reed in the movie, my wife is patient, wise, steady and supportive...also stunningly beautiful. Mrs. Bailey, foolishly and hopelessly in love with a fool waits and hopes for her husband to discover what is so painfully obvious to her.
I'll always view the world through a sort of despairing fog. But I also have hope. Because of this Hope, I can push through the fog, knowing that good things lie beyond. I am blessed beyond measure. I am privileged to Love, to be Loved and to have always known Love. It is only through the ultimate Love of Christ that I have been able to accept this. My wife will always work with purpose and duty. It can make her blind to things she does not want to see, it can make it hard to accept things as they really are. But it is her Love for Jesus that calms her and puts her at ease when her own flesh tells her she should be earning his Love. As George Bailey finally realizes how good he has it he is overwhelmed with Gratitude. And it's not just gratitude for what he actually has, but gratitude for the opportunity to see it. This is what gets me, because this happens to me now on a regular basis. In spite of my potential to dip into the dark, there are moments when the beauty of this Life and it's participants just become so obvious that I am crushed with joy. I'm usually the last to go to bed each night. As I'm locking doors and flipping off lights my subconscious does a George Bailey sort of check list of what things could be and what they really are. Yes, there is plenty to despair about but then: look at these children, look at this roof over our head, look at what I have made with this amazing woman. It's the type of gratitude that you just can't work for, you can't count your blessings and talk yourself into it. It's a gratitude that is a pure gift of God. And though I am blessed beyond what I deserve, it is a gratitude that would be present in any circumstances. It's a gratitude I have felt in my darkest moments. I suppose that is why I explore the way I do and plumb the depths of this human condition. It's the strangest sort of optimism to expect to find Hope where there appears to be none...to look for beauty in the broken. It's the strangest optimism and it seems like a contradiction. We even wear a symbol of pain around our necks that represents joy. We look upon a instrument of torture in the cross and see the ultimate hope for us all. We celebrate a baby and call him the Savior. I'm not saying it makes sense, but I am saying that it is true.
