Day Four: Hope

This blog post is part of my 2017 Write 31 Days blog series 31 Reflections on Mental Health and Illness. To read the whole series, click here for the series index page.

"I plead with you -- never ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid."

- Pope St. John Paul II

Friends, I'm going to be really real with you.  This is a hard entry for me to write.

One of the hardest things in the last four years has been the virtue of hope. I have written about my struggles with this several times on this blog. It has only been in the last six months or so that I have dared to say, "I have hope" with regard to my mental illness. That is a MASSIVE step forward for me and it is one that I do not take lightly.

It has taken me nearly four years to utter the word hope in any meaningful sense, but it has taken me most of my life to truly understand what hope really means and what it means to have hope. This most recent four years has helped me understand that hope is so much more than a feeling or emotion or even some kind of certain knowledge about God or your eternal destination.

Hope is vital. It is the very lifeblood of our existence and that makes it an absolutely critical thing to possess when you are struggling with the darkness and uncertainty of mental illness. It is the thing, without which, you have no chance of healing or recovery. I have known that it is very important for a long time, but it wasn't until I felt as though all my hope in everything and everyone was gone (God included), that I began to truly understand just how vitally important it is.

I included the quote from my patron saint above because it's one that, as much as I love my Papa (my affectionate name for him), has served to cause me great frustration. Many people are familiar with the last sentence of that quote because it is one of the most famous lines from his initial address to the faithful in St. Peter's Square just after his election to the papacy, but fewer know the rest of the quote.

When I read this quote in its entirety, I felt the all too familiar feelings of frustration bubble up inside me. Instead of encouraging me, it made me feel angry and misunderstood. I couldn't understand how this great saint and leader of the Church could say such a thing to people suffering unimaginable horrors and many worse than my own. The simple answer is that he suffered greatly and yet, through all of his suffering, he clung to Jesus and put his steadfast hope in Christ's love. In other words, he could say it because he knew it was true.

"Never give up on hope." -- This doesn't mean that you can't struggle with hope. It doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't have the experience of feeling hopeless. It doesn't even mean that you shouldn't express those feelings and struggles. In fact, bringing those into the light is what keeps you from falling completely into despair. Telling someone -- a priest or minister or friend or counsellor -- that you are feeling hopeless and telling them as often as you need to is how you find your way back to hope again. John Paul's exhortation here means to me that no matter how dark it gets and no matter how hopeless you feel, realise that despite what you feel, there is still hope and never give up on searching for it anew.

"Never doubt." -- First things first -- doubt is fine. Doubt is okay. Doubt can actually lead you towards the truth and away from lies. This exhortation doesn't mean that you can't ever doubt anything. You can certainly doubt anything and anyone -- even God. I've been there, done that, and yes, even with God. For a very very long time, I doubted that God cared for me anymore because I doubted His presence in my life. I felt abandoned by Him in my darkest hour and so I even began to doubt His existence and His Word, the Bible. I'll admit that I didn't stay in doubt of His existence or the Bible for very long, but during those weeks when I found myself so very doubtful of everything I'd ever known about Him, I wondered if I would ever find my way back. I did find my way back, but that experience of doubting left me changed and with a new understanding of God that I've never had before. In the case of mental illness, I don't think St. John Paul ever meant that doubt isn't allowed, but rather that we should never become so mired in our doubts that we stop believing altogether. During my period of doubting God, I struggled with belief, but I never stopped believing.

"Never tire." -- This one is a real gut punch. Mental illness is exhausting and healing from mental illness is exhausting. Again though, this doesn't mean what it appears to mean on the surface. John Paul's life was marked by the grief of losing both his mother and father and both his siblings before age 20, by being forced to study in secret to become a priest, by living through Nazi occupation of his beloved Poland and Communist occupation after WWII, by being nearly killed by a Nazi truck while working in a mine as a young man, by being shot during an assassination attempt, and by the ravages of Parkinson's disease. If anyone had a license to be tired, it was John Paul II, but he was indefatigable. He had an almost superhuman strength and energy despite all the many crosses he was called upon to carry. I believe there must have been days when he was very very tired, but he kept going and kept fighting the good fight. He heeded Jesus' words to His apostles and made up his mind to "persevere to the end" (Matthew 24:13). "Never tire" simply means -- persevere, even when you are tired of fighting and you want to lay down and die, keep fighting. Keep moving forward, even if only inch by inch.

"Never become discouraged." -- Again, on its face, this seems like a horrible thing to say to someone who is struggling with mental illness. Mental illness is, very often, discouraging. There are medications that don't work, challenges to face (often one immediately after another), suicidal crises, and then all the day to day ordinary life stuff to deal with on top of your mental illness. That can make it feel as though you're drowning in discouragement. This statement "never become discouraged" doesn't mean that you can never feel discouraged or sad when you're struggling. Rather, I think it means to never allow discouragement to keep you stuck in one spot so that you become so tired by it all that you stop believing and give up on hope all together.

It's really the last statement -- "Be not afraid" -- that ties it all together. Fear has the power to be both a great motivator and a great hindrance. Good fear motivates us to move forward, to protect ourselves, and to do things like plan for the future. The fear that John Paul is speaking of here is the kind of fear that leads to a total giving up on hope and that which keeps us from persevering to the end so that we may be saved. Mental illness is absolutely scary at times, but it doesn't have to be that way. One of the biggest things that helps my fears when it comes to my illness is knowing that I have people around me who know that I'm struggling, who love and care about me, and who are willing to walk with me through the hardest days.

So with all of this knowledge, is hope easy for me? Nope. It's actually one of the hardest things for me to embrace even now. I still doubt myself and doubt that I'm moving forward. I still have moments when saying the word "hope" out loud makes me feel a bit queasy and anxious because I am afraid that it will lead to things getting worse (this is irrational, I know!). That being said, I say it a lot more often these days than I used to and I genuinely believe that there is a light at the end of this dark tunnel I've been in for decades.

Even though I still have days when it's hard to find hope, I can say with all honesty, that I know hope exists, because I have come to understand that hope is the person of Jesus Christ Himself. He is hope incarnate. The very Word of God is, within Himself, the virtue of Hope in all its fullness. And that, my friends, is a very powerful thing to have in your mental health toolbox.