A woman met a man on the street who looked destitute. She slipped a dollar into his hand and whispered, “Never despair.” A few days later, the man met the woman and slipped nine dollars into her hand. “Here’s your winnings,” he whispered. “My winnings?” she asked.
The man was a bookie. The horse “Never Despair” came in first, paying 8 to 1.
I’m not really sure why I thought of this old story, but I think it may have been because a few days ago, I looked up “hope,” when that was the topic for this blog. Several of the references I found also mentioned despair. So guess what — today’s topic is going to be despair.
During my lifetime, I’ve heard “never despair” a number of times, and it wasn’t referring to a horse.
Never despair — one of those things that’s easier said than done. When I ran across despair when I was looking for hope, I suspect it’s because despair is probably one of the major challenges to hope. In fact, it’s defined as “the complete absence of hope.”
In Dante’s The Devine Comedy, the inscription to the entrance to Hell reads, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” So according to Dante, despair is the essence of Hell.
And in the musical Les Miserables, there’s a song, sung by a dying woman (Fantine) who has been crushed by virtually every unfairness that life can deal a person…
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather
I had a dream my life would be
So much different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed
The dream I dreamed.
So what is despair, really? I looked it up and it comes from a Latin word meaning “to be without hope.”
But I’ve heard it said that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle. The Bible even tells us that those who are broken will enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the rich, the strong, and the powerful.
So…. maybe a crisis is not necessarily a bad thing — but despair seems to be the bottom — someone in despair has not only lost hope, but decided the pain of the current situation is intolerable, and there is no prospect for a better future, or better days. That’s a little different than resignation — if someone resigns himself to the circumstances, he can accept the hand he’s been dealt — maybe grudgingly — but he can go on. But despair creates the sense that the cross of life has become too heavy to bear, and there’s just not enough of a fight left to go on.
I think despair is an especially lonely emotion — it’s a burden too heavy to share with someone else. If you’re able to truly share the burden, you’re likely to stop short of despair.
Despair is the acceptance of what happens without an active response or resistance along with that loneliness. And of course, despair, like grief, comes uninvited — it’s never chosen. The only thing that can be done is try to end it.
Today, November 6, 2024, I think I’ve arrived at the door of despair — I’ve arrived at the threshold of “the complete absence of hope.” Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t thrown in the towel — I’m just going to have to recalculate and realize that my journey back to normalcy is going to be a long, tough road.
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