大象传媒

From Father Christopher Jamison, Benedictine Monk:

听

After a summer break, many of us will have started back at work. The alarm may have a snooze function but eventually we have to get up and get going. Some years ago, however, a psychiatrist came to see me to tell me he just couldn鈥檛 get going. He had a happy family but his life had lost all meaning. We discussed how he might handle this depression and I gingerly asked why he hadn鈥檛 consulted a psychiatrist. His reply was that he knew what a psychiatrist would say and that wasn鈥檛 what he wanted. He did agree to see his GP to receive some medication which made our subsequent meetings easier and he began to see that what his life lacked was any sense of hope. I could see that he was deeply affected by the modern assumption that human life is a random product of natural selection and that the world is a hostile environment threatening our lives with natural disasters. With this attitude, there are plenty of reasons to ignore the alarm and stay in bed. But the mystery of life is that most people don鈥檛 do that. Somewhere inside everybody there is a hope function that gets us up and running every day in spite of all the potential disasters. Hope is a natural belief in the goodness of life that overcomes anxiety. The psychiatrist knew that medication alone would not restore hope so he came on retreat to our monastery. Reconnecting with God is, I believe, the same as reconnecting with hope. Our rhythm of prayer and community life acted like a gateway back into hope for him and he left a different man. So I invite people to ignore the snooze function and reconnect with their hope function; it鈥檒l get you out of bed more effectively than any alarm clock.