The Will to Live

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When you are in despair, do you ever wake up in the morning and look out the window and ask, Where does my help come from?  In my work with divorcing couples, despair is a common theme.  Divorce seems crueler than losing a spouse to death.  In death, the surviving spouse is comforted by the community, there is a ceremony celebrating the life of the lost loved one, stories are told, friends and family gather around and often stay very close to the widow or widower in the months that follow.  In contrast, the newly divorced single man or woman is sometimes shunned by congregations, community members, and previously close married friends.  Sympathy is greatly reduced in divorce situations when compared to the sympathies expressed in death, possibly caused by an underlying belief that equal fault lies on both sides,  and possibly an assumption that the decision to separate was mutual.

An ancient middle-eastern story is told about a childless couple who had tried for years to have a child.  Having given up hope, they decided to bear children through a slave that they owned.  The mistress conceptualized the arrangement and fully supported the pregnancy and birth until later when she discovered that she was pregnant.  She immediately instructed her husband to toss out the slave and the child into the dessert, without concern about whether they died or lived.  The slave woman and her child soon started to languish in the heat, without food or water, and soon she left her son to sit a distance away so that she wouldn’t have to see him die.  God then spoke to her and asked, “Hagar, where have you come from and where are you going?”  The story relates that God and Hagar discussed the situation.  God then blessed her, not only with life, but a promise of prosperity.  The slave responds by saying that He is the God who “Sees”.

Does God see, and if we believe He does, is this belief enough to sustain us through suffering?  The Mapmaker’s Wife by Robert Whitaker is a fascinating, well-documented account of many historical events that encompass science (calculating longitude), the colonization of South America (by the Spanish, French and Portuguese), descriptions of the lush vegetation, geography and wild life in the Amazon, culminating in an extraordinary story of love and survival.  Isabel Grameson, after being separated from her husband for 20 years, undertook a 3,000 mile trek over mountains, through jungles, and down the Amazon river to rejoin him in 1770.  She witnessed the deaths by starvation of her two brothers and nephew and was nearly dead herself when a single thought commanded her to “Get Up!”

Whitaker drew inspiration from a book published in 1963, They Survived:  A Study of the Will to Live by Wilfrid Noyce  to briefly outline several incidents where survivors of catastrophic events  found the courage and strength to continue against all odds.  The psychological strength seems to have stemmed from a sense of purpose, hope, and spiritual beliefs.  Prayer is practiced by virtually all survivors.  “Prayer can provide people in desperate situations with a remarkable resilience.  He discovered that this was true even for people who were not religious prior to their ordeal.  In addition to fostering hope, prayer gives people a palpable sense that they are not alone, and perhaps more important, helps them escape their physical suffering…  Energy which but for prayer would be bound is by prayer set free.”

From Whitaker, “Ernest Shackleton, the English explorer who in 1916 led a crew of twenty-seven men through seventeen months of cruel Antarctic conditions, declared that as he and two of his men crossed South Georgia Island on foot, the last leg of their desperate journey to find help, a “fourth walked beside them.”  His two companions also spoke of this mysterious “fourth.”