“Miss.” – “Yes, sir, how can I help you?” – “I think the elevator has stopped.”
Eight years ago I was trapped in an elevator for an hour and a half. I was in Eureka to present a class to deacon candidates; I had left my hotel room and entered the elevator at 6:45 AM. (A lot of Eurekans I knew at the time were surprised to learn there was an elevator in Eureka.) I had descended some seconds when the thing stopped between floors and the lights went out. PGE had closed down the electricity in the area and so there I was suspended within a space 3 paces wide. There was a phone, so I was able to communicate my situation and get calls from the lobby that help was coming. In the meantime I just leaned against the wall and reviewed the story of my life. The Otis elevator people finally brought me down and loudly removed bolts to open the door. They were impressed at how calm I had been. I said, “At the age of 80 one doesn’t have the wherewithal to panic; you just trust in the passage of time and the wider world outside your confinement to be filled with helpful people.”
And of course an imagination frequently nourished by stories can also generate hope. I mean if you have read stories about Tom Sawyer’s being lost in a cave or can remember the rescue of those sailors from the sunken submarine Squalus back in 1939 (as I could at my age), if your memory retains images of such escapes, you’re apt to count on something similar happening to you.
Which says something about mental health. A favorite Jesuit writer of mine named William Lynch wrote a book called Images of Hope. It’s about mental illness and among the things he says about the mentally ill is their sense of hopelessness. It’s as if time has stopped for them. They feel stuck (as if in an elevator). Nothing new is possible. And he says what they very much need is help to expand their sense of time and space, to revive memories of past redemptive experiences, memories of history itself that show that time does not stop, that bad times usually give way to good times, that one’s elevator need not remain suspended, that space is wider than a three paces by ten foot box.
They need remembrances of the Rocky Mountains or the skyline of San Francisco or a field of sunflowers. And they need to hear voices that prove there is another world out there – the way the telephone in my elevator spoke to me in the musical voice of the young hotel woman in the lobby which made me feel 21 instead of 80 and in the deep male voice of the Otis man, so loaded with competence, assuring me he would get me out. And of course aren’t we all more or less depressed, obsessed with something that shrinks the world around us, stops the clock? And so don’t we all need ways of recovering a wider sense of reality, some way of stepping out of ourselves into a world stocked with hope?
Which is why we cherish our liturgy, because during the liturgy the revelations of biblical events, the Exodus, resurrections, prophecies, songs, proverbs speak to us (confined as we are within our three paces of moodiness), to infiltrate our minds, our imaginations in such a way as to widen our sense of space and time infinitely – and what a release that can be. Horizons appear, each the threshold of a new insight, a deeper sense of reality; and our sense of community widens to include generations past and still to come. We are assured we are not alone, that we are not simply nowhere but going somewhere grand. Isn’t that why we come to Church – to Mass – to be gathered up into the “kingdom of grace” out of the isolation produced by the morning commute and newspapers called something like The Times?