It’s a Wonderful Life
Every December 24th, my family begins our celebration of Christmas with a showing of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a favorite movie of mine for many reasons, one of those being its place in our Christmas tradition. Watch the movie and you’ll see all the other reasons. Jimmy Stewart plays the protagonist, George Bailey, and he’s in trouble, a fact we find out right away from a conversation between two angels in response to the mass amount of prayers for the young man. George’s problems and the problems of anyone dealing with or healing from substance abuse are a little different on paper, but as I began my journey in recovery this past year, I found myself thinking a lot about the correlations between George’s experience and my own, both in active addiction and in recovery.
We hear a lot of George’s backstory from Joseph, the senior angel, who starts with George’s childhood in order to give Clarence, the angel being sent down, a picture the man that he’s being dispatched to help. It’s important that he starts with George’s youth, since who we are in our adult life is largely influenced by our younger years. George is a small town kid with a weighty sense of responsibility for the people in his life. He dreams big and loves even bigger. The first event we witness of his childhood is his rescue of his little brother Harry, who slides into a freezing river in a sledding mishap. George suffers the loss of hearing in one ear for his efforts, but he saves his brother. We see that George’s unhesitating leap into the river is just part of who he is; as the movie progresses, he continues to save the people he loves.
As a young man, he dreams of leaving Bedford Falls; however, the untimely death of his father prompts him to stay and run the family business while Harry goes to college with the money his older brother saved. George is the kind of guy who will do anything for his people at the cost of his own dreams, and he wrestles with the feeling of discontent that accompanies his conviction that he’s doing the right thing. Though he struggles with the reality of his small life in Bedford Falls, he continues to do the right thing. He refuses to join forces with Mr. Potter, the villain of the movie, who believes that money can get him anything and everything. He runs an entire business on granting loans to families who otherwise couldn’t afford to buy a house, giving them a place to call home when someone like Potter would have dismissed them without a second thought.
George and Mary even sacrifice their honeymoon to save the Building and Loan when the Stock Market crash aligns with their wedding day and they notice a commotion at the business on their way out of town. Mary has the idea to offer their honeymoon savings on loan to the people who need cash, and George spends the day resolving matters rather than celebrating his new marriage as he had hoped. At the end of the chaotic day, Mary telephones him and tells him to come home. George replies, “What home?” I love this exchange, because it reveals so much about the two characters and the nature of their relationship. Mary is so sure of things and has been since she was a kid in the drugstore whispering into George’s deaf ear that she would love him til the day she died. George, on the other hand, wants desperately to be sure of things and to be happy, but his lofty dreams pull him from realizing that he can find this security and happiness right where he is. He follows Mary’s lead throughout the film, only balking when fear overcomes him. When Mary tells him to come home, she means the physical space she has worked hard to turn into a home; but she also means home in the deeper, spiritual sense. She has this sense of connection that we can call communion, conscious connection, or even just love, that assures her of her place in the world and of the love in it even when times are hard. George is so unsure of his place in the world; he knows that he loves Mary, but he feels lost in the face of his deferred dreams. He cannot realize the surrounding nature of his home because he feels that he can only feel home when he achieves certain material gains.
Like George, when we’re suffering in active addiction, we experience a similar feeling of disconnect; it’s as if we’re operating on a different wavelength than the rest of the world. We can be sitting in a room at home surrounded by people we love and still feel a deep, aching emptiness in us, reminding us that we’re still not enough. We have to do more and be more before we will know what it is to be home. Like George, we desperately want to be home and may even act as though we are home, but we’re always asking George’s question “what home?” and more often feel at odds with the idea of home that others are so comfortable with.
In the film, we see shots of Mary fixing up the old house with love and a clear sense of direction. These are cut to show George coming back late from a hard day at the office; he pulls the top of the staircase bannister off as he goes to walk up the stairs, grimaces and puts it back. While Mary harmonizes with the home, George experiences the dysfunctional aspects of its physical nature because he fails to connect with himself, others and his higher power.
He admits he is not in touch with God when disaster drives him to a dark place. When his Uncle Billy loses a large sum of cash on his way to deposit at the bank, George faces financial ruin and dire consequences that likely loom even larger in his mind because of the immense importance he places on his personal success. This is a man whose dreams of leaving Bedford Falls to build great things have haunted him his whole adult life, so the idea of losing the Building and Loan - the main reason he stayed in the first place and the only thing he believes defines his success now - is enough to drive him to despair.
His desperation and fear cause a breakdown at home, where he completely loses his patience with his children and can’t even admit his problem to Mary. His inability to ask for help from the one person who has always consistently been there for him reveals the depths of his disconnect. He loves Mary so deeply, but he hates himself and his life so much in this moment that he cannot fathom allowing her to see him as he sees himself in that moment. He is convinced that he needs to fix it himself because no one will accept him or love him if they see how broken and messy his life has become.
George finds himself at Martini’s bar, which is where he reaches out to God, admitting, “I’m not a praying man,” before asking for help. Jimmy Stewart’s acting here is beautiful, his eyes brim with tears as he leans into the bar, clasping his hands and begging for help. Apparently the tears were unscripted; Mr. Stewart didn’t even anticipate crying. The actor later recalled of the scene:
As I said those words, I felt the loneliness, the hopelessness of people who had nowhere to turn, and my eyes filled with tears. I broke down sobbing. That was not planned at all.
That hopeless feeling of having nowhere to turn is perhaps the deepest agony we humans can know because it arrives in the absence of our innate sense of conscious connection. George has so many people who love him and would help him in a heartbeat if they only knew he needed it (as is proven by the end of the film), but he feels there is a great chasm between him and them and he cannot find it in himself to wander into the unknown territory of seeking help. George goes to Mr. Potter for help, since the man has power and money, and this choice is terribly reflective of our choice to turn to alcohol or another destructive substance for help in our times of need. Mr. Potter is the clear villain of the movie, but to George it seems that he has the answer for a quick fix to his problem. Alcohol causes more harm than good, but it can become the safe choice to turn to when life circumstances become too chaotic or impossible to deal with, even if deep down we know the kind of choice we’re making.
Not surprisingly, Potter doesn’t help much. And when the old man casually mentions that with George’s life insurance policy, he’s “worth more dead than alive” - the chilling comment sparks something wild and desperate in George’s eyes. In George’s world of disconnection and hopelessness, Mr. Potter’s remark rings true. George doesn’t want to die, but he sees death as the only escape from the life he’s come to view as terribly misaligned with his expectations. He goes to a bridge and looks over the railing at the river that he anticipates jumping into, but Clarence - finally dispatched after his briefing - jumps in first and gives George someone to save since he cannot find the will to save himself. This is a cool echo of the first scene in which George saved his brother from drowning. Both times, George abandons personal fear and his own agenda to rescue a person in need.
Though George’s rescue of Clarence thwarts his suicidal leanings, he still doesn’t want to live. He tells Clarence that he wishes he’d never been born, which inspires Clarence’s plan for how to help him. Clarence grants his wish, and George is thrown into a world in which he doesn’t exist and never has. In his encounters with the people he thinks he knows in the town he thinks he lives in, George slowly realizes that Clarence has effectively erased him from his own life. George begins to witness life playing out without him, and he feels like a ghost trying to fit into a world in which he never belonged.
Clarence has given George the opportunity to experience true spiritual, mental and physical disconnect. Though George has grappled with this feeling on a spiritual level for most of his life, he is now living it out in full actuality because he has lost the grounding tools to even begin cultivating the connections that will save him. In this hellish version of his non-life, George sees a world in which his brother Harry died young, his wife lives a lonely life, his mother has become a bitter old woman, and the many people he helped through the Building and Loan live lives of hardship in a town they now call Pottersville. George desperately tries to insert himself into their lives and receive their love and recognition, but the strangeness with which he is treated as other pushes him back to the bridge, this time to pray. He doesn’t jump into the water this time, but this is George’s third trip to freezing water in the movie, and only this time does he seek to save himself. The other times, he responded to Harry’s and Clarence’s desperate calls of “help”; now he finally utters the words himself, experiencing the gift of desperation and finally trusting in God to hear him in his prayer. When George recognizes the reality of his circumstances, he no longer plots to die; he prays “let me live again.”
I found myself thinking a lot about George’s experience this year. In early recovery, I felt that my new life had made a ghost of the self who would still be existing in the same circles and walking the same paths I’d been on in my previous life. I felt cut off from people and a bit directionless as I learned to make sense of how to live in a different structure and with new responsibilities that didn’t seem relevant to my priorities on the surface level. In the worst times, when I was still drinking, I’d felt the weight of disconnect convincing me that life was the thing bearing down so heavily on me. I didn’t want to die, but I really didn’t want to live, and I felt I had no safe place to turn to with this darkness in me. I can see now that the blindness in this thought was caused not by any lack of loving people or a provident God in my life, but by the intense sense of disconnect to which my addiction had led me. I didn’t see it clearly at the time, but I had been becoming more and more of a ghost in my own life long before I left everything to start this whole recovery journey. We don’t always see the walls of disconnect we construct when we’re using, because on some level we think the substances that numb the sharpest of the pain are helping even though they are only adding bricks to the barrier between us and others.
When I had my time in rehab and when I sacrificed being home with my family to engage more actively in working my program, I began to see my life as it was. I initially resented that I didn’t just earn back the people in my life right away, but as I reflected on my past and the reasons for doing the work I was engaged in, I began to see that I wasn’t a ghost or living in a world in which I didn’t exist. I was doing what George did on the bridge the second time: I was finally praying and trying to live again. I still am.
George returns to his life with elation the minute he is recognized and named by Bert the cop. He reunites with his family and though he accepts the consequences of the chaos that drove him to consider death, he realizes that the help of his community has saved him. George holds his youngest child in a room filled with his people, and his brother Harry, returned from the war, toasts him as “the richest man in town.”
George is rich because he has finally tuned into the sense of deep connection that unites him with God, with others and with himself. He is finally present in mind, body and spirit, and he recognizes that the true worth of his life is in something that transcends material wealth or grand achievements. Though George has been in the business of trust his whole life through his part in the Building and Loan, he has had to lose his life and regain it to fully understand and embrace trust in God, in himself and in others. George is finally able to trust that his people are there for him because he feels the deep, uncomplicated love that comes along with the connection he has channeled through his experience.
The name Clarence is a fitting one for the angel who helped him recover this communion with his world. Clarence stems from the Latin clarus for clear, and Clarence grants him an experience that, by jolting him from the life in which he was trudging blindly in his misery, gave him the insight to finally see clearly and perceive that his life circumstances hold no sway over the joy and love always available to him. Christmas is a time of hope, peace and joy - all of which are symbolized by the four candles on the traditional Advent wreath. Though we’re reminded of these feelings this time of year as we approach Christmas, we’re also prompted to recognize that we have access to them every day if we can only see clearly and practice living with gratitude for the life we have. Addiction is one of many things that block that vision, and addiction isn’t the substance; it’s the enslavement to that substance we’ve chosen as our would-be-savior from the pain we think is too great to bear otherwise. We’ve gone to Potter when we should confide in someone like Clarence or Mary.
I still experience frustration and fear, but it comes in lesser waves now, and I’m as honest as I can be about my struggles when they enter my life. I don’t let myself disappear into my version of Pottersville anymore, even if it means living in a scary version of real life for a bit. Asking for help, praying or even just talking to someone I know or hope will understand are all lifelines I use regularly now. I have immense gratitude for the people in my life who have been and still are those lifelines, and I try to give back that gift when I can. We’re all born with this innate connection that allows us to realize how full our lives are in any season. For some of us, it takes losing our place in life and fighting to earn it back to realize what a wonderful life we have. For many, the beauty in life is unfading and constant. George returned to the same life, but he saw it as a gift, a wonderful life given to him when he had nothing. I think all of us could benefit from George’s prayer - asking God to let us live and rejoicing at the novelty of being given a life unparalleled by anything we could dream of.
