Healing

Casablanca Revisited

by Terry Barlow
03/11/13
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Humphrey Bogart, you have nothing on this!   There is another dramatic version of "Casablanca." Meaning that long ago I was checked into a hotel there in Morocco with a friend smoking hashish. (not bragging here)  It was well known in those days that Morocco was the place to come to get stoned for free. I remember expounding so eloquently(or so it seemed)on my latest philosophy when, in the midst of the smoke, that philosophy was suddenly put to a brutal test. My friend began to choke and couldn't breathe! What could I do? She gasped and gestured toward the wastecan because she was about to vomit. I felt so helpless. I was so powerless to make any practical difference in the tragedy that was unfolding right before my eyes. I envisioned myself alone in that strange city in a cheap God-forsaken hotel with nothing but a corpse for a companion. I began to cry out wholeheartedly to the God I had just denied. I placed my hands over the drooping head of my best friend and I felt literal currents running through ny forearms! She began to catch her breath, she began to recover, she became calm. But I on the other hand had some explaining to do. I had thought belief in a personal God was old-fashioned and that I had outgrown such superstition. But deep in my heart it was obvious I still believed. And my hollow, smorgasboard, patchwork pretensions to philosophy had miserably failed the test. They were of no practical use whatsoever. Whereas the personal, relational, omnipresent God (that hotel was not so God-forsaken after all) had proven to be most practical indeed!