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When I was about 12 years old, I was enveloped in a very deep darkness. (I looked it up in a diagnostic manual decades later: it may have been what the shrinks call an "Ephebophrenic Depression".) Anyway, I was pretty far gone, thought I was going to die, and pretty much wished to die.

I had the sensation of falling through black, opaque, featureless space in perfect indifference.

I could sometimes make out other people falling, too, and their fate,too, I viewed with indifference. This went on a long time, timelessly, or beyond time.

Then I saw my father, my own father, falling through space. I finally felt something: desperate indignation. I thought, "I don't want him to just sink down into nothingness. I want his life to have meant something. It is wrong, just wrong, for everything to be just utter futility, and absurdity, and blackness and loss, for him".

But I couldn't save him. I was falling, myself, and there was nothing to hold onto, no foothold, no conceivable help. And then it seemed to me that Christ (I don't claim this was a mystical experience, but it wasn't what I'd call a hallucination, either; nor was it a vision before my eyes. I'll have to call it interior seeing, and leave it at that) --- Christ, I saw or knew, was reaching out His hand to me, and I knew that if I grasped His hand, I could grab my father.

That's all.

It's all I would hope for, for anyone.