(2007.01.28) Beyond Hope
Readings
First, a few brief reflections on the meaning of hope from various sources:
Hope fills the afflicted soul with such inward joy and consolation, that it can laugh while tears are in the eye, sigh and sing all in a breath; it is called "The rejoicing of hope.”
-- Hebrews 3:6
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
-- Aeschylus
Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all they have.
-- H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Hope is only the love of life.
-- Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Hope doesn't come from calculating whether the good news is winning out over the bad. It's simply a choice to take action.
-- Anna Lappe
Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don't give up.
-- Anne Lamott
Next, a somewhat contrary view of hope, from an essay titled “Beyond Hope” by Derrick Jensen. The essay appeared in the May/June edition of “Orion” magazine, a journal of nature and environmentalism:
What, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.
I’m not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don’t hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn’t crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they’ve assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.
I do not hope coho salmon survive. I will do whatever it takes to make sure the dominant culture doesn’t drive them extinct. If coho want to leave us because they don’t like how they’re being treated – and who could blame them? – I will say goodbye, and I will miss them, but if they do not want to leave, I will not allow civilization to kill them off.”
When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to “hope” at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do whatever it takes.
When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free – truly free – to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.
Sermon
I’m going to begin my musings on hope and “beyond hope” this morning with a true story, taken from Boston Globe columnist James Carroll’s memoir, An American Requiem, published in 1996. His book traces his life from his early life in Chicago and Washington, through his years studying to be a priest and then serving as a priest, until he left the priesthood to pursue his writing career.
This particular story or vignette – which all by itself conveys a good part of my message this morning, takes place during the first year of his journey to becoming a priest, a year of spiritual training at the Paulist novitiate, Mount Paul, which is in rural northern New Jersey, about two hours west of New York City. But it isn’t a story about the priesthood or religion or the church.
Carroll tells us that the young men in the novitiate found ways to keep life interesting while at the same time keeping to the strict Benedictine rule. One thing they did was to place bets on all kinds of trivial matters, using for currency their desserts – rice puddings, Jell-Os, apple pies.
Well, one day that fall, several of them were passing the time down by a lake on the property of Mount Paul, and the conversation became something of an argument over when the lake, which was about three hundred yards across, would freeze over. Speculation ranged from late November to sometime in January. Then, Carroll writes:
Finally, one of my classmates, a short, stocky Boston kid named Patrick Hughes who had said nothing until then, declared, “On December eighth, I’ll skate across this lake. Who wants to bet on it?”
So now it was put up or shut up. And Carroll tells us that after all bets were made “Patrick had desserts for the next four months riding on his ability to skate across that lake on December 8.”
Well, the days and weeks passed. By Thanksgiving there was no sign of freezing. As time went on, they would see Patrick go down to the lake early every morning, and then back to the chapel for morning prayers. “We all knew what he was praying for.”
Then on December 3 “a thin glaze” appeared in one corner of the lake. Later on “a delicate necklace of ice around the shore.” At this point, Carroll writes, “Having bet against him, we gathered on the shore and groaned.”
By December 5 the entire surface had a thin sheet of ice, “but it would hardly hold a leaf.” But then the weather turned hard cold for the next three days, so that “on the morning of December 8, the ice looked good – or bad, depending on your bet.”
Well, they all went down to the lake. Someone threw a softball sized rock onto the ice and it held. But then a football sized stone crashed right through.
Meanwhile Patrick was lacing up his skates; and, as Carroll writes:
An undeclared expertise was on display. Later we would learn he’d been captain of the Boston College hockey team. I, for one, had never seen shoelaces handled so deftly.
Well, Carroll then bounced a foot on the ice and it went right through. He said, “Pat, you can’t do this. It’s impossible.”
Now, listen to Carroll’s words, as he completes the story:
My words registered not at all with him. He stood and went up the hill a little, to get a running start. I felt a real fear for him. To the sound of a gun inside his head, he took off, launching himself out onto that shimmering surface. He hit it in stride, his legs pumping away. But he hit it with a great crack, and sure enough the ice broke. It was too thin. It was too soon. Oh, Patrick!
Then we saw that the ice was breaking and opening not under him but behind him. He was ahead of the break, skating so fast and so lightly that even the thin ice was support enough for the instant he needed it. All of us on that shore, watching him barreling across that lake, were transformed. We forgot our desserts and all they meant to us. We began to cry after him, “Go Patrick! Go Patrick!” As he shot across that ice, leaving behind a great crack, a wedge of black water, we knew we had never seen such courage before, not to mention such savvy knowledge of the ice, a Quincy kid’s knowledge. We had never seen such a capacity for trust – a man’s trust in himself. Even before he made it all the way across, and of course he did make it, I thought, This is a man I want to be with.
Isn’t that a great story?
I’ve read this or told this a number of times to family and friends – to some of you actually – everyone loves it.
Why? Well, there is the suspense… but I think it’s more than that.
Here’s how it strikes me.
I think that this story (a true story, otherwise it wouldn’t have nearly the same power) illustrates beautifully the distinction between hope and intention, or to put it more accurately the necessary partnership between hope and intention.
I think this is a pretty straightforward idea – and it is actually the whole of my sermon – but we may lose sight of this idea to our peril… so I’ll say some more.
To begin with, we can understand hope, as Derrick Jensen wrote quite bluntly, as having to do with those things over which we have no control.
Whereas we bring (or ought to bring) intention to those things over which we do have some measure of control. Though intention is just part of what we bring. Like Patrick it helps hugely if we also bring knowledge (like a Quincy kid’s savvy knowledge of the ice), courage (which is a world away from foolhardiness), and maybe trust too (trust in ourselves and our capacities, as Carroll reminds us, not trust in some other agency or power over which we have little or no control).
But what about the rest of Derrick Jensen’s message, suggesting that hope is dangerous and that we ought to discard it altogether? His essay kept me thinking for a long time; there was much that I liked and still like about it.
To begin with, he makes a compelling case for dumping hope. Worse than useless, he believes, hope dangerously “leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state.” Worse, he asserts, hope divorces us from “the degree of agency we actually do have.”
Now, I do see his point. But though he may find it liberating to dump hope as he understands it, I think he misunderstands hope, at least in part. I do agree with Jensen wholeheartedly that we must pay attention to this difference between hope and intention, as I’m putting it. And I would also agree that if, in one or another dire circumstance all we do is hope, we could be in serious trouble; we could find ourselves in the position Ben Franklin describes when he said that someone who “lives upon hope will die fasting.”
But most of us most of the time, even in terrible circumstances, know that we can’t and shouldn’t live only on hope.
When my father was diagnosed with cancer, hope sustained every one of us, including, I’m certain, dad; we all hoped for many more years of healthy life for him. What could be more natural than that? And our hope did help to sustain us.
But we didn’t only hope. Dad sought treatment at every step of the way; and we all supported my folks every step of the way.
And I hear this kind of story and see it over and over again. Hope does sustain – even as you do what needs to be done, what you can do.
Yes, there is plenty over which we have anywhere from limited to no control or agency, from the serious to the trivial – whether the ultimate course of an illness or whether the Red Sox will win another World Series or whether a lake will freeze.
But rather than being a reason for discarding hope, I would say that this points us to the pivotal moment of discernment, which is the moment at which we make the choice to move from hope to action in relation to the things we can do and can change. Writer Anne Lamott said it well: “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don't give up.”
You wait, yes, you watch, yes, and you work – you do what you can and must, yet all the while you may also be sustained by hope – which can indeed, as the passage from Hebrews expressed it, “fill the afflicted soul with such inward joy and consolation.”
What, after all, can be wrong with hoping that a friend – or you yourself – will recover from a fall or illness or a personal setback? As long as we don’t let ourselves begin to only hope for things which we should really be doing something about, because we do have control, agency, and power.
So… returning to that pond in northern New Jersey several decades ago: Every day that fall Patrick Hughes hoped the pond would freeze. He had made what amounted to an educated guess as to when it would freeze, so there was some degree of knowledge and intelligence involved when he declared he would skate across the lake on December 8. But he had no actual control over the vagaries of the weather that particular season or any season. So mostly he could only hope (and perhaps pray as we are told – that would be another sermon…) that the ice would carry him by December 8.
And then, the borderline nature of the conditions on that particular morning meant that Patrick had to bring all of his skill and knowledge and courage – and intention – to bear as he laced his skates, took his running start, and then practically flew across the ice.
So, yes, hope may have helped to sustain him in some sense as the day grew near. But hope did not freeze the lake, nature did. And hope may still have been in his heart as he ran down that hill to the lake, but hope on its own would not have gotten him across the lake; he did – with intention, along with skill, knowledge, and courage.
There are so many other examples of the partnership between hope and intention.
Last weekend for example, we hoped for good weather for our celebration of the 325th anniversary of the Meeting House. But we had to do more than hope the program would be successful. We gathered a great committee, we made phone calls, sent emails, chose super presenters. We intended to create a wonderful celebration, and that’s what we had.
And in time to come here at Old Ship, we can hope for this or that great new program or outreach effort. But our hopes and visions only become real when we harness them to intention and action.
Or the direction of our lives. You can’t just hope to become a doctor or lawyer, carpenter or artist. You have to do the work of education, preparation, training, apprenticeship.
And if we do fall ill. As I’ve already said, only hoping we get better won’t do. Depending on our illness, we need to rest or see a doctor, take medication, do physical therapy.
So, I do understand Derrick Jensen’s point, but only to a point. For hope is, it seems to me, an entirely human response to tough situations – whether personal crises or global crises from the war in Iraq to global warming. And to put it in positive terms, hope is an entirely human quality as we dream our personal future or as we imagine a better world. For it is more than worth keeping in mind that hope’s first cousin is vision, and from vision can grow the intention and action necessary (paraphrasing Thoreau) to put the foundations under our castles in the air.
And why bother at all – to hope, to dream, to have a vision of what could be? As Derrick Jensen writes elsewhere in his essay (though not about hope, which he has discarded, rather about action), though the thought is hardly unique to him… it’s all about love; it’s all about who and what you love, who and what you care about.
We do what needs to be done, harnessing hope to intention, to protect and help the people we love.
We work to save what we love – whether salmon or redwoods or this Old Ship Meeting House.
We work to create what we love – whether peace or a work of art or a community or a family.
Love is the energy source, the juice, that takes us beyond hope or, more accurately, takes us to the place where hope becomes partner to intention and action, with knowledge and courage… to a life fully and joyfully lived.
So may it be – for each of us and for all of us together. So may it be.
May the hopes and dreams in our hearts
Become the work of our hands,
As we share the journey of life with one another,
with the family of humanity, with the family of life…
Share… with love, with kindness, and with an enduring spirit of peace.
So may it be.
Updated Feb 04, 2007 Written by Rev. Kenneth Read-Brown