Hope in Doubt

Set aside hope as a potential encumbrance in the work before us?

Margaret Wheatley’s sober admonition reminds me of words to the same effect from Archbishop Oscar Romero a generation ago as shared by the poet Carolyn Forche. In a conversation with the bishop she inquired of him as to his personal sources of hope. "Mr. Romero told me not to need hope,” she wrote. “He said if you need to feel hope, you're courting despair; and if you court despair you'll stop working. So try to wean yourself from this need to have hope. Try to have faith instead, to do what you have to and stop worrying about whether or not you're effective or important. Worry about what is possible for you to do--which is always much greater than you imagine.”

This all leads me to wonder if Martin Luther may have intended something similar when he said, "If I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces I would still plant my apple tree.” Even with nothing to hope for love goes about its faithful work.

I wouldn’t want to debate the question of whether hope’s place among the spiritual dispositions is fading. (So faith and love abide, only these two . . .) I think what Wheatley and Romero and possibly Luther challenge us to is a stubborn, unwavering commitment to the practice of goodness in an environment of uncertainty, or even despair. If hope is a part of that tenacious temperament, then it is Dickinson’s thing with feathers, which while seemingly delicate at first glance, is in fact deceptively durable and self-possessed, for never in extremity “it asked a crumb of me.”

Wheatley reminds us that true moral character—specifically, being generous, kind, creative, and community-focused—has to do with who we fundamentally are and are becoming rather than what the gains from our behaviors will be. “No matter what is happening around them,” is how Wheatley would describe the disposition of a true leader in our time. No matter what. Minus incentives, minus encouraging signs, minus measurable progress toward a goal, minus any glimmer of light on the eastern horizon, who would we choose to be? How would we choose to live? This is how: with indifferent love as our guiding purpose.

What I find most stunning and also helpful is Dr. Wheatley’s level assessment of the seriousness of our circumstances. She is not interested in advancing the fiction of our okayness. And yet she is not subsumed beneath the ominous features that lie behind the curtain she’s drawn back. We need not be left paralyzed or defeated by daunting things, uncertain futures, or the limits of faith as we’ve practiced it. It was Christian Wiman who said, “One must learn to be in unknowingness without embracing it.” Or without letting it embrace us in some stranglehold.

Prepare

I also heard "prepare" in this conversation as a posture of readiness for the person of faith and action. “We have to prepare to be the best we can for all the destruction we’ve already created, and what’s ahead of us.” That word, prepare, is prominent among Advent lections and liturgical themes. The gospel texts for the first Sunday of Advent always herald coming catastrophe and urge preparedness. Subsequent Sunday readings lift up John’s voice in the wilderness and Mary’s in the angel’s presence, both echoing the message of prophets of old: “Prepare the way of the Lord . . .” and God has “brought down the powerful . . . and lifted up the lowly.”

We’ve often approached these texts more metaphorically than literally. Yet in an increasingly troubled global ecosystem and geopolitical arena, they become more existential. What does Christian waiting, expectancy, readying look like now when applied with Wheatley’s searing honesty to the harsh realities of our time? Originally shaped as a four-week season to mirror the forty-day Lenten season, Advent holds the same invitation to penitence, shriving, and renewed intention for practices of piety, mercy, and justice in preparation for the advent of the Messiah.

Memory Joggers

Shannon Hopkins speaks in the interview about funerals in the context of the deep work of grief as among the memory joggers that invite us to recall the deepest truths and highest virtues in our lives and sacred story. These are among the grace-filled gifts for the grieving—keen awareness of what has been ours due to the life of the one departed. Emily Dickinson’s phrase applies here: By a departing light//We see acuter, quite//Than by a wick that stays. If the season, the age before us is one of letting go, lament, the passing of a certain era of civilization, the dying of the light, then what can be gleaned from the passing things to hearten and fortify, to inspire and sustain us?

Her insight reminds me of a passage in Richard Powers' The Overstory. The description of a tree's fecund divesting holds a deeply ironic edge in that it is related to the felling of this species of tree by a voracious marketplace, so much of the backdrop of Wheatley’s view of earth’s increasingly precarious status.

“Before it dies, a Douglas-fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament. We might call these ancient benefactors giving trees.”

Does this portend humanity's best promise of relevance, goodness, virtue in the precarious future of a self-absorbed humanity? I find it, conversely, a poignant image for inviting individual acts of kindness and compassion, divesting whatever gifts of love and virtue into the world in ways that will not, regardless of external signs to the contrary, return void. Maybe therein lies that thing with feathers by which we are inspired to carry on, inviting assurance in the intrinsic worth of every note of song, every act of love.

Two-Loop Theory

The Two-Loop theory, it seems to me, is the essence of the Christian understanding of the life-giving power of God in our feeble lives and our failed history. “If we proclaim the dying of Jesus,” goes the liturgy, “we shall rise with him.” Things fall apart; catastrophe threatens; the center cannot hold; the night of history draws near. And yet our labors of love are not in vain, for we partake of the grace-imbued mystery of dying and rising that meets us in the gospel, in the Eucharist, and in faithful, self-sacrificial leading and serving in the world. “Even if my life is being poured out,” Paul writes in Philippians; but not as an expression of meaninglessness or despair—rather purposefully, devotionally. “Even if my life is being poured out . . . I rejoice.” Why? Because, with Hammarskjold, “existence is meaningful and . . . my life in self-surrender had a goal.”