Hope Against Hope

October 1st, 2023

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There is a version of the myth of Pandora’s Box which ends just a little bit differently than the standard telling. Just as in the original, Pandora opens the forbidden container left in her care, and greed, envy, hatred, pain, disease, hunger, poverty, war, and death were released into the world. And just as in the original, the last thing to fly out of the box was hope.

But this retelling goes on to suggest that, instead of being a light to hold against the shadows which came before, hope was actually just as cruel a gift as all the others.

I am not a pessimist. I’m not! And yet, at times I find that framing to be alluring. You see, hope and I have an uneasy relationship.

The quality is, at best, paradoxical, and at worst it can be downright toxic. I’m admittedly a pretty sensitive person but hope has contributed to some seriously wounding experiences in my life. Choices I’ve made from that beautiful, enchanting, irrational emotional space where my being was suffused with hope turned out more often than not to lead to some major wounding.

I suppose you could call that false hope, but when you’re in it, how can you possibly know the difference?

Developing stability in my life has required me to cultivate a philosophy of non-attachment similar to that professed by Buddhist teachers. And this particular type of hope, false or otherwise, is a form of attachment. Attachment to a certain outcome impedes our ability to meet the moment with curiosity and openness. It disrupts our ability to connect with gratitude, and it sets us up for disappointment.

“I hope I pass my driver’s test”... “I hope I get the job”... “I hope my candidate wins the election”... “I hope the church recovers from the pandemic years” …

Not only are these attachments, I’d even say they’re a form of abdication. How often does an expression of a hope like this motivate you to action?

To begin the journey of recovery from my years of toxic hope, I had to engage in some targeted thought replacement. Whenever I caught myself behaving hopefully, I tried to become mindful of the unknowable multitude of possibilities ahead of me, and then refocus on getting curious about what was around and ahead of me. I did a lot of work to make peace with the things which were out of my control. And this did a lot to improve my decisionmaking, but it also left a vacuum where I needed something to help me face the world’s hardships without feeling crushed by them.

Because that is the purpose hope serves, when it does show up to help. At its best, hope is the antidote to despair. Curiosity is the antidote to anxiety, and gratitude is the antidote to dissatisfaction, but despair? That’s a job for hope.

And this is where the paradox comes in, the big old catch-22 of human experience.

Because far and away the best anti-despair fuel comes from taking some form of action demonstrating the possibility of a better world. Depending on how powerful the despair is, sometimes just getting out of bed and making a cup of tea can shake loose a crumb of hope. And other times, it looks more like feeling a little more optimistic about the future after attending a protest, or feeling a little less disconnected from community after going to a committee meeting. The source of hope IS the actions of hope.

But if we need to do hopeful things in order to feel it, where on earth do we get the energy to act in the first place?

The answer to this is different for everybody, and often varies from moment to moment. For me it’s often music, sometimes rain, and sometimes a belief that I was put on this world for the purpose of loving it through and through. For you it might be some concept of the divine, some expression of nature, the future of your grandchildren, making your ancestors proud, a belief in the universality of love, or really anything that gives you a little spark of lightness.

I believe we need faith in order to reach true hope. We are asking ourselves to take the actions of hope without any guarantee that our circumstances will get better.

This is an irrational request. We need to have faith in something to get through it.

And humans, we’re really good at giving magic powers to the things which hold our attention. We can use our ability to mythologize to our advantage when it comes time to fight against despair. In the energy-devoid state of hopelessness, we reach for whatever we believe in to back our internal promises that we will feel better. Whether you are repeating sayings from AA in your mind, or hissing “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice” through your teeth, you are utilizing faith to pull you towards hope.

It’s tempting to reject faith-based thoughts because culturally, we do tend to lionize rationality. Don’t give into the temptation, because let me tell you: when you are in a hopeless state, logic is not your friend. When despair is tugging at you, there is a tendency to find it easier to notice all the bad stuff in the world. And logically, yes, there’s always a lot to be upset about. Getting lodged there helps no one.

So I’ll encourage us all to reject the reflex to rationalize and feel for faith wherever you can find it. As soon as you have that little spark of energy in your heart, don’t waste it! Before it fades, use it to take an action of hope in whatever way is available to you.

When I was in seminary, I was assigned to write about what keeps me going through hard times, and I found myself writing about what I’ve learned to do when I am stuck in an unbearable feeling. In short, I lean on the certainty that at some point in the future I’m bound to experience a different feeling from the one I’m having right now. To get there, keep moving. To improve the odds of the different feeling being a better one, try to make sure my small movements are good ones.

And as I’ve gone through this week thinking about this topic of hope, I keep encountering stories with this idea of not giving up by continuing to make moves. In the words of Howard Zinn, for example:

“I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that only confidence can prevent people from giving up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.”

And this is the best, most practical, most honest suggestion about hope that I can impart. Whether or not we can change our most intolerable circumstances is usually beyond our control, but the only chance there is of things becoming any different is if we try something. And often, hope isn’t about our world getting easier, but about having the fortitude to weather its difficulties. By taking the actions of hope, we give ourselves the energy to keep on moving. We give that gift to our communities, too. And we give the world another micro-opportunity for change.

So reach for what you believe in, and let it keep you moving. Because in the words of Hezekiah Walker, I need you to survive. Many weeks, the spirit of this community is the source of my faith. If you believe in us like I do, I ask you to bring your stronger-than-reason faith with you here and hold it up high, because we need to believe in one another.

And I ask you, when you can, to take your actions of hope here in this community.

When we join in that effort together, the results are magnified. Together, we can conjure up so much more true hope than we might alone. Let’s show up for one another, shield each other from despair when needed, amplify each other’s energy when possible.

This is the power of a faith community. May we fulfill it for the sake of our own hearts and the good of the world in equal measure.

Copyright 2023 Miranda (Bran) Lennox