Hope during Hard Times

Alexander Pope

When I was growing up, I often heard my mother citing snippets of poetry.  One such snippet was:

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast."

I knew that aphorism by heart long before I learned it was from the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope.

As I grew, finding my own identity, I heard many people expressing ideas that circled around that matter of being hopeful.  Radio and TV hosts frequently ask people, "Are you optimistic about the future?"  But optimism is different from hope (as the wide variety of answers given to that question demonstrates).  Whether or not a person is optimistic depends more upon their individual personality than upon what is actually probable.

Another word that circles around the matter of hope is the word "wish," but it too is different from hope.  The word "wish" often conveys a pie-in-the-sky type of wanting, as in when we speak of "wishful thinking."  Young children, before blowing out the candles on their birthday cakes, are told to "make a wish!"  The adults know, however, that at an early age, a child's wishing can be imagining things that are totally improbable.

The 19th-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote of a "passion for what is possible."  But what is possible in the future?  The better I can predict and even affect what might possibly come about in the future, the less often my hopes will be dashed, and the more often I will have the encouraging satisfaction of my hopes being fulfilled.  To borrow a metaphor sometimes used in the Taoist faith-tradition:  When woodcarvers create sculptures, their efforts will go better if they work with the natural grain of the wood.  Is there similarly a "grain" in the wood of life -- in the nature of things -- that I would be better off working with rather than resisting?

Certainly, if I wish the sun will rise in the sky tomorrow, my wish will be granted -- even if I am no longer alive to see it myself!  Even before modern science, astronomers had mapped out the movements of the sun, moon, and planets more precisely than any clocks they possessed.  The sun's rising tomorrow is not only possible but virtually assured.  That is not the case, however, with what will happen tomorrow in human societies.  There are too many factors involved in any single society to have an absolute assurance about what will happen.  There are even too many factors involved in one individual human life.

These reflections of mine on hope and the future have concentrated mostly upon thinking about the nature of hope by itself.  But in the Bible -- which so frequently exhorts people not to give up hope -- hope is not usually treated as a quality in and of itself.  Hope in the Christian tradition has been considered to be part of a triad of human spiritual qualities:  The other two qualities of the triad are faith and love.  That triad is rooted most explicitly in a New Testament passage in I Corinthians in which Paul writes:

"And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three;

 and the greatest of these is love."

-- 1 Corinthians 13:13 (NRSV)

Hope can become something even further away from wishing when it is blended with love.  When blended with love, hope can become transformed into something much larger than concern about my individual well-being and whether I can control or predict the future to my own advantage.  Blended with love, hope can become an ennobling way of life.

One of the trickiest questions revolving around hope is:  Can our hoping itself actively affect the future? The theologian Jürgen Moltmann (who wrote a book titled Theology of Hope) tackled that question.  He answered "yes" to it in this way:

"Biblical texts understand hope as a positive, divine power of life.

 It is the expectation of a good future....

  Consequently, hope...does not detach the human spirit from the present through delusions,  but rather the opposite;

 it pulls the promised future into the present."

And as I try to become more loving (and not lose hope), maybe a walk in the early morning sun will help me.  Maybe it will help me feel the constancy of a hidden grain in the nature of things.  Maybe even a grain within our human lives.

~ ~ ~

(What do you hope for?)

(The Pope quotation is from An Essay on Man, l. 95.)
(The Kierkegaard quotation is from Fear and Trembling.)
(The Moltmann quotation is from New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology,
 ed. by Donald W. Musser & Joseph L. Price, © 2003, pp. 249-250.)

Bound Together at the Root

We call them "pages" -- those rectangular sheets that form a book.  At one time, those pages were not infrequently called the "leaves" of a book.  Today, we employ that term less often (although we do still use "loose-leaf" notebooks, even in this digital age).  And occasionally we might say that a person is "leafing through" a magazine as they browse through its pages.

John Donne
(1572-1631)

The employment of the same English word for both the pages of a book and those flat attachments to a tree we call "leaves" proved to be fertile ground for the pen of the early 17th-century poet and essayist John Donne.  His prose could at moments be as rich as poetry.  And he drew upon the "leaf" metaphor in "Meditation XVII" of his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.  That is the mediation in which he makes his more famous statement that "No man is an island, entire of itself."  But his expansion of the "leaf" metaphor is more intricate.

In his imagery, he turns a book into a living organism that goes through a season of rebirth -- the way a tree is reborn into a new spring of life, even though its leaves had fallen to the ground the autumn before.  In Donne's intricate picture, those "scattered leaves" are parts of our human lives, which can seem piecemeal.  But God is able to give new meaning to them, even though we are all mortals.  As Donne writes:

"When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book,
 but translated into a better language."

One reason God is able to do that work of restoration is because "all mankind is of one author and is one volume."

Donne would doubtlessly have been aware of the long tradition in Christianity of describing the natural world as the "Book of Nature." Similar to the way that Christianity possessed a book -- the Bible -- as one source of revelation, the natural world was also viewed as being able to reveal things about God.  But in his "Meditation XVII," John Donne focuses just on humans and the challenge of our mortality.

"not torn out"

Death was a challenge he knew full well.  His wife Anne, at the age of 33, died after giving birth to a stillborn child.  Also, John Donne had to frequently deal with death as an Anglican pastor: ringing the bell to signal the loss, and then addressing the congregation through a sermon.  In his "leaf" metaphor, he takes advantage of the stitched edge of a book being called its "binding" to emphasize that we are all inescapably bound together.  In a more fascinating way, he describes death as not being removed from the "book" but as being "translated" as God reveals new meaning in each person's existence.  As Donne puts it:

"Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice;
 but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up
 all our scattered leaves again for that library
 where every book shall lie open to one another."

In the same way that the continuing work of the Creator recycles the minerals of a tree's fallen leaves back into the tree's new spring-life, the values of our human lives are not lost in Donne's vision.  Instead, at death, they are given new, deeper meanings as part of a larger whole.  Indeed, many of us have experienced how the lives of the people we have known but who have died can speak to us in a new way, even though they are physically gone from us.

~ ~ ~ 

(Is there a person no longer living whose life gives you additional understanding for your own life?  Who?  And how?)

(All the quotations are from John Donne's "Meditation XVII" from his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 1624.)
(The portrait of Donne is in the public domain by virtue of its age beyond the artist's life.)

What is Natural?

What wakes you up in the morning?  An alarm clock?  A clock-radio set to your favorite station?  The sunlight coming through your window?  Your dog?  Your child who wakes up before you do?

The answer depends upon your particular life circumstances.  At one stage in my life, when I worked at a job that began before daybreak, I would often rouse up before the clock-radio, out of my anxiety that I would oversleep.  Now that I am retired from that job, I can enjoy letting my body's own internal "clock" wake me up.

Thinking about what wakes us up in the morning is an easy place to begin reflecting upon a complex question:  Namely, what is natural?  That sunrise certainly is natural, in contrast to that electronic clock that mimics the sun's 12-hour-average day.  Our body's internal "clocks" are also natural -- although they can be thrown off their rhythms by our having stayed up late the night before, using artificially created electricity to run our man-made computers.

There is more at stake in that word "natural" than the matter of how we wake up.  That is because in trying to understand ourselves, we try to discover some aspects of our human nature that have some connection to the world of Nature.  Even as we declare some human actions to be right or wrong, we also describe some of those actions as being "natural" or "unnatural."  We ask, "What is human nature?"

Over the past few decades, a number of scientists have presented depictions of human nature that have drawn upon the biologist Richard Dawkins' idea of "the selfish gene."  As Dawkins now famously wrote:

"We are... robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules
 known as genes."

However, there is something askew about Dawkins' characterization.  He attributes more personality to genes ("selfish molecules") than he does to human beings.  Whereas genes are able to guide outcomes, we are just robots.

One of the conclusions Dawkins puts forward from his depiction of genes is that humans are fundamentally selfish in nature.  As he wrote, "We are born selfish."  It is here that the philosopher Mary Midgley stepped in to critique what she saw as being the crude simplifications resulting from selfish-gene rhetoric.  Midgley admits the valuable point that genes that contribute to the reproductive and survival potential of a species are more likely preserved.  But she points out that part of that process is genes' making us naturally mammals and social creatures.  And so, one of our gene-related potentials is our ability to take care of other individuals.  As Midgley puts it:

"If we ask whether we are indeed... creatures that are naturally just hell-bent egoists, we can see that this cannot be true because ancestral creatures like that would never have gone through all the trouble and sacrifice that are needed to rear human children.
Such people would leave no descendants."

Midgley underscores our natural potential for offering care by spotlighting a parent's love for their child (even if that child does sometimes wake up the parent who wanted to sleep longer).  Even though as an infant our earliest yearning was to be loved, love was built into our mammalian, social nature.

Midgley's worry is that "the crude metaphor" of "selfish gene" has been employed to promote "an ideology of everyday cynicism."  She writes:

"To repeat -- officially, the doctrine of selfish genes does not mean
 that individuals are motivated only by self-interest."

Our human lives and societies are complex integrations of the natural and the man-made.  Valentine's Day is an artificial, societal construction.  And yet, like those natural cycles of the sun, Valentine's Day's annual rhythm can wake us up again to the importance of being loving.  Loving toward partners.  Toward friends.  And even by being courteous to the stranger we meet.

~ ~ ~

(Where do you see love at work?)

(The Dawkins quotations are from The Selfish Gene, © 1976, 1989, pp. 127 & 3.)

(The Midgley quotations are from her article "The Origins of Don Giovanni" in the magazine Philosophy Now, Winter 1999/2000, p. 32.)

Of Campfires and Stars

Even before there was writing, humans gathered around fires.
And even before there was writing, humans told stories.  As those ancient humans sat around fires at night, telling stories, they would have noticed some of the sparks from the fire ascending against the darkness of the night sky.  As their eyes followed those sparks upward, some of those sparks would have seemed to almost merge with their cousins -- the stars.  And as those humans looked upward and told stories, some of those random stars became transformed into constellations. They saw animals and legendary heroes there:  A bear.  A scorpion.  Orion.  And thus, the cosmic dome became part of the narratives about human lives.

Today, the idealized campfire is a symbol of belonging and peace.  It is a place where we hope people will come together to find belonging and a warmth of spirit.

The literary analyst Harold Bloom provided a revealing analysis of the connection between fire and belonging in one narrative in the Bible's book of Luke (22:54-62).  After Jesus is arrested, his disciple Peter flees into the darkness of the night.  Peter is alone and cut off in the coldness of the night.  But then he notices a fire burning in the distance.  On many occasions in the past, Peter's companions and Jesus spent time around such fires at night, sharing stories.  And so, the lonely Peter is drawn towards this new fire, around which people are huddled.  But when Peter draws closer to this fire, his face becomes illuminated, and so he is recognized as being a disciple of Jesus, the identity which he had been trying to conceal.  Peter and the strangers around the fire have not felt their common humanity.  And Peter flees back into the darkness of the cold night.

There is a larger way the sense of belonging can become lost.  Jeffrey Sobosan recounts an incident involving a mentor of his, "an old priest who had .... contributed brilliantly to his own specialty in theology, and now at the close of life had given himself over to what he once described as his first love, the study of the stars."  Sobosan continues:

"I met him in a garden one evening, where he sat by his beloved telescope...
with a look of ineffable sadness in his eyes.... He spoke of the beauty of the universe...
but in striving after this beauty,... his mind had taken a savage turn ...
toward the damning conclusion: the universe is void of meaning."

The vast cosmos had, for him, become alien.

It is not hard to understand why Sobosan's mentor-priest felt himself betrayed by the cosmos, which he had hoped would provide him a comforting beauty with its views though the telescope.  Even though telescopes have revealed much more of this vast universe, the view through a telescope is a narrowing of our immediate field of vision. It is somewhat like trying to view an ocean through a ship's small porthole.  As the philosopher Max Oelschlaeger explains, using Galileo as an example:

"By using the telescope, Galileo’s eyes gathered additional light,
and the telescopic image itself was magnified....
What he lost was the sweeping field of view of the naked eye astronomy....
And perhaps, in his intense concentration, he lost also the sounds and smells of the night
and the awareness of himself as a conscious man beholding
a grand and mysterious stellar spectacle."

A sweeping field of vision can encompass both those stars and ourselves in one grand narrative.  And that narrative can give us a sense of universal belonging -- provided we remember our common humanity as part of that domed narrative.  The story-telling circle must become wider than the ring around our particular campfire.

~ ~ ~

(Do you have any recollection of being around a campfire in a way that increased your sense of belonging?  When was it?  What was it like?)

(The Sobosan quotation is from his Romancing the Universe: Theology, Science, and Cosmology. © 1999. p. 1.)

(The Oelschlaeger quotation if from his The Idea of Wilderness. © 1991. p. 78.)

A Crocus in the Snow

It is a classic subject for nature photographers:  a vividly purple flower
 in the midst of white snow. Why is that image appealing to us?

Part of its appeal comes from its aesthetic beauty -- so much so that it demonstrates what have long been held to be some of the identifying characteristics of beauty.  One of those is that beauty is created when some features that might otherwise be experienced as being in conflict are instead held together in harmony.  In this case, the intensity of purple contrasts with the absence of color in the snow; yet the two are held in harmony.  The contemporary professor of religion Steven R. Guthrie, explaining this aspect of classical Western thought regarding beauty, writes that, "In Plato's dialogues... harmony in this sense is not uniformity or unanimity but the beauty that emerges from different elements in right relationship.... It is, in Dante's words, 'an order' from 'things disparate.' "

Most people like the image of the crocus in the snow.  That favorable emotional response points to another aspect that the Western philosophical and theological traditions have identified as being a characteristic of beauty.  Namely, that something beautiful creates a resonance within us that is pleasing.  In that regard, Guthrie explains that " [Thomas] Aquinas draws our attention to the immediate impression that beautiful things make upon our senses."

In the case of the crocus in the snow, however, those who find the image beautiful are often responding to more than the aesthetic beauty of purple against white.  A purple blotch on a white background would not elicit the same emotions that the flower does.  What also resonates within us in the case of the crocus, even if unconsciously, is the contrast between the new life of the emerging flower and the surrounding cold snow of winter -- the season in which most plants die back.  This additional form of contrast is also a dimension of the image's beauty that is pleasing to us.  Not only is the tension between purple and white held together, but life and death are held together in a moment of harmony when the crocus emerges out of the snow.  The 18th-century poet Christopher Smart, in his poem praising God, expressed how the crocus stands out from other plants around it.  He wrote:

"The laurels with the winter strive;

The crocus burnishes alive

     Upon the snow-clad earth."

The moment of plant-nativity displayed by the crocus can thus evoke within us that enduring quality of hope that sustains our human existence.  Gandhi once wrote:

"I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds
 all together, that creates, dissolves, and re-creates.... And is this power benevolent or malevolent? I see it as purely benevolent. For I can see that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists.
 Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light."

It is through our human capacity to not only resonate when experiencing aesthetic beauty but also respond to symbols that we can open ourselves to the transcendent dimension of reality.  The crocus in the snow reveals to us more than the survival capability of a specific flower.  It points to the Ultimate Ground of all existence.  And in that Ground are the "flower-bulbs" and "seeds" of all that can be.  There is an Indian saying that:

"All the flowers of all the tomorrows
 are in the seeds of today."

The real challenge can be spotting those "seeds" and nurturing them.  Sometimes we cannot even see them at all.  But even when we cannot perceive them, we can hope, and like Gandhi we can have faith that they are there despite being hidden beneath the snow.

~ ~ ~

(What do you hope for?  Can you see any way you might contribute to that future growth of something good?)

(The Steven R. Guthrie quotation is from his book Creator Spirit:
 The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human, © 2011. pp. 201-202 & 205.)

(The lines by Christopher Smart are from "A Song to David,"
 taken from Encompassing Nature, ed. Robert M. Torrance, © 1998, p. 1015.)

(The Gandhi quotation is from his Young India, 11-10-28, as quoted in Gleanings from
 the writings of Mahatma Gandhi bearing on God, God-Realization and the Godly way, ed. R. K. Prabhu.)