Hunting for Hope
Rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing steadfastly in prayer.
Kobe’s passing seems like decades ago. COVID might be slowing down, but most of the experts are pretty sure it will speed right back up. And after George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and the ongoing protests and the ongoing debate between two sides on the “legitimacy” of the outrage of many, we’ve never had such polarizing division in America.
Factor, too, the individual crisis generated by what has happened in 2020. Unemployment, the urgency of childcare and child development, the plight of low income Americans, the fear of black and brown people upon seeing the red and blue lights exacerbated all the more.
And, as well, even the shallow, relatively “insignificant” crises distinct to all of us (yet felt all the same). Unrequited love. Lack of belonging. Deep and crushing loneliness. Rise in digital addiction, including pornography, show binging, alcohol use, drug use, etc.
There’s a lot that the powers and principalities that be, the ones that Paul writes in Ephesians, are doing to keep us divided. Keep us desperate. Keep us impoverished. Keep us hopeless.
As we continue to struggle against these overwhelming forces, both the ones we see on Fox or CNN, but also the ones that are unseen physically but pervade everything spiritually, we must not abandon the hope that we cling to. The cross followed by the tomb. The death of the False Self which raises a better and truer True Self, in Christ.
And, most importantly, the kingdom of God Jesus has called each of us into, which provides a path for a better world for those around us, in particular, those who are the most oppressed and slighted by those same principalities and powers. After all, the first beatitude is blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.
Schools were some of the first places to shut down. Understandably so. I love kids, but they are disgusting, and so spread their germs to every orifice of the places they inhabit. So, out of necessity, all states closed schools down to prevent the spread of COVID.
I support the move, 100%, but I now feel the weight of three months bereft of one of my main sources of hope. Children have a particular capacity to preach sermons to me that even the most eloquent and insightful preacher never can. Their joy is unfiltered, their frustration uninhibited, their emotions and fears and problems evident and directly out on display. Watching a little one overcome a particular pitfall is worth a hundred viral videos, thousands of followers on social media, millions of likes from particularly foolish politicians in alarmingly powerful positions.
The past few weeks I’ve been in a rut. And most of it rightfully so. Our nation, even amidst all the huge protests and sick people and clap-back tweets, is in a place of mourning. We needed to be, some hundreds of years ago. There’s many places where we have been deeply wrong without even a hint of recourse or a cry for repentance (save for those who have been wronged and who have been crying against those who have wronged them). White supremacy is the biggest one on the forefront of many minds, but within even that lies several monolithic sins America has clung to for far too long.
“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”
“God helps those who help themselves.”
“Wealth is proof of God’s providence in your life.”
These ideas support one another, feeding off of each other to place some of the church on the wrong side of history. It is propagated, absolutely, by a nation birthed by mostly religious, wealthy, white slave owners, and is sustained by the seen and unseen powers and principalities of our time.
What is interesting to me, however, is that if I, as an educator (and eventual counselor), approached my work with these kinds of lenses, I’d be terrible at my job. If I told Johnny to pull himself up by his bootstraps while his dad is out of the picture, and his mom is working three jobs to support him? Heartless and lacking compassion.
If I told Darrique that he should do what’s right because “God helps those who help themselves,” that would entirely omit his father being locked away in prison for a petty crime with a pettily long sentence (see Ava Duvernay’s “13” on Netflix and/or read “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander) and his mother’s deep concern for her son’s very life when a cop car drives by.
If I told Alejandro that our current president’s wealth is proof of God’s providence in his life, I am also saying, implicitly, that his father who worked his tail off to provide for his family only to be hauled away for being born on the wrong side of God’s earth is proof of God’s NOT caring about his life.
This may be an uncomplicated image, an elementary caricature, an overly simplified appeal to how this kind of theology would not work when addressing the plight and pain of a child’s individual experience, but then why is it readily accepted in adulthood?
Why when thousands of black and brown Americans die from COVID because of a lack of medical access and income, do we rage in anger over our sudden lack of freedom and liberty in city capitals? Why when the unarmed and innocent George Floyd has his neck pressed against the concrete do we primarily complain and bicker about the looting and violence?
Why when we have a God who in His holy scriptures directly addresses the plight of the poor over 2,000 times do we still hold tightly to a theology and government and society that continues to push them down and oppress them, whether they be black, brown, white, male, female, other?
This is my lament, of which I borrow mainly from my brothers and sisters under the more direct duress of these adverse experiences.
Yet from this lament, so do I also begin my hunt for hope. For lament itself stems from a deep belief that things can and should be better and a frustration at the slowness of that very change. Martin Luther King Jr. said “there can’t be deep disappointment where there is not deep love.”
I love that King quote because it dispels the foolishness of nihilism while also commending anguish at how things aren’t the way they “ought to be.” Because these two seemingly opposing things can and often coexist, contrary to what many might say. We can be hopeful and frustrated, excited and worried, steadfast and fickle. I wonder if hope isn’t the absence of despair but the choice of hope even amidst overwhelming despair.
But it has to start pragmatically. Theoretical jibber jabber has come and gone, rearing its ugly head to make us believe we are more different than we are the same. The time for convincing others of how they are wrong via tweets or Facebook is coming to a close. The time is right (as it always has been) to do what is right (also a quote by King).
It is hope that sustains morality, not intellectual wisdom nor collective outrage. So then, what is hope? And how can we tap into its power to help the cause of the kingdom of God, particularly for the least of these?
Hope, in action, is a deep and abiding trust that the good you do, the tangible, self-sacrificial, agenda-less acts of love for the sake of others done on the daily actually do cause damage to the powers and principalities. Gandalf, when asked by Galadriel in the first Hobbit film, describes it like this:
Saruman believes that it is only great power that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I have found. I found it is the small things, everyday deeds by ordinary folk, that keeps the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.
Hope, in action, is the deep, hard, and laborious duty of refusing not only to hate and resent others, particularly, those responsible for bringing such severe circumstances of oppression, and, instead, stepping out, in faith, with love toward those very same people. It is choosing nonviolence when everything in you would opt, rather, for violence. Coretta Scott King puts it like this:
Nelson Mandela sat in a South African prison for 27 years. He was nonviolent. He negotiated his way out of jail. His honor and suffering of 27 years in a South African prison is really ultimately what brought about the freedom of South Africa. That is nonviolence.
Hope, in action, is the inward journey of rooting out selfish ambition, ego advancement, and our deep need to be right to instead go and do what is right over and ahead of thinking what is right. Rumi puts it like this:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.
Hope, in action, is an emptying of sinful motivation and justification by replacing it with the needs of those around you, especially and particularly the needy and hurting. Thomas Merton puts it like this:
There are plenty of (people) who will give up their interests for the sake of “society,” but cannot stand any of the people they live with. As long as we regard other men as obstacles to our own happiness we are the enemies of society and we have only a very small capacity for sharing in the common good.
Hope, in action, is the fierce and wild imagination of children who, even under the most adverse of experiences and heaviest of hardships, are deeply inspired and moved by narrative, by truth, and mostly importantly, by love itself and a belief that all things can be changed for the better. Frederick Douglass put it like this:
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
Hope is expensive. The principalities and powers have a vested interest in keeping everyone hopeless. It is how, in fact, they continue to oppress people into lacking hope and stalling change. Therefore, choosing hope is choosing a rich solidarity with those who have no hope. The enemy is a roaring lion, looking for prey to devour and destroy. Jesus describes that the Satan comes only to kill, steal, and destroy.
Jesus, on the other hand, came to give life and life abundantly. The first scroll He read, the first thing He wanted others to know, the first sermon He ever taught was reciting a prophecy about Himself and how He would aid the needy and hurting:
The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
By trusting in hope, hope in Christ and in His kingdom, the Spirit of the Lord will be on us. He will anoint us to proclaim good news to the poor. He sends us, now, in 2020, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, so that we can, with utmost and entirely confident hearts, proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
Hope is expensive. But despair is too. Whether life be hard for you to remain faithful or life be hard so that you become faithless, the universal truth is that life is hard. But it is purposeful, it can be redemptive, and is best lived lessening the hardships of those around you. A life lived bettering the lives of those around you is the essential beauty, wisdom, and eternal treasure Jesus lived for, died for, and rose again for.