Hope: making room for lament
“What the world needs now is love, sweet love; it’s the only thing that there’s just too little of. What the world needs now is love, sweet love—no, not just for some, but for everyone.”
When, in 1965, Hal David penned those lyrics—to be sung to Burt Bacharach’s flowing music—“sweet love” may have been what was needed. Now? Naw. It’s hope, hope especially, that humankind requires. What, nowadays, could be more needed, more longed for, than hope?
It’s this evanescent ingredient that Debie Thomas points up in her writing for the October issue of The Christian Century, “The hope I’ve arrived at”: “I used to put a positive spin on everything. I assumed that my faith required me to put a positive spin on even the bleakest of things.
“But this moment of climate peril, mass shootings, political brokenness, war, economic uncertainty, failing civic institutions, violent and racist rhetoric, and death-dealing loneliness, feels an especially hard one to navigate….”
The author of the book, A Faith of Many Rooms, Thomas is hardly alone in questing for hope. Read what John Pavlovitz [whom Religion News Services dubs the “digital pastor of the resistance”] wrote in his blog a month earlier: “I can feel it in my bones. That not right-ness [that] wakes me up at night. […] I…tell myself…that things aren’t as bad as they seem, that the world is no worse off than it’s ever been. But I know me well enough to know that I’m lying.”
This pastor, writer, activist, and progressive Christian blogger continues: “I imagine you feel it. You sense the not right-ness, don’t you? …You can’t be alive right now, and not notice something’s wrong.” He adds, lamentably, “Over time, the negativity begins to feel normal, the malice ordinary, and slowly but certainly the muscles that allow you to care deeply begin to suffer atrophy, and your empathy eventually dies.”
______________________________________________________________________
Pope Francis: our world “is losing its heart”
That “something’s wrong,” as Pavlovitz has it, is not lost on Pope Francis. In October, he issued his fourth encyclical, “He Loves Us,” in which he writes of global turmoil marked by “wars, socio-economic disparities, and the uses of technology that threaten our humanity.” He’s worried that our world “is losing its heart”: should we fail to “feel that something is intolerable” in the suffering of peoples caught up in conflicts—think of Gaza and Ukraine—well, that would be “a sign of a world that has grown heartless.”
Especially in such a world, we risk losing access to an “interior life,” and forgetting “that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity.” In this newest encyclical, Francis is appealing to the faithful to meditate on Jesus’ love: as one archbishop explained, the pope is saying, “‘God loves you, and has shown you in the best way, through Jesus.’’’ Vatican encyclicals are the most authoritative form of papal teaching.
______________________________________________________________________
Already half-a-dozen years ago, Pavlovitz preached a sermon [“When the world is upside down”] at a Unitarian Universalist church in suburban Raleigh, North Carolina, a homily so arresting that Religion News Service reported it: he offered the “people assembled the reassurance they are not alone. ‘I hear that nagging question you hear: Am I losing my mind? I’m here to tell you, you’re not.’”
Take heart, he coaxed: “‘The despair you feel, the urgency, the frustration, means that your heart is doing what a heart is supposed to do. You are the kind of people the world needs right now. Yes, it’s disheartening, but there is reason for hope. …It’s why you can’t make peace with the madness that you see.’”
In dedicating his 2015 book, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance, to the parishioners of his church in Oklahoma City, Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ—notably inclusive, welcoming, and bent on orthopraxy—Robin Meyers, too, pictured “a world that is not as it should be.”
In an earlier edition of The Christian Century in which the piece by Thomas appeared, the magazine’s editor, Peter Marty, reckoned, “Despair is easy to come by in anxious and divided times.” But he offered, well, hope: “We can choose to live with a posture of hope instead of a disposition of dread. […] [H]ope is not some silly conviction that everything in society and politics is just fine. It isn’t fine. Hope merely visualizes a better way—a way to walk into the future and, even more importantly, create a future.”
Ordained Lutheran minister that he is, Marty went on to note, “In a long section of Luke’s Gospel [21:5-36], Jesus speaks of the fear and anxiety that will infiltrate people’s lives as they witness distress, persecution, calamity, and more. The cataclysmic events enveloping the earth will be matched only by the chaos rumbling around in people’s souls.
“But then, in a most improbable image, Jesus starts talking about spring. He paints a parable of green leaves appearing on bare trees. Suggesting that summer and the kingdom of God are near, he calls his followers to stand tall amidst the turmoil as he summons them to live expectantly in hope.”
So, to soldier on in this world, surely hope is needed. It must be the answer.
Not so fast.
“Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing,” environmental activist Derrick Jensen contends. Hope,” you see, “is what keeps us chained to the system,” to the status quo, to all that’s wrong. In his piece, “Beyond hope,” published in the May/June, 2006, issue of Orion Magazine, he contends, “We’ve all been taught that hope in some future condition…is, and must be, our refuge in current sorrow.” And that has him fume: “Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane.”
Jensen defends his minority-report conclusion in this way: “To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. […] When we realize the degree of agency we actually have, we no longer have to ‘hope’ at all. We simply do the work. When we stop hoping…then we are…truly free to honestly start working to resolve it”—“it” being the awfulness that causes us to feel helpless and hopeless. “I would say that when hope dies, action begins.” Hard to argue otherwise, isn’t it?
[“But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave,” Jensen reports, “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.”]
You know, Jensen isn’t the only writer to advance an unconventional take on hope. In his newest book, Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart, the prolific Brian McLaren admits, “[H]ope can be a problem.” And if, by “hope,” you mean optimism, then, he declares, “I often feel that I have lost hope [his emphasis].”
This progressive Christianity luminary explains, “It’s counterintuitive to many of us to see hope as dangerous,” but, and here he quotes Thich Nhat Hanh, who writes from a Buddhist perspective: “[W]hen we ‘cling to our hope in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment.’ We bypass the present to dwell in a better imagined future….”
McLaren then describes the paradox in which he’s left: “According to people I respect and trust, hope is essential because it motivates. According to other people I respect and trust, hope is dangerous because it keeps us from facing how bad things really are, and responding appropriately.”
Thus it is that McLaren points up, and embraces, the understanding of Joanna Macy, another Buddhist teacher, who “argues for hope, but for active hope [his emphasis].” It’s Derrick Jensen all over again!
But let’s return to Pavlovitz and the blog he posted in September [“Where have the kind humans gone?”], who takes this subject matter off in a different direction, still trying to make sense of all the outrage and mayhem with which we struggle: “I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is.” His conclusion? “The problem isn’t the ugly, bitter, maddening legion of dangers that are here. The real problem is what’s not here: kindness [his emphases].
“It’s the gaping hole opening up in our collective humanity. The absence of compassion. The poverty of empathy. It seems like kind people are an endangered species. […] All I know is that we need kind people, now. We so need a Renaissance of goodness to be ushered in, a fierce revival of decency that sandblasts off the negativity, and breaks open all these battle-hardened hearts, allowing us to be softer toward one another.”
[This matters so much to Pavlovitz that he’s authored a book—which will be added soon to the SSUC Library collections; watch for it—Worth Fighting For: Finding Courage & Compassion When Cruelty is Trending. It’s meant, its publisher, Westminster John Knox Press, declares, “to provide the encouragement, stamina, and direction we need to keep going, even when things feel bleak.” It’s “a stirring playbook for Christians who strive to ensure that kindness triumphs over toxicity,” Foreword Reviews warrants.]
Lots of sound keep-calm-and-carry-on advice in these writings, yes? Really? In the face of the pervasive evil, violence, hatred, displacement, ruin—sin—all about us? So very much of which we human beings are sowing? The “cruelty” that Pavlovitz points up, and the “doom” that McLaren underlines? Engulfed in this maelstrom, we’re to hope? When, really, we’d rather wail and rage.
This is where we need to hear again from Debie Thomas: her take on hope may well be the most honest of all, the most acute:
__________________________________________________________
Debie Thomas in her own words: delving deeper into mystery
“I’m…a columnist and contributing editor for The Christian Century. From 2014 to 2022, I served as a staff writer for Journey with Jesus: a Weekly Webzine…and from 2014 to 2024, I served as a lay minister for formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California. I studied English literature at Wellesley College and Brown University, and earned a master of fine arts in creative writing at The Ohio State University. Currently, I am a seminarian at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California.
“…I was born in Kerala, South India, and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Like many children of immigrants, I grew up juggling a complicated and often confusing mix of identities: South Asian, New England suburban, evangelical, and feminist. In the murky ‘in-betweenness’ of those identities, I learned that life is far more varied and messy than it is neat or certain, and that faith is not about finding once-and-for-all answers, but about delving deeper and deeper into mystery.
“I was a preacher’s kid and a church nerd, but also the annoying little brat who asked all the ‘wrong’ questions about God, faith, doubt, life, and the Bible. I started writing as soon as I learned to read and spell. I was lucky to have a mom who introduced me early to the treasures of language and literature, and writing soon became my way of processing my world. Whenever I felt awed, bewildered, frightened, or joyful, I turned to pen and paper for refuge and grounding….
“I’m not quite as conflicted as I used to be, but I remain a seeker, an explorer, a believer, and a doubter. I write about faith because faith is both hard and life-giving, both beautiful and bizarre. I write because I don’t know, and because God somehow meets me in that unknowing. I find solace in wrestling and seeking blessing on the page, and I hope my journey gives others permission to wrestle, too.”
___________________________________________________________
“Whatever hope entails now, it simply cannot entail a Pollyannish minimization of what is real and true,” she insists. “Even if what is real and true is terrifying…. So, I try to embody a different version of hope. This version makes room for lament. It honours the ancient Christian practice of crying out in grief, rage, horror, and desolation, at a world that doesn’t look anything like God’s dream of a peaceable kingdom. This version of hope sits in the ashes. It lingers at the cross. It practices reverence at the grave.
“Once we recognize that hope can be palliative, we can weep for what is lost, what is dying, and what we will not get back. We can repent for what we have neglected, abused, betrayed, and killed—out of our ignorance, our greed, our misguided religiosity. True hope requires sitting in reality’s ashes, gazing at the ghastly with heartbroken love.
“The hope I’ve arrived at now simply compels me to choose the good, the beautiful, the loving, and the just, on a daily, minute-by-minute basis—regardless of the results. I will never do it perfectly. But I will make it my goal. What else is Christianity if not an astonishing commitment to the tiny, the improbable, the fragile, the broken? A mustard seed. A bit of yeast. An alabaster jar. A crucified carpenter.”
With that in mind, this essay will take a sideways turn.
In Life After Doom, McLaren would have us “learn to…appreciate…all that we are losing, all that may soon be lost”; “You have your lost places…. We could not protect them. …Our love for them outlasts their existence”; “…in us, as…beautiful places are destroyed, the beauty itself lives on, deathless.” He concludes…and hold this thought for a moment…“Consider how…photography…[can] help you taste the inexpressible bittersweetness of love and grief.”
Debie Thomas’s understanding of hope, a version that “makes room for lament,” is all this writer can muster as he reviews in his mind’s eye the conflagration that shattered Jasper National Park this summer. [Environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s impulsion resonates now: “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to…act as if the house is on fire. Because it is.”]
I…and you, too?…recall staunchly the park’s pristine wonders. These are such that hiker, climber, and author Don Beers titled his 1996 guidebook to Jasper [and neighbouring Mount Robson Provincial Park], A Taste of Heaven. On its opening page, he quotes an entry in the Jasper Park Lodge Visitors’ Book penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1923: St. Peter welcomes a man from Jasper to heaven, only to admit, “‘I am afraid that you will be disappointed.’”
Now, in the wildfire’s aftermath, one needs…before moving onwards…to sit “in reality’s ashes,” as Ms. Thomas puts it, and gaze “at the ghastly with heartbroken love.” Or maybe not.
At the end of September, SSUC’s former minister, Nancy Steeves, and her spouse, Dawn Waring, off on another great adventure—to Tuscany, actually—stopped by for a visit. They’d driven from their new home in Qualicum Beach to Edmonton, from whence they’d fly on, and they’d taken the standard routing—through Jasper. Knowing, as they do, our love of high mountains and mountain highs, they urged that we not return to the park: your heart would break, they counselled. [Three days later, Canmore’s Rocky Mountain Outlook posted 19 aerial photos of the devastation: ghastly.] No, stay put, they recommended, but treasure all the more the oh-so-many photographs you’ve taken on your many drives to and through Jasper. That we will. And, now, maybe you will, too?
Here, in 45 images, is Jasper National Park, before the trauma: a taste of heaven.
Ken Fredrick
