As virtual meetings go, this one has been smooth. I missed the chance for the random conversations over shared meals and at breaks, but the ability to be present even in a limited way with people from all over the world was great.
It was delightful to get to use the synodal listening approach in this more universal context. My parish has been using it regularly, so it was familiar and comfortable for me.
But I hear the statement with an undertone of teen-ager. It's a thing. It's so tempting to say hope isn't a thing anymore, that hope is just not a thing. Or perhaps, not the thing, in the current world. Hope is for those who have lost something, not for those who have everything.
Hope is expectant. Hope is for those who are seeking something. For those who are sure there is more than the world promises. Expect, I learned in Just(e)'s reflection, comes from the Latin root spectare — to look. To expect is to look outward, to see beyond oneself. To expect is to look hard at and toward the future.
My study window at home faces the west and while I can't quite see the horizon for the trees and houses, I catch glimpses of what is coming. Today I am scouring the horizon for any signs of incoming weather. We might have snow. We expect some rain. We are in desperate need of something to ease the drought. (Remind me of this when the basement floods!)
I am scouring my personal horizons as well. I misread so many signs of the Parkinson's. My smaller handwriting, my difficulty writing on the board and stirring my tea and typing. Almost imperceptibly my horizons shrank. My world has expanded again, but I worry about what is on the horizon.
_________
So is it madness to hope — or conceit, or cowardice, or grace?” That is the question Jesuit priest Alfred Delp asked as he sat in a Nazi prison cell in January of 1945 awaiting execution. How could he hope? It seemed illogical to entertain hope, he wrote, yet he could not stop returning to the question.
As the presidential campaign enters its final weeks many of us are refereeing an internal wrestling match between hope and despair. How can we risk hoping when fear and chaos threaten to engulf us?
St. Paul famously said in a letter to the Corinthians of the virtues faith, hope, and love, that the greatest was love. What he didn’t say is that the hardest of these is hope. Love we can experience, faith we can cling to in the moment, but hope? Hope is always about what is just out of reach, always about a future we cannot predict with certainty, despite all the polls and statistical models.
It’s not just the election that has me grappling with questions about hope. In July of this year, I sat in a doctor’s office in downtown Philly and listened to her say, “I know this is not the news you hoped to hear.” She went on to tell me I had an incurable and progressive neurodegenerative disease whose course is unpredictable. For now treatment is working, but the future is uncertain. So believe me when I say I know something of the dance between despair and hope.
Five years ago I wrote a book titled Living in Joyful Hope. Like Delp, whose story opens the book, my personal path toward hope — whether about the outcome of the election or my own health — takes its cues from a lifelong Roman Catholic faith and theological training. Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved in Hope) that “[t]he one who has hope lives differently.”
To live in hope is to thirst. To thirst for justice, for mercy, for healing, for welcome, for peace. To hope is to build up, not tear apart. St. Augustine wrote that the courage to challenge injustice was a daughter of hope. To live in hope, then, is to stretch my heart wide enough to encompass the needs of my neighbors as my own, to feed the hungry, house the homeless and welcome the refugee. “We are workers,” said St. Oscar Romero, “We are prophets of a future not our own.”
Fear is the antithesis of hope. Fear seethes and rails. It preaches ruin and destruction, it deafens us to reality. Fear is a failure to see what is possible, a failure to see the worth and dignity of everyone I encounter. Yet fear clings like tar, I confess I cannot easily shake it off. There is a reason, I suspect, that the phrase “Do not be afraid!” appears again and again in the Gospels. To live in hope is to turn down the volume on the rhetoric that demonizes others and tune in to the voices that call us to companion each other, as Jesus has promised to accompany us.
Gaudium et spes, Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, reminded believers that we have our feet simultaneously planted in two cities, our earthly dwelling and the divine one. The Kingdom of God, then, is not for me a distant dream but part of my present reality. And if joy is the surest sign of the presence of God, then to have a foot in that kingdom is to have access to joy. So I cherish the small joys offered to me — chocolate, the cheerful conductor on the crowded SEPTA train — and strive to offer them in return. (Yes, I absolutely keep chocolate for students and colleagues in my office.) To live in hope is to be mindful of the joy that is here now and for which I believe we are destined in eternity.
So is it madness or conceit or cowardice or grace to hope as we come to vote in this election? Perhaps it is a touch of holy madness. Certainly it takes a gritty grace. It may be conceit or even cowardice, but given the choice between hope and despair, I choose to live in joyful hope.
_______
Photo is of fountain in the courtyard outside the apartment I am staying in Vatican City. Hope springs forth.
Hope, wrote Emily Dickinson, is the thing with feathers. Which feels a bit like something you might cup in your hands, careful not to ruffle it or outright squash it. Or perhaps not. I saw this description on social media (but haven't been able to track down the source - so if you know, please share!): “People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s [sic] webs. It’s not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.”
Should hope have feathers, I imagine it as a hummingbird dancing just out of reach, heart beating ferociously. Or maybe she is a red-tailed hawk come screaming out of the sky, her talons out and ready to defend her young.
I have been thinking a lot about hope lately. The presidential campaign has something to do with that, certainly, but also my kids are at what mathematically I would call critical points -- big changes in direction are coming. Crash Kid is shopping for a house -- on the other side of the Atlantic. Math Guy (formerly known as The Egg) is defending his doctoral dissertation this semester. But mostly I have been thinking about hope because a few weeks ago I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. I know, I buried the lede. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I have not gotten any better at telling people other than to simply say it.
It’s a challenging diagnosis, and a disease with an unpredictable course. I am doing well at the moment, and am mostly hopeful and grateful. Grateful for good medical care, and a treatment plan that has helped my day to day functioning in a way I can only describe as a miracle. Grateful for a physical therapist who suggested a weighted pen that let me write out a grocery list again and scrawl an outline for an essay on a yellow pad of paper. (Bonus, my handwriting is no longer microscopic, which drove my teachers batty back in the day. Which I now totally understand as my eyes have aged.) I am utterly grateful for each day.
And however illogical it might be, I am hopeful. I contemplate Alfred Delp SJ’s question as he awaited his execution, “So is it madness to hope — or conceit, or cowardice, or grace?” It seemed illogical to entertain hope, he wrote, yet he could not stop returning to the question. Nor can I. It gives me and God something to talk about.
Hope is not fragile, nor is it always gentle. Sometimes it is a bit gritty. But it is always a grace.
I just. Need. To. Pick. One.
