Interrupting the Silence

The Only Sane Attitude

It’s Election Day, a good day to reflect on hope.

The arguments and attacks, the pleas and the promises, have been made. Winners and losers will be declared and results will be analyzed. Some will keep score and some will seek to settle a score.

I don’t know how much will or can actually change as a result of today’s elections. That doesn’t mean I don’t have my picks, my team, my desired outcomes. I do. I have donated money and I have voted.

Today, I am hopeful. Some days, however, I’m not hopeful and I am hoping for some hope. And other days I am hoping against hope. Then there are those days that I just want some magic and I make a wish.

What about you? What is hope like for you?

My hope today is not in the polls and predictions, the candidates and parties, the election deniers or defenders, or the outcome of the mid-term elections. As Thomas Merton writes in his “Letter to a Young Activist,” “Do not depend on the hope of results.”

If hope is not about an outcome, why hope? Because “to live in hope” is “the only sane attitude in life.” (David J. Wolpe, The Healer of Shattered Hearts: A Jewish View of God (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 138.)

How then does a tender heart live with hope? What is hope and what is it not? What does hope offer us and what does it ask of us? Not just on Election Day, but every day.

Wishing and Spitting

“I wish …”

Every time I said to my grandmother, “I wish …” she would answer, “Wish in one hand. Spit in the other. See which one fills up first.” It was her way of telling me that if I wanted something then I needed to do something. If it was going to happen, I had a responsibility for and a part in making it happen, even if it was a small part, and even if I couldn’t control or guarantee the outcome.

So maybe the first act of hope, our first hopeful act, is to show up. Hope neither denies nor avoids the realities of what is. And hope is not passively waiting around for God (or anyone else) to show up and do something. That’s just wishful thinking or praying.

There is nothing passive about hope. When I am hopeful, I engage with the realities of what is. When I am wishing, I am seeking a magical fix or an escape from and an avoidance of what is.

“The Spaciousness of Uncertainty”

Hope “is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.” (Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), xiii.) That kind of optimism (and hope is not the same as optimism) means I don’t have to show up and act because it’s all going to work out in the end. Likewise, pessimists refuse to show up and act because it won’t make a difference anyway. (Ibid.)

Optimists and pessimists share a certainly by which they excuse themselves from acting. Hope is an alternative to that certainly. It “is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable.” (Ibid.)

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.” (Ibid., xiv)

Living in Hope

Hope holds open the door to the future and the future is always better, not because it necessarily will be, but because it might be. (John D. Caputo, In Search of Radical Theology: Expositions, Explorations, Exhortations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 190.)

That “might be” is why we show up and act. There just might be a “possibility of something new, the chance of something different, something that will transform the present into something else.” (John D. Caputo, On Religion, 2nd Edition (New York: Routledge, 2019), 8)

Hope is “the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.” (Solnit, xiv.) That means we do the right thing, not as a prerequisite to gaining something else, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Hope does not make a promise or a guarantee, it makes a call. It calls upon us. It calls to us. It calls for a response. It calls for you and me to act, to do something.

Living in hope means doing hopeful things.

I wonder what hope will look like and ask of us tomorrow. I wonder how we will respond.

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Image Credit: Photo by Thomas Kinto on Unsplash.