Hope

I hate hope.

There,  I've said it.¹

I hate the idea of hope, what Emily Dickinson called that thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all. Yeah, that thing. I cannot stand it.

And I know that I should like hope, right? I know that hope is biblical, probably, right? and it's just one of those things that's supposed to sustain our existence in some way and I should always be in support of that. I mean, hell, I have a quote tattooed on my arm that is ostensibly an argument for believing in the hope that is inherent in the human spirit. I would not make that argument, but you could. If you're a pansy who believes in such useless ideas as unfounded faith in eventual fruition of events that you can't bring to pass. 

Ugh, sorry. I know that that's not what hope is supposed to be. Hope is supposed to something, I dunno, pure and genuine and real, something that you can cling to, something that, as Dickinson followed up, never asks a crumb of you. Hope is something you can have when you have absolutely nothing else going for you, something substantial that gets you through the day. I hear that.

It's just that I have such difficulty with that idea. Hope to me feels very passive, like, "Well, all we can do now is hope." And I acknowledge that there are situations in which yes, all you can do is hope, but that feeling of powerlessness that accompanies hope is what I always want to fight against. It seems that hope is your place of last resort, your solution when all else fails. I'd argue that if you're at the "hope" stage in life, there has to be another solution out there. I also acknowledge that this is probably because I've spent more time living in comic book movies and fiction than in living in the real world. In the real world, you come up against situations that rob you of power much more frequently than a comic book hero (a statement that I find surprisingly true). 

Hope points out my insecurity. I'd rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic with the best of them, while the people performing the real profound service for humanity are the ones playing hymns as the vessel breaks apart. The damage is already done in this case. The damage control has already reached its limits. And in that moment, you can either choose to lean on something bigger than yourself or you can spend your last hours in a flurry of activity that idiomatically helps no one. 

Then again, I don't care that my action doesn't have any results as long as I'm taking that action. I have spent so much of my life oscillating between action and inaction and I have found that because of my place and privilege in the world, action on my part is always better. Speaking out is always better. Taking a step is always better, even if it ends up being a step in the wrong direction. Waiting, hoping for something to occur is painful to me because it means that either I'm not taking advantage of my situation or I have been robbed of my advantages. I do not like either of those ideas. 

I'm wiling to admit that there may be a trust or control issue here. I am not good at trusting other people to get a job done. Whenever I delegate a task, I have to very specifically stop myself from taking that task back for myself. I know how I want it done and, frankly, if I'm delegating the task in the first place, it means that I know that I can do it and do it well and that I believe it to be simple enough that someone else can do it for me. It is difficult for me to trust that they are going to do it as well as I can, but trust them I must. Believe me, if I had a Time Turner and could just repeat each day enough times so that I could complete all of my tasks on my own, I would. American Individualism at its best.

Which brings me back to hope. I think that there's an ethos in America where hope is something to be acted upon. You bring hope into fruition. The world is in our hands. We have the sometimes frightening ability to change things. And we should take advantage of that ability. We should act when acting is prudent, and sometimes we act even when it's not. That's what we do. In a country founded on a kind of idealism, on this belief that all men are created equal,²  we judge people based on their actions and not on their hopes or the hopes that have been laid out for them. The proof of your worth is what you've done, not what you've hoped to have done. Action is the language that we speak, maybe one that we deify.

On an absolutely personal level, the only arena in which I will allow myself to hope is that of human relationships. I hope that someone will be my friend, will look at me, will smile, will understand where I'm coming from, will think well of me, because I know that I can't really help in these situations. I can only try my hardest to present the best version of myself possible and then hope that the person sitting across from me sees some glimmer of value in me. There's a real abdication of causal ability there. And I hate that.

So while I hear that hope is helpful and hope is useful and hope is a comfort and hope pulls people through the situations that no human should ever really have to go through, I have difficulty accepting hope for myself. It's something that I know that I should work on. I know it.

But you must forgive me my bias. That thing with feathers has only ever let me down.

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¹ Not you, Hope. You're a phenomenal human being and I wish I had longer to work with you because you just seem like a trip and a half. Keep fighting the good fight, friend!
² I know, I know, "All men" really meant all landed white males, but work with me here. We have expanded our definitions since the time of the Framers.

Finding God

On Saturday morning, I met up with a friend of mine from small group at church and we walked together to the church’s new office space to help another friend do a quick clean of the space before the move-in. Serving with people is one of my favorite things to do and as much as I hate to admit it, I enjoy cleaning. You’ve got a clear, achievable, practical goal and you don’t have to give the task at hand 100% of your brainpower. I like it the way I like gardening- you’re doing something good and useful with your hands. Not that I garden all that much. But I like the idea of being able to.

When we were done, we made lunch, which was lovely, and talked about accents and vacation days and the benefits of having a church without a church building and then we walked back home. On the way over, it had been freezing but sunny, but now the clouds rolled in and I felt the happy feeling slipping away. It was going to drizzle that cold, useless rain on me again after teasing me with just enough sunlight to think that maybe the sun might stick around this time.

I stopped by my flat, grabbed some books and went to the library. On my way, a few tiny snowflakes mixed in with the rain and I smiled in spite my grump. One landed on my eyelash and I almost hated to blink it away. I rolled my eyes at the whole situation and thought to myself, Fine, if this is all the snow we’re going to get, I’ll enjoy it while it’s here. I put on Hamilton and bounced to the rhythm of the words while watching for the lighter snowflakes hiding in the raindrops.

I got some good work done, though I’m always just a little bit distracted in the library. It’s probably the product of my first week there. I let myself daydream a little too frequently and my brain can’t take the place entirely seriously. I considered calling it quits early and just spending a couple of minutes in the chapel downstairs before going back home- my brain’s been bouncy lately and it could be nice to try to calm it down. I got distracted by an article a friend of mine shared about getting out of a spiritual rut, though, and ended up heading straight out the door before closing time. 

Out in the courtyard, it was snowing. 

The whole way home, it was snowing.

And hours later as I sat by my window writing, it was still snowing. These big, beautiful flakes that back home mean that the snow’s about to be done, the wind picking up and swirling them around my window. It’s so pretty, I assumed it must be fake, but I caught a flake or two on my tongue, a perfect second of fresh cold in my mouth, which I’m pretty sure is what heaven tastes like, so this snow must be real. 

It’s so easy to say, poetically, that God is in the snow. It’s so easy to say that this wonderful, beautiful thing that nature’s doing right now is a pure blessing- enough snow to look nice and fill the soul with something like joy, but not enough to cause any problems. I think we as humans, when our hearts are in the right place, respond to beauty in nature with awe and that awe can be translated pretty directly back into our religious beliefs. 

I’m happy to find God in nature, I think, but I’d hate to limit human interaction with the divine to the days and times when the world looks bright, the times when your heart is inclined to believe there’s something good out there after all. You need a God of the ugly as much as a God of the beautiful. And it’s a big step from the God who sent the snow to the God who sent his Son. I’m going to need something more.

I can shrug my shoulders and say that we encounter God in the good- in the beauty of nature, in the love of friends and family, in honest, challenging, but not exhausting work. I’m particularly prone to seeing God in other people’s words and in music, a kind of spark or truth or depth that points me toward something bigger than myself. Christianity fills in the rest, in my spiritual life. So there are moments, maybe, when we’re confronted, but there are also tried and true places we can go looking for God.

When I pray, God’s up and to the right. That’s where I look, that’s where I locate my idea of the thing that I’m praying to, that’s where I address my concerns and my frustrations and my petitions. It doesn’t matter if it’s my bedroom, a cathedral, the car, the street. I like to find a physical corner of a room to look at, but even if I don’t have that, it’s up and to the right. I know that’s problematic in terms of humility and deference, but I was always told to come with boldness before the Throne because God listens to me. It’s only rarely that I’ve gone to God in prayer and felt like there wasn’t anything there. I don’t really feel the need to manufacture a religious experience.

Nor do I want to, really. I want everything in my spiritual life to be genuine, authentic. Which is laughable, right, because there’s not a single aspect of my thoughts about God that isn’t steeped in the religion I grew up in, the society I grew up in, the influences of the media I consumed and the breadth of the world I live in. You can’t strip all of that away, no matter how hard you try. You can consciously set some of it aside, maybe, but we are built out of our experiences. We see with our own eyes. You can’t get outside of that to some kind of universal true. Like it or not, we are stuck in our bodies and memories. 

So maybe we do need to look for God in the beauty of our planet and our universe. Maybe we do need to see God in our positive relationships, in the wonderful things people can do for each other, the way we can care. Maybe we need to seek God in art and words and music and all the good things people can make. Maybe that’s the best place to start. If we can encounter God in that tangle, maybe, with practice, we can see God in the tangle of ourselves.