In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man’s torments.  ~Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 1878

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.  ~Pearl S. Buck

As I have mentioned to you before, I have always looked at hope a little bit like the middle child in a family with three children back, say, in the Polaroid days of the 1950’s and 60’s. Young people, of course, will not remember days before cell phones with cameras and digitalized pictures and selfies. Back then there were plenty of pictures of the first child simply for being the first child. I’ll call this child Faith. They were even put into photo albums (notice the plural–albums). There are plenty of pictures as well of the third and last child, because this one, no matter what age, would always be looked at as the baby of the family, the last child, golden. These photos didn’t always make it into an album. Maybe a box on the floor in the front closet. But there are nonetheless, a lot of pictures of the baby. I’ll call this child Love. But what happened in-between, wonders the middle child. Let’s call this child Hope. “Where are all the pictures of me?” One can only imagine what a tough lot in life it is to be the sibling slipped in between Faith and Love, and to be part of such a famous family when the whole world seems to be watching, checking to see if you live up to your name.

It’s true. Hope doesn’t get as much attention or airplay as Faith and Love. It never has, probably never will. But I think that in some ways, the most neglected of the Theological Virtues is perhaps the most necessary in these times of ours which so easily tip toward despair. Life is also made difficult for Hope because there are so many imposters out there walking the streets disguised as Hope. In reality, they are poor imitations, not grounded in or stretching forth from an experience of consciously facing and waiting in the dark. These charlatans not only give in to their fear of the dark but flee it in an attempt to outrun it. They deny or ignore the darkness by confusing legitimate, earthy, courageous Hope for a cheap imitation called Positive Thinking or Optimism. Optimism looks only at the bright side of life, whereas Hope looks straight into the dark side of life and leans into the light that cannot be seen. Another imposter is called False Hope by some and is a behind-the-back way of saying “In your fear, and in the darkness, you have woven a fantasy. Grow up. Get serious.” An evasion of reality can never be mistaken for Hope. That it has been was enough to make Nietzsche call Hope “the worst of all evils.”

Still other critics of Hope, the odds-maker and the rigidly rational thinker opine, “Wake up. Be realistic. What are the odds?” But Hope is a poor statistician, disinterested in the odds not unknowingly but with clear head and brave heart. True Hope is nobody’s fool. It is fierce, neither for the faint of heart nor for those infatuated with fantasy. It’s a conscious choice, a deliberate way of being in the world while facing the uncertainties and tragedies and dark impasses that life presents. This Hope does not float above in airy fantasy but is rooted in reality, grounded as all life-giving roots are in the deep, dark soil where things die – yes, rot and die – but also where life imperceptibly subverts the odds-maker’s omniscient arrogance as it nurtures nativity, as it serves the latent and new possibility that gestates hiddenly and grows mysteriously within. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life (Proverbs 13:12). The prophet Isaiah speaks of the subterranean nature of hope’s beginning:

But a shoot shall sprout from the stump^* of Jesse,
and from his roots a bud shall blossom.
The spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him:
a spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
A spirit of counsel and of strength,
a spirit of knowledge and of fear of the LORD,
and his delight shall be the fear of the LORD. (Is. 11: 1-3)

Unlike Fantasy or False Hope, real Hope is conceived and born in darkness. What comes forth as genuine Hope began as “embodied anguish.” In this sense, the womb is a foreshadowing of the tomb from which we all are made new. The cross and the crib are one and the same mystery: Emmanuel. The longing and the hoping are part of the human side of the fiercely insistent dance of the divine coming into our midst. Remember, in the gospel narrative, while everyone is looking up at the star above Bethlehem, the star is shining down where the people least expect the advent of the Divine. Hope shoots up from below, from the least expected place, in the least expected of people.

Advent is the season of hope. It is the time when we actually lean into not away from the darkness and in so doing paradoxically and faithfully (as opposed to despairingly and fatalistically) lean into new possibilities and old promises and new light. Author Ann Lamott writes, “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.” In the end, although it is more than a matter of odds, who knows, maybe it is a matter of placing one’s bet on the table or placing one’s life on the line and with the one in the crib – not in order to save one’s skin or soul after life but as an intentional decision regarding how one will choose to live his or her life before death. Perhaps, as Pearl Buck suggests, it is a matter of how we eat our bread. Whatever the odds, perhaps that choice is really about what side we want to be on: probability or possibility? The former is about playing the odds and being right. The latter is about daring to look odd in the eyes of the world and being fully alive. All promises are only possibilities grounded in hope.♦

Hoping for You and Your Loved Ones
for all human and other-than-human creatures,
for all of the earth and
all creation — NEW POSSIBILITIES and NEW LIFE!

Dan