Text: Ephesians 1: 18
". . .having the eyes of your heart enlightened,
that you may know what is the hope to which God has called you."
There seems little doubt that the two most salient contributors to Western civilization have come from two major sources: the classical period beginning with the Greeks around the 6th century BCE, and the Hebrew culture and its offspring, Christianity, that traces its roots to approximately 4000 years ago. At times these two strains of our heritage have been remarkably compatible, but in many circumstances we find them at odds and producing positions that seem to be poles apart. Nowhere is this conflict more apparent than in the widely contrasting convictions that abound in our current attitudes toward a very simple and yet quite profound human experience: hope.
On one hand we have a panoply of witnesses that border on the sentimental, like Alexander Pope's familiar couplet:
Hope springs eternal in the human breast,
Man never Is, but always to be blest.Or Emily Dickinson's:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune—without the words,
And never stops at all.On the other hand we have those ruminations by some famously cynical observers like H.L. Mencken:
Hope is the pathological belief in the impossible!
Or Henry Miller:
Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means you entertain illusion.
Some have approached the topic with a wry sense of irony. Like the Australian journalist Bettina Arndt who observed:
Women hope men will change after marriage, but they don't;
Men hope women will not change, but they do.Or the bumper sticker I once encountered on the highway one day:
When I gave up all hope, I started to feel better.
The truth is that we have all at various times in our lives felt a little bit like all of the above. Hope seems at times to escape us, to seem to us nothing but an immature fantasy or a child-like illusion. In such times we are prepared to embrace our despair with a kind of defiant courage. At other times, we have felt able to endure the pain of unspeakable loss, or of a crushing defeat because we found sustenance in a hope that appeared as if from beyond our conscious life. It has called us to remain centered, to live with a kind of crazy faith that we will not only endure, but we will be changed.
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So how do we account for these radically different attitudes toward something so central to our nature as hope? Part of the answer lies in the contrasting attitudes that persist as remnants of the two cultures that have combined to produce Western civilization: the Greeks and the Hebrews. The Greek attitude toward hope has been profoundly ambiguous from the beginning. It was most poignantly set forth in the myth of Pandora. Pandora—whose very name is ironic and means "all gifts"—was the first human woman created by Zeus, not—unlike the Biblical myth of creation—as an act of love, but of revenge. Zeus meant to punish Prometheus and all of humankind for his act of stealing fire from the gods and making it available to humans, to endow human beings with the god-like capacity for creativity. According to Hesiod's tale, when Pandora was to be married to Epimetheus, Zeus concocted a diabolical dowry—a box into which he invited each of the gods to place a sinister capacity for misfortune. And in obedience into that box they placed all the ills that afflict humankind: disease, war, pestilence, envy, corruption, greed, poverty, despair. Pandora was strictly forbidden to open that box, but, of course, her curiosity got the better of her, and open it she did, unloosing all of those plagues for all time into human history.
But in that box was one other "gift." That gift was hope. It remained there until some time later Pandora revisited the box, lifted the lid and allowed hope also to escape. This story, one of the foundational myths of Western civilization leaves us with a profound ambiguity about how we should understand hope. Is it a "gift" in the same sense as all the other evil "gifts" that were loosed by Pandora's inquisitiveness? Are we to assume that it was the greatest of all the evils because it taunts us with a false possibility? Or does the story mean to suggest that hope is indeed different from all the rest? That hope was given to humankind as a way to ameliorate the countless other ills that flesh is heir to? No single interpreter has ever successfully resolved this ambiguity. And so it is that we see in this story many of the roots of our modern confusion and some of the more skeptical and even cynical assessments about hope in the Western imagination.
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For Israel the issue had a very different feel and outcome. That was in part because Hebrew religion was monotheistic. Since God for them is One, they did not have to contend, as the Greeks and most other religions did, with the petty conflicts and quarrels between the gods that was the chief feature of polytheism everywhere. So the Psalmist could say "Let Israel hope in the Lord" and there was substance in the affirmation, because he believed fervently that Yahweh was just, single-minded, reliable, and cared deeply about the fortunes of his people.
But even more to the point, the experience of hope as it developed in the Hebrew imagination was always more than an intellectual exercise. It was an experience grounded in a profound faith that drew upon the resources of the whole person—the heart and the spirit, as well as the mind. And that is why the most powerful witnesses to hope have always seemed to defy logic as such. That is why hope appears to the skeptic as if it is merely whistling in the dark, a form of profound illusion. But that is the great paradox: the most powerful witness to hope has always come from those who seem to have had the least reason to be hopeful.
I think, for example, of St. Paul, the first great missionary and theologian of the Christian era. For the sake of his faith he was beaten and imprisoned over and over again. He never lived to see the fruit of his tireless and frequently discouraging efforts to spread the Christian message. Yet his message to the early church communities never lapsed into despair. So, in a famous passage he wrote to the church at Rome, he proclaimed:
We rejoice in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given us. (Romans 5: 3-5)
Notice the sequence here: what begins as the experience of suffering ends in hope and the experience of "the love of God poured into our hearts." That is what is so different from the more intellectual and cynical assessments of hope. This is an experience of profound transformation. And it is a profound experience of love.
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In our more recent history, I think of the witness of Victor Frankl who endured the ravages of the Holocaust, but clung to his indomitable belief that human life is meaningful even under situations of dire suffering that we are unable to change. It was the human spirit's drive to seek meaning even in the midst of the Holocaust that allowed some of its victims to endure unspeakable loss and personal suffering, and to survive.
I think too of Vaclav Haval, former President of the Czech Republic, who endured years of humiliation at the hands of a totalitarian government, to take a leadership role in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the creation of a new Czech Republic in the 1990's. The son of an influential entrepreneurial and intellectual family, Vaclav's desire to study humanities at a great university was blocked by government officials who feared his potential. So he basically educated himself and became a playwright and an outspoken critic of that government. Like St. Paul, he too was imprisoned on several occasions—at one time for a period of four years. Yet he endured and eventually helped to lead his country out of that dreadful period of its history. Here is what Mr. Haval had to say about hope:
"Hope is definitely not the same as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well. It is the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." (from Disturbing the Peace, chap. 5).
How much like Frankl he sounds: "It is the certainty that something makes sense, (that is, has meaning) regardless of how it turns out."
And another time he famously stated:
Hope is not prognostication; it is an orientation of the heart.
"An orientation of the heart." That is it. That is what is missing from the Greek assessment of hope. That is the main difference between the Greek and Hebrew strains in our own civilization. It was the great contribution of Hebrew religion to see human beings as empowered to shape their history, as co-creators with God, and therefore as free to find meaning even in the face of unspeakable suffering. Hope is always possible to those who are free to seek meaning. It may be the case that optimism is a condition of "wishful thinking." But hope is categorically different from optimism. Optimism is fundamentally an orientation of the mind, but hope, as Haval puts its so beautifully, is "an orientation of the heart." Hope is inextricably bound to the human capacity for love. It is about insight as well as foresight. It is about caring, and connectedness. It is about remaining related, even when all seems to be lost.
St. Paul, once again, would have know exactly what Haval meant. That is why centuries earlier he could write to the Christian community in Ephesus that he always remembered them in his prayers, and asked God, among other things, to give them a "spirit of wisdom, and of revelation in the knowledge of Him"—a somewhat pious declaration, and just about what we might expect him to say. But then he added an explanatory phrase that just seems to leap off the page: ". . .having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you."
Hope when it is available to us is always feels unforced. It always feels like grace, like a calling. We are bidden to hope, even when the evidence is not all in, and graced with hope when all the evidence seems to cry out to despair. But while we can always manufacture some form of optimism with our mind's eye, it is only with the eyes of the heart that we truly discern hope.
And so, while hope may at times appear to us as "the thing with feathers"—actually a marvelous image of its grace-like nature—it is at the heart of its nature everywhere and always "an orientation of the heart."
Let us pray: O Thou whose loving kindness is never far from view, steady us in the midst of our sorrow, our confusion, our despair until we are mindful of that great love, and by its light able to discern with the eyes of the heart, the hope that transforms and changes us, and conducts us from darkness into light. Amen.