Day 28: Semantics and settling

Maybe it’s all just about semantics.  Language is a squirrely little thing.  Words are just one way of trying to figure things out.  They’re enough to help us get ideas across to each other, but no word means the exact same thing to anyone, and they all fall short.  My idea of hope is different enough from what the general public’s idea of hope is that it creates a gap.  And I’m okay with that.

And regardless of how I feel about hope, here we are at Christmas.  Hope doesn’t stop time.  The next things happen whether I hope for them or not.  We have trudged through Advent and expectations and hustle, and we are here.  We made it.

I feel a settling.  Not like I’m settling for something or settling for less, not that kind of settle.  It’s the kind of settle where I can set things down.  I can release and relax and recognize that it is far from perfect, but it is here.  I think my people know I love them.  It’s the kind of settle where the weary soul rejoices in the relief.  It is real and honest and true.  It is gut-punch-ingly painful and breathtakingly beautiful.  And it is mine. 

It is more than I could hope for.

Day 27: Thrill

It occurs that me that one of the reasons I don’t like hope is that it feels dangerous to me, and I don’t court danger.  At least not on purpose.  Life gives you enough risk and danger without going around taunting it, thank you very much. 

Seeing “courage” as a synonym for hope gave me pause yesterday.  Courage is kind of the opposite of danger.  Or maybe it’s that courage is called into being by danger.  You can’t have courage without something to be scared of.

And also, when I think of hope at Advent, I think of the line from O Holy Night:  a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.  I am not a thrill seeker by any stretch, and the idea that a weary world would have the energy to rejoice seems like a great miracle.  That weary rejoicing might also be simply some freaking relief that we can see the first thin glimpses of a new and glorious morn breaking over yonder.  But that’s not hope if you already see it, is it?

I also think of O Little Town of Bethlehem where the hopes and fears of all the years are met in one little human on one little night.  Also, that carol has one of my favorite verses ever:  “How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given.  So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of God’s heaven.”  I feel like that silent gift that gets given over and over and over is kind of what makes the great world spin.  I digress.

A thrill of hope.  Is that the courage that you feel swell in your heart when you know that task at hand is daunting, but you feel ready for it?  Or coming down the chute at a marathon’s finish, when you know for sure you’re going to make it? 

A thrill of hope does not sound inviting to me, but sign me up for a weary world rejoicing.  In fact, make it a double.

Day 26: Sames

The obvious next step, then, is to consider synonyms for hope.  A few of the entries in the thesaurus are confidence, expectation, optimism, anticipation, courage, faith, chance, desire, aspiration, dream, wish, trust, yearn, and long. 

For whatever reason, the one that I hang on to is faith.  Faith seems a close neighbor to hope that fits me better.  Faith holds a longer view of the arc. It hangs less upon my particular will.  To me, faith is a fundamental knowing that the Big Love that underpins this whole thing does, indeed, underpin it. 

Faith reminds me that Big Love has this and that it is well, even if all evidence is to the contrary and I have crumbled.  Hope seems flimsy when I crumble, driven to a specific desire or particular outcome.  Hope has a way it thinks this should go.  Hope is more about me. Faith is more about something much, much bigger.  Faith is enough to hold me up even when it lets me down. It is one small layer in from the Big Love that breaths through all of it and all of us.

My definition of faith has changed over the last few years.  I used to have faith in people or in institutions (like the church or marriage).  I don’t so much anymore.  Faith is deeper than those things.  Faith can shine through those things, but faith also keeps going when those things let you down.  I suspect there are lots of people who use hope to mean the same thing as how I describe faith, but to me, they are different.

If faith, hope, and love abide (and I do love a thing that abides), I choose faith.  I choose abiding faith because it feels deeper and more true than abiding hope.  I choose faith because it grounds me in and points me to the abiding love upon which we all stand.  And I choose faith because it reminds me that, while human love is a choice, this abiding love, this Big Love that moves through all creation … this is not something you choose.  It simply is, whether you notice it or not.

Day 25: Opposites

Thinking these salad thoughts is not always fun and not always easy, but I think they’re worth thinking so I let myself think them.  There are certainly far more hazardous things to think on, that’s for sure.

When I think about big things, I try to follow Queen Brené’s formula:  name it, stay curious, keep showing up.

Naming it sounds like it should be easy, but with big things like this, it’s not.  At least not for me.  One of the things that helps me name it is to think about what it’s not.  I’m much better at that, and there is some value to the process of elimination.  It’s an odd way to go about things, but it does sort of help to define it.

After I’ve percolated on it for a bit and am ready to talk about it with my people (which can take a very long time), I sometimes run things by them to get out of my own head.  You can imagine the joy and lightness I brought to the Thanksgiving table when I asked my people, “What is the opposite of hope?”.

It’s very fun inside my head.

I have thought a lot about this, though – the opposite of hope.  An obvious first response is hopelessness, but that didn’t feel right.  It felt too dismal somehow.  The sad of hopeless feels more severe than the thrill of hope; they don’t equal out in my head.  They don’t balance.

I’ve gotten a wide range of answers from other people:  despair, discouragement, pessimism, doubt, fear, effort.  My first answer was dread, but dread seems more certain than hope does.  Hope allows for the possibility of good, but dread seems to entail a fairly certain bad.  Maybe that Biblical hope that has more certainty is more like a positive dread. 

I like the idea of effort as hope’s antithesis.  The thought behind that one was that hope is just wishing for something better, but effort is doing what you can to actually make something better.  Hope is passive; effort is active.  That felt okay to me.

I finally settled on worry as the opposite of hope because if hope is looking to the future with expectations of good things, then worry is looking to the future with expectations of bad things.  That clicked into place for me because I am a natural worrier. It comes to me easily for reasons I understand better now but still struggle with on a way too regular basis. 

Holding worry next to hope makes it pretty clear why I think hope is stupid.  It fits into my deeply engrained patterns of scarcity and fear and insecurity.  My gut wonders who in their right mind would ever cling to a potential positive when there are so very many ways that things could go wrong? 

But then maybe I have to consider “what is a right mind?”, and that’s a whole ‘nother salad thought.

Day 24: Are we there yet?

Y’all. This is the point where I’m done.  I wake up tired.  I just get more tired as the day wears on. 

The “holiday” feels like nothing more than a list of tasks and chores that other people expect of me that have a very definite deadline and the amount of time between now and that deadline makes me think that I’m going to be even more tired and still not get it all done.  Then I remember that it’s all my own fault because I’m just doing what other people expect of me. 

This is the point where I feel defeated. 

All I want for Christmas is December 26.  I want it to be over and be snuggled up in the cold mountains with all of my people and none of the expectations.  The disappointments are realized, and the world keeps turning.  That’s what I want at this point of the season.

Would hope help here?  Is that what I’m missing?  If I hoped for more magic (or maybe just a better attitude) does that make it better? 

In my experience, retrospect is much more helpful than hope here.  My friend (whom I’ve never actually hung out with, but I’m sure we would be friends) Jen Hatmaker says that good enough turns into magic after time passes.  I know that we will look back on this Christmas and remember it fondly.  Retrospect casts a beautiful fog that puts the right lens on things.  Not always, but sometimes.

I’ll take that kind of hindsight over hope any day.

Day 23: Night of the Radishes

Noche de Rábanas.  Night of the Radishes.  It’s a real thing, people, and it totally hijacked my salad thoughts today. 

It’s an annual event held in Oaxaca, Mexico on December 23 and it involves intricate carvings of … you guessed it … radishes.

I am not making this up.

Apparently the radish carvings began as an attempt to entice people to come to the Christmas market more than 100 years ago. It worked.  Now the city grows special radishes just for the competition. Treated with heavy chemicals and fertilizers and allowed to grow much longer than usual, they can be 50 cm long and weight up to 6 pounds. 

I am not making this up.

Contestants (up to 100 or so) register months in advance and are given their allotted freakishly large (and inedible) radishes on December 18 so they can plan a scene based on what they have to work with.  They can’t start carving, though, until December 23.  Since the radishes wilt quickly after being carved, the judging happens on the same day that the carving does.  People will wait 5-6 hours to see the radish carvings.

Isn’t the world just an amazing place?  And doesn’t this seem like further encouragement to stay in the present?

Day 22: A fourth best thing

Waking up easy is a best thing.  A morning where your schedule allows you to open your eyes when you want to and your heart allows you to lie in that slow wake up with peace and contentment – well, that’s one of the greatest luxuries there is in my book.  Odds are that I will probably still wake up at the same ridiculously early time I do on a work day, but I don’t have to do anything, and that is glorious. 

If my kids are in their beds or if my house is full of people I love, that makes an easy wake up even better.  I lie there and think about the little lives we have all made and the places where they intersect and the parts we get to share. 

If it’s rainy or windy outside, I think about how this little house offers shelter and warmth and about how my little burrow in my bed cradles me. 

It used to be a best thing to have an easy wake up with another warmth beside me, listening to the breathing of someone I loved.  I worried that the pleasure of an easy wake up would be gone forever after the shatter.  And it did take me some time to work through that, but I’m pleased to report that the easy wake up is alive and well.

Rather than thinking about the warmth beside me, I just snuggle under my weighted blanket and feel my own warmth and think about how far the kids and I have come and how we are all okay.  Maybe it a little borders on basking, but it has less of a sense of pride and more of a sense of just rightness.  Not righteousness because that is a whole ‘nother thing and definitely not a best thing, but just rightness.  An easy wake up says I’ve checked my schedule and my heart, and it is well.

Sometimes it is so well that I can even drift back off to sleep.  And that’s another best thing, too.

Day 21: Umwelt

I recently heard a review of a book called Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science by a science writer named Carol Kaesuk Yoon. I haven’t actually read the book, and I probably never will because I’ve been burned by these book reviews too many times before, particularly with nonfiction.  They make it sound so interesting, but it’s still nonfiction, and 99% of the time that means non-story enough that I give up on it. Yes, I know nonfiction would make me smarter and give me more interesting things to bring to a conversation, but I’ve decided that a good book review will check that box just as well.

Naming Nature covers the concept of umwelt.  Umwelt is a German word that translates literally as “the world around.”  Umwelt (in which the “w” is pronounced like a “v” because German is just cool like that) means “the world as it is experienced by a particular organism.”  The interview I heard gave this definition of umwelt: “the environment as it’s perceived by various animals according to their sensory abilities and cognitive powers.”  

Umwelt names the reality that we experience the same environment in different ways.  A honeybee takes things in through its compound eyes, a bat through its pinging sonar, a dog through its keen sniffer.  They can all be in the same place, but they have unique umwelten because of what they have to work with. 

The umwelt theory also gives credence to the connection between the mind and the environment because the mind is how we interpret what we take in through our honeycomb or our sonar or whatever.  So that means that not only does each species have a particular umwelt, but also each particular organism does, too.  We cannot separate our interpretation of our environment from our own history. 

The umwelt theory is, of course, much more complicated than this, but I didn’t read the book, so I can’t say too much more without Wikipedia.  I don’t really know what umwelt even has to do with hope except this:  umwelt seems to be on the opposite side of the fence from hope because it is grounded so very much in the present, in experiencing this very moment through our general lens and through our particular experience.  Umwelt appeals to me … but not enough to read the whole book.

Day 20: Tidings of joy

One morning when I was leaving the house to start the day, I turned on the radio and caught the middle of an interview. I don’t even know who was being interviewed or who was asking the questions, but the first question I heard when I turned on the radio was this:  “What brings you spiritual joy?”. 

And the answer? 

“There are 27 chickens in my backyard.”

What’s not to love about 27 chickens?  Just the thought of that makes me smile.

I just loved the immediacy of that answer. And I loved the randomness of it.  I loved the question itself: spiritual joy.  I don’t usually distinguish between types of joy.  And because Christmas is almost on us and I’d just been thinking about comfort, somehow comfort and joy linked up in my head. Tidings of comfort and joy.

At any rate, it occurs to me that joy – 27 chickens joy – is not focused on the hope or on the future.  It’s not focused on some sort of expectation or desire.  It’s about the now, the moment. Joy is not about hoping for something; joy is about appreciating what’s in your yard right now.

Day 19: Tidings of comfort

Just as I was thinking about how giving up on hope makes me feel stronger, I heard something interesting on the radio:  the root of the word “comfort” is the Latin word fortis.  Fortis means strength.  It’s the same root of words like “fortify” or “fortitude.”  Those things sounds strong to me; comfort does not.  When I need comfort (which is often), I do not feel strong.

Then it struck me that the “com” of “comfort” might matter, too.  Just like “compassion” means we suffer together, maybe “comfort” means we strengthen together.  Light research does not support that idea, but I’m going with it.  I like that connection.  It makes sense to me.

Maybe what I’m saying is that giving up on hope actually gives me comfort.  It’s a weird place inside my head.

Day 18: Not sad about it

When I say “hope is stupid,” it’s not a sad thing or a bad thing.  Actually, when I let go of hope, it makes me feel lighter somehow.  Hope feels like a crutch that is faulty.  It’s not that I don’t need a crutch now and again, but it’s that I recognize there are sturdier crutches for me.  When I don’t feel hope, that doesn’t mean I feel hopelessness or despair.  It actually makes me feel better to not count on something that could be so flimsy.  It frees up space inside me somehow.  It feels good to not hope. 

When I say I don’t buy hope, people get a look on their face that says they really want me to believe in it.  It’s a look that kind of borders on pity.  It’s also a look that feels misplaced to me.  I’m leaning on things that are worth leaning on, and that feels right.  I’m not saying you have to give up on hope. I’m not even saying I won’t ever hope for anything ever again.  Hope is pretty deeply ingrained in our world, particularly if you are Christian.  It’s just not for me.

In a weird way, not relying on hope actually makes me feel more like it’s going to be oaky.  It feels more realistic.  It makes me feel stronger.  I don’t doubt that my life is a good one.  I don’t doubt that good things will happen in the future.  When I let go of hope, I can bask in the now, and that makes me feel grateful and strong. 

Day 17: Defining a new present

So maybe there are a few special people who can live in the world as if a big hope has already been realized, which is a pretty amazing and beautiful thing.  But then it also occurs to me that there are also a few special folks who are brave enough to point out that it’s not just that the world can be different than we think it is; it’s that the world actually is different than we think it is.  Already.  The framework we’ve placed around our experience is not correct.  I’m thinking about people like Darwin and Galileo.  People who took things we were so certain of and turned them inside out. 

It sounds like a really cool thing when you’re talking about science, but when it’s your heart, it hurts.  It can even cause a soul to cast dispersion toward hope.  Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Even if we can’t conceive of it, sometimes our certainty, our perspective of reality, is skewed.  Often it is so off-base that it causes us to at best stall out in our development and at worst hurt someone else.  The world does not actually spin around us, and once we see that, we can’t un-see it.  But until we see that, we can’t conceive of it, either.  At least most of us can’t.  There are a few special folks who can, though, and we are usually better off for their honest assessment of the way things are, even if it might sting a bit to get there.

Day 16: Living like a new future is already here

As I’ve thought about how we know what to hope for, so far I’ve considered two things: people telling us what to hope for and our past experience telling us what to hope for.  These are pretty big buckets that cover a lot, but I do wonder if I’m missing something. I usually am. 

I wonder if there’s something ingrained in us that allows us to think on things we haven’t directly been told or experienced.  Something that lets us see a way that is not defined by our past, a better way, a bit more of the kingdom come, a teensy nudging toward justice or toward a righting of the scope. 

I’m thinking about the people who made a great difference in the world by believing it could be different … not just for them, but for everyone.  I’m thinking of Jesus and Ghandi and Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King, Jr.  I’m thinking of Buddha and Sojourner and Muhammed and Mandela.  People who were able to imagine a vastly different world without much of a model to follow.  That’s a certain kind of person who sees the world a certain way.

Maybe it still all starts with the experience and the words, though.  These are people who pay close attention to what they’ve been told and what they’ve experienced, but something in them tells them not to believe either of those sources.  They can see a better way in the world.  I don’t know, though.  It’s more than that.  It’s like they live in the world today like it’s already the better world.  Like how Jesus paid attention and kind of left a trail of healing and love in his wake.  Like the new future is already here. 

Maybe that’s what the NT hope is – having such confidence in how things can be that you live it out around you in the day to day.  I think of hope as a distraction because it calls me away from the present, but if I recast hope to be a present day reality, an impulse to live better already rather than waiting for something else, maybe that’s something I could get behind.  That seems like a good way to heal and be productive for a larger good in the present moment.  In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of a distraction; it might actually be a focus.

Day 15: A third best thing

Skipping.  Skipping is a best thing for me.  Sometimes I skip because I’m feeling sad and want to try to change my perspective a bit.  It’s harder to be sad when you’re skipping.  Not impossible, but harder. 

Skipping is a lifter for me; it makes me feel lighter and less care-caged.  There are lots of long, open corridors in our office, and when I turn a corner into one and there’s no one there, it just seems like an invitation.  If I’ve been very busy or if I’m feeling low, skipping down that corridor brings me back into myself.

But sometimes I skip because I already feel light, and it’s the appropriate response to that.  Like loving people is an appropriate response when you recognize that Big Love (or the Universe or God or whatever you call it) loves you.  Skipping feels like a body way to express that love … or maybe joy … or maybe just a time when life was fresher and less fraught.

I’ve raised a skipper, too.  I didn’t realize it until fairly recently, but my girl enjoys a good skip as much as I do.  On a recent trip to Auburn, she and I skipped down the ramp from the nosebleeds at Jordan-Hare stadium to the sound of the marching band playing the fight song.  The bobble on the top of my hat flopped along to the beat of the skip.  My girl was right beside me.  It was a best thing. 

Day 14: Experience

So one option for what steers our hope is words: being told what to look for, what to expect.  But do we only hope when people tell us what our options are?  How does that line up with our lived experience?  What if our actual lives don’t support what we’re being told?  What happens then?

Some folks say that the OT hope was founded on the idea of God’s faithfulness.  I struggle with the idea of OT God as faithful.  Experiencing OT God sounds absolutely terrifying to me.  I probably wouldn’t even survive.  OT is harsh. 

OT God does come back around eventually, but OT God also commits genocide; sends plagues; sanctions gruesome, horrible, violent war; and submits really good people to all manner of pain for no apparent reason (#Job).  No one is safe.  That was what it was like to experience OT God.

The divine violence in the OT is as universal as the flood and as particular as Lot’s wife.  It is rampant. To me, it speaks more of moody melodrama and petulance than it does of faithfulness.  Is that the lived experience that’s supposed to shape our hope?  Do we just hope that everyone behaves and we dodge the bullet?  That the violence passes quickly and we are on the right side of it?  I’m just not sure about all of that.

Now, a NT experience as a harbinger of hope might be a little easier for me to wrap my head around, particularly if you ever hung out with Jesus.  While his words could be tough, it seems like the way he went through the world could lead you to believe that better things were possible.  And his words were only tough if you were kind of self-impressed.  I don’t think Jesus was much into self-impressed. 

The thing about any lived experience is that it’s kind of all over the map.  Some horror, some beauty.  Maybe hope means that we point toward the beauty despite the experience of the horror.  Maybe that’s the point.

Day 13: Prophecy

If we can agree on the general idea that hope involves waiting for something or expecting something with varying degrees of certainty or possibility, then how does hope find its direction?  How do we decide what to wait for, what to expect?  How do our little hearts choose what to desire?

On the first Sunday of Advent, a friend sent me a text reminding me that hope – early, Biblical hope – was somehow connected to prophecy.  I tend to think of prophecy as some sort of prediction of the future.  And I tend to think of Old Testament prophets as folks who kind of went around spreading dread and doom about all the terrible things that would happen if folks didn’t change their ways. 

It seems like prophets are generally thought to have received some sort of divine inspiration behind their messages and hang their authority on that.  Prophets carry messages from God to the world around them.  (Now that I think about it, wasn’t that the angels’ job, too:  to bring messages from God?  I digress.)

Prophets are often reluctant to accept the position.  Moses offered a lot of counter-arguments at the burning bush recruitment event.  Poor old Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh.  Turns out he didn’t really have a choice.  

I don’t imagine people would be happy to see a prophet coming down the road.  They aren’t spouting off winning lottery numbers or bringing the Publisher’s Clearing House prize patrol to your door.  They mostly just tell us that God’s judgment is coming and it ain’t pretty.  Some prophets have very elaborate visions of how this judgement looks.  If they were movies, I wouldn’t be able to watch them for all the violence.

But also, I think the OT prophets came up with this idea of a messiah, a person who would set the world right, would ease the pain, and would save us from others … and from ourselves.  Lord knows I need saving from myself. 

And the prophets also have a lot to say about restoration in general, and that could be really beautiful. You know, if we get our act together and turn back to God.  It seems like of like the prophets set up two options for our future:  reward or punishment. 

Maybe those messages – words about options for our future, particularly words attributed to the divine – are enough to drive a hope, to give us something to expect or desire. 

Perhaps someone telling us what is going to happen in the future is one thing that informs our hope. Maybe their words plant a seed about a possibility for the future, and we hope toward the plant that seed will become. 

Day 12: What did it mean?

The archaic definitions of the word “hope” remind me that definitions shift and change over time.  Hope used to mean more of trust or reliance or confidence.  And I think Biblical times definitely qualify as archaic.  Maybe hope seemed a little more sturdy back in the day. 

And thinking on these things from an “it’s in the Bible” kind of way also necessarily entails a degree of separation via translation because I speak neither Hebrew nor Greek.  According to Google, there are two Hebrew words used in the Old Testament that are primarily translated as hope. 

One of those OT words is yakhal.  Yakhal appears approximately 50 times in the Old Testament and translates most closely as “to wait for.”  That’s kind of one of my main Advent questions:  can you wait without waiting for something?  Is there a difference between waiting and waiting for?  I hope I remember to come back to that later.

The other Hebrew word we translate as “hope” is qavah.  It’s used about 70 times in the Old Testament, and it translates as “to wait.” 

I like qavah better than yakhal for a variety of reasons, the first one being that it’s a “q” without a “u,” and that doesn’t happen very often in English.  The second reason is that it’s based on the Hebrew word for “cord,” which is qav.  Qavah has to do with the pulling of a cord, the tension that builds and builds and builds until the cord snaps.  That seems a little more realistic to me. 

Things have tension.  Things snap.  Things that held can stretch until they simply don’t hold anymore.  I can a little bit get behind qavah because it recognizes the tension that accompanies the waiting and seems to allow some space for the fact that sometimes things fall apart.  It might ultimately still be for the better, but it’s not lollipops and rainbows. 

In New Testament Greek, the word we translate as “hope” is elpis.  It translates as “expectation, trust, and confidence.”  That’s an interesting development.  Confidence seems like the opposite of hope.  If you’re confident in something, are you still hopeful?  I’m pretty confident that Santa will be the last thing in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.  I look forward to seeing Santa at the end, but I don’t hope I’ll see him because I know I’ll see him.  If that’s New Testament hope, that’s a whole different thing.

That seems like quite an evolution to me: 

1. OT hope = wait or wait for

2. NT hope = confident expectation

3. Today hope = desire with possibility and expectation

Words.  They’re slippery little buggers, aren’t they? 

Day 11: What does it mean?

“You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Inigo Montoya was talking about Vizzini’s “inconceivable” obsession, but it (like all Princess Bride quotes) holds up in real life.  Words are kind of slippery.  We use them and ascribe them all sorts of meanings and contexts and roles.  That’s one of the reasons I love words.  It’s also kind of what makes them so hard.

So after all this talk about hope, what does the word “hope” actually mean? And what do I think it means?

Left to my own devices, I’d define hope as a wish that things will be better, an expectation that something will improve, or a desire that a particular outcome will occur.

Y’all might already know that The American Heritage Dictionary is my dictionary of choice, and it defines hope as follows:

v. hoped, hop·ing, hopes

v.intr.

1. To wish for a particular event that one considers possible: We are hoping for more financial support. [1]

2. Archaic To have confidence; trust.

v.tr.

To desire and consider possible: I hope that you will join us for dinner. We hope to buy a house in the spring. See Synonyms at expect.

n.

1.

a. The longing or desire for something accompanied by the belief in the possibility of its occurrence: He took singing lessons in the hope of performing in the musical.

b. An instance of such longing or desire: Her hopes of becoming a doctor have not changed.

2. A source of or reason for such longing or desire: Good pitching is the team's only hope for victory.

3. often Hope Christianity The theological virtue defined as the desire and search for a future good, difficult but not impossible to attain with God's help.

4. Archaic Trust; confidence.

Idiom:

hope against hope

To hope with little reason or justification.

[Middle English hopen, from Old English hopian.]

hoper n.

What strikes me most in that definition is the persistence of possibility.  According to the AHD, all contemporary definitions of hope entail the idea that what we hope for is possible.  (The archaic ones don’t, which is interesting.)  I hadn’t thought about that before and will definitely need to percolate on it some, but my first thought there is that I wonder if I hope for the impossible.  I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s my gut reaction.[2]

Also, the AHD tosses in a nod to the use of hope in a Christian sense as a theological virtue.  It does not mention other world religions, though, so I wonder if hope figures more prominently in Christianity than it does in other faiths.

I like to consult at least two dictionaries to get a broader view; Webster’s defines hope this way:

hope 1 of 2 verb

hoped; hoping

intransitive verb

1:       to cherish a desire with anticipation : to want something to happen or be true

hopes for a promotion

hoping for the best

I hope so.

2       archaic : TRUST

transitive verb

1:      to desire with expectation of obtainment or fulfillment

I hope she remembers.

hopes to be invited

2:      to expect with confidence : TRUST

Your mother is doing well, I hope.

hoper noun

hope 2 of 2 noun

1

a:    desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment

came in hopes of seeing you

also : expectation of fulfillment or success

no hope of a cure

when they were young and full of hope

b:      someone or something on which hopes are centered

our only hope for victory

c:      something desired or hoped for

great hopes for the coming year

2       archaic : TRUST, RELIANCE

Phrases

hope against hope

: to hope without any basis for expecting fulfillment

That one seems to be more about expectation.  Expectation fits better with my own idea of hope than possibility does.  Maybe expectation necessarily entails possibility.  You wouldn’t expect anything that wasn’t possible, would you?  I get lost in all sorts of weird little word trails in my head.  Definitions can make things clearer and murkier all at the same time. 

The line that gets me in Webster is this:  to want something to happen or be true.  I think that’s my rub with the whole hope thing.  Wanting something to be true doesn’t actually make it true.

It’s also interesting to me that both dictionaries mention hope against hope as lacking cause or basis.  Maybe that’s hoping for the impossible?  Maybe that’s the kind of hope I have a problem with?  Hope against hope.  Expecting against expectation.  What is the sense of that?

[1] (Aren’t we all, AHD?  Aren’t we all?)

[2] Note: gut reactions are hard for me to type out loud, but I think it’s part of the noticing the moment business, so I’m trying to be better at it.  Urgh.

Day 10: But hope’s in the Bible, so c’mon…

As I think about hope in a new way, when I tell people I’m thinking about hope like this, it’s clear that it goes against the grain.  There’s a lot of talk about hope in the Bible.  It’s one of the three things that remain, right?  Faith, hope, and love.  And those who hope in the Lord will be renewed.  The Lord has plans to give you hope and a future.  There are tons of quotes from Scripture about hope that could kind of cross into toxic positivity if we’re not careful.

And I guess there’s the argument that it’s our job to hope and that really what we all hope for is an ultimate communion with or immersion into or dissolution through God.  Some might say that’s the point of being Christian.

But all that talk about hope?  That’s not actually Jesus talking.  It’s Old Testament prophets or poets or song-writers.  Or it’s New Testament people who knew Jesus and tried to make sense of him.  I don’t think Jesus himself actually says much about hope.  He does talk about eternal life and the kingdom of God and stuff like that, but mostly Jesus strikes me as a guy who was really living in the moment.  In fact, he seemed to think the Kingdom of God should be something in the right now, not just something in the future. 

Of all the things people wanted from Jesus, what they wanted most was his attention.  And he gave it.  He lavished it on everyone, even people who the world thought didn’t deserve it.  Maybe that’s the whole point: it’s worth our attention.  Whatever is in the now, the right in front of us, is worth our attention. 

Jesus paid full attention to the people in front of him. Jesus saw important people and plain people.  He saw the people who put on a show and the people who didn’t want to be seen.  He saw Zaccheus in the tree, the woman at the well, Pontius Pilate, Nicodemus, the proud and the humble. 

(He also paid attention to his need to get away and rest a bit.  Sometimes when I get super frustrated with him, I remember that he was likely an introvert who was in high demand, and that helps soften my heart toward him a bit.)

Jesus does not strike me as a man who is distracted, not even by hope.  He doesn’t seem to gaze across the crowd, hoping to find anything in particular.  He just takes in what’s in front of him and does what he can to make it better.  What’s in front of him might not be pretty, but it’s always better off for his attention.  Jesus leaves things better than he found them by being in that moment. 

It’s amazing how often Jesus is reported to have known what was going on inside people, in their hearts.  So often I see what I’m looking for, but I don’t think Jesus did that.  And because he wasn’t looking with an agenda, he saw what was actually there.  In that very moment. 

Maybe what I’m getting at is that holding attention in the present is more important (and more impactful) than holding hope in the future.  It’s in the Bible.

Day 9: Driven to distraction

Okay, one more reason why hope is stupid:  hope is a distraction.  As I’m healing, I’m trying very hard to stay in this very moment.  For a long time, that was because if I wasn’t in this very moment, I was reliving something very painful. My brain was caught in a horrible loop that only reinforced my fear and my hurt and my feeling that I am not enough.  It would play over and over and over.  I was literally re-minding myself, rebuilding my mind, just etching that experience deeper and deeper into my brain.  Doing myself zero favors.  Making a lot more work for myself now.

Obviously, it’s super fun inside my head.

My therapist, my meditations, my woo-woo reading all instructed me to stay in the present.  To breathe.  To notice that I woke up and that the sun is shining.  To feel the ground beneath my feet.  To acknowledge this very moment because it is really all we have.

Hope, on the other hand, calls me away from the present.  It lures me to anticipate, to imagine, to dream of a different way.  It turns me away from this moment with the temptation that the next moment will be better.

And yes, sometimes this very moment actually sucks. And the next one might, too.  But my goal is to embrace that suck and see what I can learn from it because moments are just that:  moments. They pass with alarming regularity.  Seeing them and feeling them is how we make a life well lived.  And when the sucky moments stop and the universe suddenly does you even the tiniest little solid, you get one of my favorite things ever:  delight.

One of my friends says that the secret to happiness is low expectations … and bourbon.  I agree on both counts.  Hope can be a cruel hype man, setting up expectations that fall short, disappoint, and wound.  Hope pulls us away from the work – and the joy – of the now and turns our attention to the maybe of the future.  It distracts me from my reality, my healing, and the people right in front of me.  I need to focus, and hope gets in the way.