David Wood, a retired pastor and co-director of the Resonance grant that Pastor Kara, Mike Woods and 21 other church leaders have been in for three years, shared this message with the group the weekend before the election for All Saints Sunday:
Whenever I contemplate the meaning of Christian hope, I find myself returning to one of my favorite theologians, Nicholas Lash. He states that there are two main enemies of hope: optimism and despair.
Optimism is easily mistaken for hope because it confidently asserts a positive outcome. Optimism points to a far horizon, unsullied by present circumstances. In effect, optimism closes our eyes to the present, calls us out of a conflicted present to practice a kind of wishful thinking about a dislocated, detached future.
Hope differs from optimism in that hope remains firmly grounded in the present circumstance with eyes wide open to the reality of what is. However, the aperture of hope is wide—it draws upon a horizon of remembrance that widens the angle of vision on any given moment.
Hope gives us the capacity to interrogate the present, to raise questions, to probe for possibility. Hope is not invulnerable. It is capacious enough to encompass the disappointments and sufferings of the present. Hope does not know the answer as much as it enables us to live amidst the unanswerable.
The other enemy to hope is despair. Whereas optimism seeks to escape from the present into a distant, unsullied future, despair is the experience of being overwhelmed, consumed by the present. The dominant mood of despair is resignation. It is the feeling of being entirely and completely defined by whatever difficult circumstance we find ourselves in.
If optimism claims to know too much about the future, despair knows too little. Or perhaps more to the point, despair gives up on the future all together.
Hope is more humble than optimism and more bold than despair.
Hope refuses to be engulfed in or consumed by the moment. At the same time, it refuses to escape the moment into some distant, dislocated future. It operates at a kind of middle-distance. Hope always brings memory and anticipation to every present and thereby grants us the capacity to be responsive (vs. reactive), available (vs. anxious), and attentive (vs. distracted). Hope rejects simple answers, quick fixes, easy solutions.
Hope spends less time asking questions like:
What has happened to us?
What will happen to us?
Why is this happening to us?
Instead, hope moves us to focus on questions like:
In light of this moment,
What will be required of us?
Given what is happening,
What is being asked of us?
A favorite story of mine comes from the writing of E.B. White. A few years after the death of his wife, he wrote an essay on her love of gardening. Every year in the Fall, when it came time to plant, she would plan carefully, putting in her orders to seed catalogues, and created a new diagram for each year’s planting. In her latter years, after she became ill, and nearly an invalid, she would still make her way to the garden to plant….
Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katharine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a little wool hat, put on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair—a folding canvas thing—that had been placed for her at the edge of the plot.
There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while her helper produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for intricate interment.
As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion—the small hunched over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.
Calmly plotting the resurrection.
Standing on the threshold of this moment in our national life, we have been shaken out of any illusion of an easy certainty about the future. In unanticipated ways, we have been awakened to the truth of how little we can assume, know, control, or predict.
There would be difficult days ahead—that Jesus made sure his disciples were certain of. But, wherever they were, whatever their circumstance, they must remember Him, this night, this bread, this cup.
In doing so they will remember how little they knew on that night, in that moment of what was to come. In that remembrance, the opaqueness of whatever present they were in would be exposed and hope awakened.
On this All Saints Sunday, in the company of witnesses seen and unseen, we are called once again to be gathered into that remembrance and the hope it makes possible…a hope that enables us to dig in to this moment without fear and, with all those who have gone before us, to go on our way calmly plotting the resurrection.
Whenever I contemplate the meaning of Christian hope, I find myself returning to one of my favorite theologians, Nicholas Lash. He states that there are two main enemies of hope: optimism and despair.
Optimism is easily mistaken for hope because it confidently asserts a positive outcome. Optimism points to a far horizon, unsullied by present circumstances. In effect, optimism closes our eyes to the present, calls us out of a conflicted present to practice a kind of wishful thinking about a dislocated, detached future.
Hope differs from optimism in that hope remains firmly grounded in the present circumstance with eyes wide open to the reality of what is. However, the aperture of hope is wide—it draws upon a horizon of remembrance that widens the angle of vision on any given moment.
Hope gives us the capacity to interrogate the present, to raise questions, to probe for possibility. Hope is not invulnerable. It is capacious enough to encompass the disappointments and sufferings of the present. Hope does not know the answer as much as it enables us to live amidst the unanswerable.
The other enemy to hope is despair. Whereas optimism seeks to escape from the present into a distant, unsullied future, despair is the experience of being overwhelmed, consumed by the present. The dominant mood of despair is resignation. It is the feeling of being entirely and completely defined by whatever difficult circumstance we find ourselves in.
If optimism claims to know too much about the future, despair knows too little. Or perhaps more to the point, despair gives up on the future all together.
Hope is more humble than optimism and more bold than despair.
Hope refuses to be engulfed in or consumed by the moment. At the same time, it refuses to escape the moment into some distant, dislocated future. It operates at a kind of middle-distance. Hope always brings memory and anticipation to every present and thereby grants us the capacity to be responsive (vs. reactive), available (vs. anxious), and attentive (vs. distracted). Hope rejects simple answers, quick fixes, easy solutions.
Hope spends less time asking questions like:
What has happened to us?
What will happen to us?
Why is this happening to us?
Instead, hope moves us to focus on questions like:
In light of this moment,
What will be required of us?
Given what is happening,
What is being asked of us?
A favorite story of mine comes from the writing of E.B. White. A few years after the death of his wife, he wrote an essay on her love of gardening. Every year in the Fall, when it came time to plant, she would plan carefully, putting in her orders to seed catalogues, and created a new diagram for each year’s planting. In her latter years, after she became ill, and nearly an invalid, she would still make her way to the garden to plant….
Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katharine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a little wool hat, put on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair—a folding canvas thing—that had been placed for her at the edge of the plot.
There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while her helper produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for intricate interment.
As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion—the small hunched over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.
Calmly plotting the resurrection.
Standing on the threshold of this moment in our national life, we have been shaken out of any illusion of an easy certainty about the future. In unanticipated ways, we have been awakened to the truth of how little we can assume, know, control, or predict.
There would be difficult days ahead—that Jesus made sure his disciples were certain of. But, wherever they were, whatever their circumstance, they must remember Him, this night, this bread, this cup.
In doing so they will remember how little they knew on that night, in that moment of what was to come. In that remembrance, the opaqueness of whatever present they were in would be exposed and hope awakened.
On this All Saints Sunday, in the company of witnesses seen and unseen, we are called once again to be gathered into that remembrance and the hope it makes possible…a hope that enables us to dig in to this moment without fear and, with all those who have gone before us, to go on our way calmly plotting the resurrection.
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