Cynicism and Hope

There is perhaps nothing more painful than to reside in a place where hope is nearly dead.

We hope because hope encourages us, but when we begin to realize that what we hope for is probably unattainable, hope turns wicked.

What to do then? Live in the torture of dying hope? Walk through the fire of abandoning hope, dreading what we will find on the other side?

Or throw a Hail Mary pass, giving hope one last crazy try?

Of course this is all about hope in temporal things. Our eternal hope is certain.

Our eternal hope—and the living reality of the beloved community that is its pale reflection—is the best source of courage for that crazy try. And it is the best promise of a safe (though painful) landing if the pass falls short of the end zone.

“Adopt a tragic view of history and don’t place your hopes in temporal power. You’ll experience fewer disappointments.” —my colleague Richard Kauffman, of the Christian Century, on the morning after the Scott Brown Senate victory in Massachusetts

Jeremy had that look on his face this morning. His shoulders were slumped, his face was frozen, and when he turned to me his face crumpled into pain.

A month ago we’d started – really he’d started – to strip the paint from our fireplace mantle and later the brick. Eighty years of paint – we counted 20 layers – was proving a stubborn adversary. And it was taking its toll on my husband.

I walked into the living room and looked over the mess – the top of the mantle, which he’d dismantled earlier in the week, was half resting on the rubble on top of the brick, half lying in the hallway. The bricks were at various states of having been attacked – I saw green, white, blue, pink, some raw brick. The closer I got to the fireplace, the stronger the fumes of the environmentally friendly paint stripper got.

And that’s when the words from last night came echoing back to me. I’d even been the one to quote my mom last night – after Suk Maya, a friend from Bhutan, insisted we read Matthew 6.

My mother used to look me in the eye and say with a stern voice and her finger wagging, “God gave everyone a gift to share with others. Are you going to pretend you don’t have a need – pretend you don’t have a hole that needs to be filled – and ROB that person of their opportunity to give to you? How dare you prevent them from giving by refusing to receive!”

And so I called Suman and Nathaniel.

There were several reasons not to. They are newly arrived refugees from Bhutan. Suman already has 2 jobs – some days he works 16 hour shifts. He supports his wife, his mother and his 3 sisters. They all live in the same 2 bedroom apartment a couple of blocks away. Nathaniel has relatives arriving tonight from Nepal (his mom is Suk Maya from last night’s storytelling group).

But the look on my husband’s face – he’s an extrovert who gets energy from being with people, and doing this huge project alone was killing him – made me call anyway.

Nathaniel wasn’t sure what stripping paint from brick meant but I asked him to come over to take a look. He came. Suman showed up just a few minutes later. They put on the jumpsuits Jeremy gave them and soon paint chips were flying everywhere.

A couple of hours later Suman had to go to work, so the three men stopped for the day. Jeremy offered money but Suman said,

“You shouldn’t even offer. Aren’t we friends?”

Yes, of course! Jeremy replied.  We’ve shared meals and so much tea, brought them gifts, visited and told stories in the evenings in a sweaty one-bedroom apartment crammed with the whole extended family.

“Don’t you help me?” Suman said.

We did help him move about a month ago. We’d gotten the truck and driven it because he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet. Jeremy just paused.

“Then alright,” Suman concluded, and they all said good-bye.

On his Reconcilers blog today, Chris Rice of Duke University’s Center for Reconciliation reflects on those days “when it feels like two steps backward rather than one forward in the struggle to make a dent for a better way in this world.” He says that the phrase “eschatological activists” resonates with him: “It tempers my desire to be motivated by the ’seen’ versus the ‘unseen.’”

Chris then quotes Charles Marsh, who writes in a reflection on Martin Luther King Jr.’s final days in his book The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rights Movement to Today:

The beloved community remains broken and scattered, an eschatological hope, yet precisely a hope that intensifies rather than absolves us from responsibilities in the here and now.

When I read this quote, I remembered that yesterday when I was cleaning out my office at the Christian Century in preparation for my return to freelancing, I came across a copy of the 1967 Christmas letter from Dr. King and his family, a wonderful find from the voluminous files of my friend and colleague Dean Peerman, who this season marks his 50th year with the Century and was the copy editor who prepared King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail for publication in the magazine back in 1963.

I wish I could post this whole letter online, but I’m sure that to do so would be a copyright violation. The whole letter makes clear that King was concerned not just with ending segregation, but with ending poverty and war as well. Here are a few choice quotes.

In our work, let us see scorn and ridicule for what they are—scornful and ridiculous. “Keep your hand on the plow,” the old spiritual admonishes. “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ’round,” the freedom song declares.” . . .

Peace and good will, the simplest and most elusive of dreams, . . . begin with the individual before they can be extended to collective man. So let us begin with ourselves. . . .

If we as individual human beings will spurn selfishness, we shall appreciate the value of true love of self, of the exhilarating beauty of living. And if we recognize that all people can become truly alive and beautiful, we will understand the cosmic truth that all men are brothers and inseparable. . . .

We who know we are brothers, therefore, have a duty to bring others back into the broken family of man, into our world house. . . . We must live together as brothers or we shall perish divided as fools.

Amen.

May we all be eschatological activists, relentlessly and with hope pursuing that “simplest and most elusive of dreams.”