Irrational Hope
What’s that? You say it’s Tuesday? Ahhh, yes, this is true. But I hope you’ll forgive me for getting lost in another kind of word offering Sunday in the form of speaking at church.
This past Sunday was the first day of Advent, a four week period in the Christian church leading up to Christmas day, that invites us to enter a season of waiting and renewal, a beginning that holds within it an end. Advent is the start of the Liturgical calendar, sort of like the Christian church New Year. It is meant to usher in the beginning of hope, peace, joy, and love, as it pushes back the forces of destruction and division that fragment and wound.
The first week of Advent we are asked to enter into hope. I spent several weeks preparing for this service, and a lot of time contemplating hope as I did. What happened was what I call “red car syndrome.” I’m not sure what the technical name is, but this is that phenomena that happens when you are thinking about buying a certain car or have just bought a certain car, and then see that car everywhere you go. As I contemplated hope, hope kept showing itself to me over and over.
The day before service, I turned on the latest On Being podcast episode and heard Krista Tippett interviewing Joan Baez (listen by clicking on the underlined text). I heard Baez speak about her belief that hope doesn’t necessarily happen in big movements, but is built overtime, in small increments. “Hope is a muscle,” she said. Hearing this, I thought, ah, yes, a muscle. This is good. There’s action to this. Something I can work on. Then, almost immediately, I thought, Building muscle can be really hard, though. Especially as we get older.
Yet, here we are, at the start of this Liturgical year, outside the constraints of the world’s time, in which we are asked to wait and hope, as in ancient days long passed, for love to be born, AND ALSO acknowledge that this love has already been born, and is being born over and over again. It’s irrational, mind-blowing at the very least. At least to my simple mind.
Advent doesn’t usher in the kind of new year that we might expect with the turning of the December calendar into January. There isn’t revelry or confetti or countdowns or balls falling in this new year. There is waiting. Perhaps Advent time is asking us to imagine beginnings in a quieter way. A way of waiting to see what is revealed, and to trust that somehow what we wait for has been all along. This kind of quiet waiting feels counter-cultural to me, and frankly a little scary, outside my control as it is.
Yet, I hear the call, all the same, to wait, not alone but together, a waiting from old. A waiting that hopes for the promise of love, justice, and peace that is not yet, and yet is now, and has always been. How irrational is that?
Madeliene L’Engle writes in The Irrational Season, “It is the nature of love to create, and no matter what we do to creation, that love is still there, creating.”
This is incomprehensible to my mind. Sort of the way that the words of all of the prophets of the ancient texts are irrational, mind-blowing, incomprehensible by the mind alone.
In preparation for Sunday, it was suggested that I read a particular section of writing from a prophet named Jeremiah, who writes that the “days are surely coming…when a righteous Branch” will spring up, a branch of justice and righteousness in the land. In those days, the land, the humans, the animals—all creation—will know safety. All will be saved from the abuses of injustice; all will know God’s promise of love, of peace, of righteousness.
But not yet.
Jeremiah was a prophet to the southern kingdom of Judah, warning them that the way they were treating the land and one another was going to lead to destruction—not only for human beings but for all of creation. Basically, they were really screwing things up. I like to imagine it had something to do with all the reactive fear-mongering and finger pointing they were doing, plus all that total disregard for human life or climate change, and of course, so much social media scrolling—but maybe I’m reading into it.
What Jeremiah did preach of was the destruction of adhering to false idols and the imperative to social justice, often prophesying doom of war and captivity. He lamented fervently for the world. And he continued to urge people toward a vision of wholeness, toward God’s vision:
Surely, he says, the world is not as it should be, not as it one day will be, yet the days are coming when truth and justice and love will come to this land.
Easier said, than believed, I’d like to say to Jeremiah. Look at all there is to be against in this world. How are you not sitting around and worrying endlessly, doom scrolling and hiding in a puddle of fear and lament?
Instead, Jeremiah speaks future generative creativity into and over a people and land devastated by war, in the midst of great suffering, with unjust rulers. He addresses people in exile, while he himself is in jail for the preaching of his prophesies, abandoned by both his family and his government. He addresses people in the midst of despair. He is right there with them in the midst of it all, yet he speaks of waiting with their minds returned to the sacred inner life, and to do so with hope, for the time when all that humans have fragmented might be returned to its original oneness.
Hope within despair. This kind of hope can not be understood by the mind alone. This is the ferocious, irrational, hope of the heart.
Who knows this best? Perhaps it is not only the prophets, with their poetic words of image and metaphor, who see God’s righteous, creative love before it’s arrived. Perhaps also it is the artists, the musicians, the gardeners, the creative among us who can see what so many might see as “not yet” and “not possible” and speak over it all with an awareness that somehow their vision already is and will be—deeply possible within the heart of awareness.
I can’t help but quote Leonard Cohen again, who said:
“It’s the artists of the world, the feelers and thinkers, who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing, and shout the big dreams.”
The artists, musicians, the gardeners, too, thinkers and feelers all—these are the ones who know how to wait expectantly, when there seems to be only a void of creation, for something to be revealed. Call it the muse or call it the divine. One can no more force it into being than one can force birth. But it can be witnessed to, and in the witnessing, born into the world.
Waiting expectantly with hope for something to be revealed. This kind of fertile void of waiting offers the opportunity to consider some of life’s most important questions within the particularity to our particular time in history. What does it mean to be human NOW. Who are we going to be to one another NOW. How do we want to live NOW?
Our prophet Jeremiah answered this in his way--with his defiant, tenacious plea to live a kind of hope that sees the world as it is and remains ferociously committed to the world by investing in the land to come.
Jeremiah believed in the redemption of creation so completely that he acted upon the belief. Within all the sorrow and hardship, Jeremiah purchased some land. A seemingly simple act, yet it speaks volumes: This right here, the land of the living, is where a righteous branch will spring up.
Recently I returned to work in Baltimore, MD, in the garden at a place called the Glenwood Life Center, an addiction recovery center in an impoverished section of the city. Perhaps you’ve heard me tell the story of this place and the woman, Precious, who first came to the center nearly dead from a drug overdose. Precious went on to become a counselor and a gardener at Glenwood Life. I tell this story a lot, because each time I return to Glenwood Life Center it’s to a story I need to remember: the land that is now a lush, clean space where life grows abundantly was once filthy and filled with trash that revealed the devastation of life. Precious saw this land, and also saw what it could become, and somehow, what it already was. She spoke over this land, and called it good. Talk about irrational.
Who among us can speak over creation in this way?
Yes, I believe, it must be the artists, the musicians, the prophets and poets, the irrational among us, with their mind in their heart. The ones asking, waiting, and also not waiting, for the answers to the questions of how to live. How to survive. How to love and how to hope. Perhaps, too, it can be us, here in this time and place, with an irrational faith to guide us forward, asking us to both wait and to do so expectantly, with hope, and with a keen awareness of not only doom and despair, but with a willingness to act, to plant seeds and make art and speak hope acknowledging not only what we’re against, but also what we’re FOR, with a memory of resurrection of all kinds, in this land of the living, where our bodies reside now. Let us be as the ones who remain in the hope that something divine will emerge, revealed in its season.
Imagining and contending for what we hope for in this world is both a hard and kind path. We can orchestrate the most creatively crafted dance of turning away from that which we oppose and turning toward that way of living and walking that generates life, love, justice, and peace, until the next best step is revealed both to us and through us. Until what we hope for is shown to have been here all along.
Advent time feels to me like the great line from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Four Quartets:” In my beginning is my end. Somehow it is that we are entering both a beginning and an ending, a time both ancient and new. I hear this as hopeful news. So I’ll allow these final lines to be Eliot’s:
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
Before I leave you, I’ll return to that muscle building metaphor. A couple years ago, I literally wanted to get back to building muscle after having been sick and mostly inactive for a long chunk of time. I tried to pick up where I had left off. Instantly, I regretted this. My body rebelled. It was too much too soon. I had to work in smaller increments of weight and time.
Maybe this is where you are with the whole hope building thing, friend. If so, I get it; you’re not alone.
Try picking up a smaller weight this week and finding hope in small ways. Today, this happened as I walked at the local park and did what I do every time I see one of my park “friends,” those folks who happen to walk the circle at the same time as me. Today, I smiled and asked the older gentleman I started to pass how he was. It turned out, he wasn’t well. Today is his wife’s birthday, he told me. She died this past January so today is his first year without her.
I paused my walk and asked him some questions about his wife—her name was Wendy and she loved going out to eat. My park friend thanked me for my smile, which, he said, gave him a feeling of hope, and then he gave me a gift card to Wendy’s favorite restaurant—something he wanted to do since he couldn’t take her out to dinner.
I thanked him through teary eyes and then we parted. Just like that, together, we picked up a small weight. A smile, a hello, the willingness to stop and listen, his willingness to share his vulnerable heart. Maybe it wasn’t such a small weight at all.
Friends, for the month of December, I’ll be offering these weekly mailers for all subscribers to enjoy. I do believe that it’s together that we remember best the kind of hope, joy, peace, and love of the heart that might allow something beautiful, something new and of old, to reveal itself in and through us—and into the world.
Thank you for your wisdom and sharing your vision of hope.