Hope Against Hope: Toward Hope Beyond Hope

By Leonard Bowman

A conflict of hope is causing tensions in Church and society. Hope Against Hope describes two common forms of hope. Apocalyptic hope stresses conflict and looks forward to Doomsday. Cosmic hope stresses reconciliation and looks forward to universal harmony. Reflecting on this conflict, Hope Against Hope draws on the Bible and on everyday wisdom to highlight the strengths and deficiencies of both common forms of hope. Then it leads toward a good hope that balances the good in both and goes beyond them to their root. This way focuses on the great surprise of the New Testaement, the resurrection. Then it finds the power of the resurrection at work, surprisingly, in the simplest human relationships. From that simple insight comes a promising direction for the future and a clear moral compass.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 29, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462081929

Leonard Bowman

Leonard Bowman teaches religion at Wesley College, Delaware, and has served at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland and Marycrest International University, Iowa. His Ph.D. in religion and literature is from Fordham University. His writings include The Importance of Being Sick (1976) and A Retreat With St. Bonaventure (1993).

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Contents

EPIGRAPH

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. WHAT Is HOPE LlKE?

2. THE APOCALYPTIC SHAPE OF HOPE

3. THE COSMIC SHAPE OF HOPE

4. APOCALYPTIC HOPE LOOKS AT COSMIC HOPE

5. COSMIC HOPE LOOKS AT APOCALYPTIC HOPE

6. TOWARD HOPE BEYOND HOPE

7. LIVING GOOD HOPE

8. GOOD HOPE AND THE FUTURE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

To Emily, Sarah, Claire and Dayna

EPIGRAPH

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:13

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Molly Sartorius for raising a simple question and then for encouraging me through the first draft of this book. Thanks to Connie and Gerry Cylkowski for reviewing revisions and the final draft, and to Joy and Les VanEck and Jena Hom for reviewing the final draft.

This reflection draws on many sources. Here are a few: Paul Tillich for the concept of the demonic substituting its own shape for the divine mystery; St. Thomas Aquinas for seeing evil as a corruption of good; St. Bonaventure for understanding creation as God’s first book of revelation and revelation itself as the coming of insight; Martin Buber for the I that rises in relationship; Gabriel Marcel for the link of hope to love; Jean- Paul Sartre for the voice of despair; Thomas Berry and Ewert Cousins (and through them Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) for introducing me to the cosmic shape of hope; Hal Lindsey, Tim La Haye and innumerable other preachers and writers (some on the Internet) for acquainting me with the apocalyptic shape of hope. I am indebted to Biblical scholars too numerous to name for this book’s reflections on passages from the Bible.

A much earlier phase of my reflecting on the issues of this book is in Armageddon: Are We On the Brink? Chicago Studies, volume 24 (1985).

The verse from Dante’s Divine Comedy in Chapter 7 is translated by Dorothy Sayers.

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

The path that led to this book began with a simple question.

At least it seemed to be a simple question. I was attending a small conference on Science, Spirituality and the Future. I left feeling sour, because a heated exchange had marred the closing discussion. A tense man in the audience had charged that the conference’s earth-centered vision violated the God-centered perspective that any real Christian would take. Just outside the door, a recent graduate of my college asked me, What makes Christian people get so angry at each other when we talk about things like this? I thought that would be easy to answer, so I offered some professorial platitudes about different ways of interpreting the Bible. Her question didn’t go away. "But why do people get so angry?"

I blinked, recognizing that I really didn’t know. Somehow deep religious nerves are touched by abstract ideas about the future. My mind groped for different ways people think about the future, but I ended with a shake of my head. There was so much I didn’t understand. It would take a whole book to explore her simple question.

Well, she said with a smile, maybe you need to write that book. And so I began. Five years have passed since that conference, years of pondering and years of change. Just as the question turned out to be anything but simple, so the path turned out to be anything but straight.

The question of how Christians think about the future is really the question of hope. What is hope? What shape does it have—or shapes? How does hope affect our lives?

These too seem to be simple questions. Of course we know what hope is—faith, hope, love, the three theological virtues that all Christians learned from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. But then my puzzlement returned. Do we really know what hope is? Do we really understand how our present hopes shape our future? Or, for that matter, how they shape our present? Again the simple question arises: why do people get so angry? Can hope be wrong?

That question was the first sharp turn in my path, unfolding into several other unsettling questions. Can hope indeed go wrong? Not just mistaken, but fundamentally defective? Can hope radically miss the mark and so become sin? Can hope be really sick, like a cancer substituting its own malignant shape for the divine mystery? Might that be why people get so angry, because there is something deeply sick about their hope?

Another set of challenging questions arose as I considered how hope might affect our lives. Does the shape of our hope influence our behavior? Does it influence all our relationships with people and with our environment? If hope can have so pervasive an impact on our lives, can it be that defective hope might cause some of the bad things happening now in ourselves and in our world?

This path has led me to conclude that the answer to all these questions is yes. Yes, the two dominant shapes of hope among today’s Christians are defective, and they are sharply in conflict with each other—hope against hope. Yes, these defective forms of hope may contribute to a lot of the tensions and conflicts in ourselves and in our world.

At this ironic point along the path, I wondered if indeed I was seeking after one of the principal virtues or perhaps one of the deadly sins. I thought hope was supposed to be something good, not a source of evil. Yet isn’t evil always rooted in good? Isn’t evil really a corruption of good? If so, then following this path through to the core of hope should lead us to rediscover the good in which defective forms of hope are rooted—a hope beyond hope.

I invite you to join me in following this path toward good hope. We will find that it takes many turns, some of them sharp and disturbing. We will need to be patient with questions that may challenge some of our cherished assumptions. We will need to pay close attention to some things so familiar to us that we may have taken them for granted. We need to be open to surprises.

Rise; let us be on our way.

1. WHAT Is HOPE LlKE?

Our path starts right where we happen to be, of course. That should be a simple beginning. From here we can explore how hope works in our ordinary lives, perhaps in ways so close and obvious that we may take them for granted. Then we need to look at how we talk about hope. An important part of that will be distinguishing hope from other attitudes toward the future that are like shadows of hope.

So where are we, as we begin this reflective path? Here, of course. Be careful—if we think only of our particular geographic location, we’ll get lost quickly. Let’s think most simply and most universally about what it means to be here. Philosophers help us get at that simple, universal place by saying that human existence is being in the world with others. That world that we’re in is a place, yes—but what’s most important for our path is that the world is also time. Our starting point is our basic, simple existence in space and time.

Time. I find myself looking at a clock. How do we experience time? To conduct our business, we use time as a framework. We set appointments in a calendar, on a grid of time expressed in space. We make a date to spend time with a special person. Time clicks away at a steady pace on the clock—but what about in our minds and hearts? I find that time is slow in business meetings, often painfully slow. Time speeds when I am looking forward to a special time with a special person. Some times like that seem to stand still, in timeless moments.

Rhythms form much of our sense of time—the regular rhythms of the clock, of day and night, of seasons. Memory, though, adds another dimension to our sense of time—time past that is gone and perhaps to be regretted, time that adds up to a career, a life. We also know the times of the lives of other people, adding up to an irregular, inevitable rhythm of birth, growth, decline and death. Time stretches back into history. It also stretches forward.

Yes, that is an important part of our sense of time. We are conscious that our own time does not go forward indefinitely. It will end. This present existence is in passing time. The awareness of death radically alters our sense of time from the mere rhythmic dance we suspect is experienced by other living creatures. We know where this dance leads and how it ends. Our response to that awareness raises the issue of hope—or despair:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Macbeth 5.5

What a lovely thought that would be to greet us first thing in the morning! Fortunately we don’t usually think about such ultimate issues, do we? The alarm rings or beeps, we extricate ourselves from whatever dream or darkness has held us, hit the alarm, wrestle ourselves upright, and start the day. Yes!

Why?

If life is a mere shadow walking the way to dusty death, why bother to get up in the morning?

Surely reasons to rise abound. I get up with the alarm so I can get to work on time. Got to pay the bills after all. On weekends, I may get up just as early so I can do some gardening, play a game of tennis, or enjoy a visit to the beach with my family. There are perfectly sensible reasons to get up in the morning—that is, if there is more to life than a fool’s way to dusty death. But is there?

A yes answer to that question would rise from a living hope within us. Hope is a verb.

The next question might be What? What is there more to life than a way to death? What is there to look forward to that is more than death? The way we answer this question will give shape and content to our hope. Hope is a noun.

Let’s not move too quickly, though, to the answers. We need to take a good hard look at the question if we are to find the path toward good hope.

Why bother to get up in the morning? Let’s slow down in our answers, because that nasty word why can probe every one of our answers. Why go to work? Why pay the bills? Why maintain a home? Why exercise? Why do things with our family?

To each of these questions we can come up with sensible answers, and of course the why can probe each of those in turn. With each turn of answer and the next undercutting question, we circle farther and farther from that naive yes we gave to that first question, whether there is more to life than a fool’s way to death.

Perhaps, then, we should ignore all these questions.

Yet the questions are there. If they were not, then our rising in the morning would be like that of the birds, chirping blissfully into another round of the rhythmic dance of time, unconscious of past or future or death. If the questions were not there, seriously there, what need would we have of hope?

Why bother?

The path to good hope requires us to consider seriously that there may be no solid reason to get up in the morning. That may be old news, easily dismissed. But as time passes and we grow older and sadder, if not wiser, that possibility is harder to shrug off. When we take it seriously, something can happen to our basic sense of being in time.

Facing each day was easy with naive optimism. Go for it. Hey, you lose some but you win some. Try, try again. No pain, no gain. Tomorrow is another day. Time heals all wounds. If it’s meant to be. We’ll survive; we’ll be okay. Something will turn up.

As time passes, such cliches lose their credibility. They become ironic, and then even tragic. Opportunities in work and life seem to diminish as change accelerates. Problems take on new dimensions. Once we said, got a problem? Deal with it. Find it; fix it, and then go on. But then time passes, and problems persist or multiply. We may realize that our plight is bigger than just dealing with problems. It is as if, with passing years, we step mindlessly out farther and farther onto a limb that grows thinner and thinner. We may not notice as we become more isolated, more limited in choices, more precarious, more tempted to cynicism and to despair. Are we stuck? Trapped?

As my options diminish, time can become like walls constraining me and closing in, locking me in as effectively as any prison bars. I crash into my own limits. I run into misunderstanding, resistance, opposition, and even hatred. No matter how hard I try, I keep running into walls. No matter how much pain I endure, I see no gain. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on with nothing to show, nothing to be done. Time can become a prison with no exit. Any changes of job, place, or even relationships that come within that prison don’t really make a difference. I feel trapped, helpless.

On the other hand and at the same time, change accelerates. Whirling and raging it sweeps me off like a rain-swollen river leaving nothing to grab, no way to fight the current or even stay afloat. Time can become an overwhelming flood in which I tumble, sputtering—every moment threatening that my spirit will be shattered against rocklike realities or that my heart will be smothered as waters close overhead.

I can feel dragged or trapped as time closes me in like a prison or closes over me like swirling waters. I can’t go on like this; I just can’t. But I’ve tried my best, and it doesn’t make any difference. Something inside me wants to cry out in distress, to cry out for help. But—why bother? Why not just give up, yield, and stop this futile struggle?

The path to good hope faces the question at this depth. Anything less than good hope—easy answers, platitudes, canned doctrines—would provoke cynical laughter. Anything less would miss the mark.

Is there a place for us?

If you are like me, answers to the why bother question boil down to the people in our life—family, friends, good people with whom we work. When the why seeks to get beneath these answers, another dimension opens on the path to good hope. With it, a dreadful dimension opens in the questioning. For no matter how good or how young or how loved, isn’t each of those people also on the way to dusty death?

Now time can enclose us in another sort of prison, the horror of the solitary cell. Freely I have been speaking of us along this quest. But does the word us refer to something real? Is there real sharing and being together? Or does death turn that finally into an illusion, leaving us each ultimately and completely alone? Is there a place for us?

This question echoes a song in the old musical West Side Story. That musical tells of love doomed by senseless conflict. It is based on Romeo and Juliet, perhaps the classic story of doomed love. The question asks, is love inevitably lost? Is all love doomed? Is our sharing something real, or just a momentary thing like a morning mist that evaporates under the sun’s sharp scrutiny? Does sharing between persons really mean anything at all, or is it just a pleasant diversion from the harsh reality of impending death?