Is Hope Helpful?
A few years before my 2018 retirement I decided to experiment with an original end-of-year ritual at Madison’s First Unitarian Society. It was a bit of a gamble, but since attendance was always depressed on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year, I figured that a possible fiasco wouldn’t affect too many of the faithful.
I dubbed it “A Service of Regrets and Hopes,” and at the climax of the hour I invited attendees to inscribe on two small pieces of parchment (included in the Order of Service) a “regret” from the past year they wished to banish, and a “hope” for the coming year they’d been entertaining. Then, at my prompting, people marched to the front of the chancel to “drown” their recorded regret in a container of water, and deposit their hope in a flaming bowl, thereby sending the energy of their intention into the heavens.
To my surprise and pleasure (despite an assurance that participation was strictly voluntary) almost everyone in the auditorium accepted the offer. And, a miscalculation on my part about the intensity of the fire generated by our collective hopes nonwithstanding (the use of a fire extinguisher was required), the ritual struck a chord even among the congregation’s sober rationalists.
This memory resurfaced because hope has been on my mind recently, and particularly after my 100-year-old mother passed away over the Thanksgiving holiday. She had endured an up-and-down autumn, with a health crisis in early September, an unexpected recovery, and then a gradual decline at the end of which she succumbed to a Covid infection. But prior to her passing, I had prayed that rapidly developing dementia wouldn’t exacerbate the despair she was already experiencing. This is one hope I can now forfeit.
As for myself, 2024 marks the sixth year since I cleaned out my office at the First Unitarian Society. Since then, Trina and I have soldiered on without benefit of a faith community and, despite the collapse of our relationship with FUS, I recognize that a piece of me had always “hoped” for some sort of reconciliation. What I’ve learned, however, is that such a hope can cause a lot of unnecessary frustration and pain. Yes, “where there is life there is hope,” (Cicero), and St. Paul included hope, together with faith and love, in his short list of spiritual gifts. On the other hand, according to the contrarian philosopher Walter Kaufmann the foundations of human dignity - courage, honesty, and freedom from illusion - are subverted by hope.
I understand where Kaufmann is coming from, since he appears to equate hope with wishful thinking and a kind of passive expectation that things will turn out well. But that’s probably too simplistic a picture. Past experience convinces me that Frances Moore Lappe’s more nuanced perspective makes better sense. “Honest hope has an edge,” she writes. “It is messy and requires that we let go of pat answers…and all confidence that our sailing will be smooth.” A pithy Jewish aphorism makes much the same point: “Believe in miracles, but be prepared for alternatives.”
The trick with hope is to keep our expectations in check and allow ourselves to be open to the unforeseen and unanticipated. True hope is “wayfaring.” In other words, it doesn’t chart a specific course and doesn’t turn its rudder toward a particular port-of-call. It’s a wide world, and even for someone who has spent a lifetime among Unitarian Universalists options are available elsewhere: a soft landing among the Quakers, perhaps, or amidst the eclectic searchers at Holy Wisdom. What I have concluded is that only by shedding the hope (or illusion) of a particular outcome (e.g., a return to the UU fold) can I be at peace with myself. As the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron urges:
One of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will…. (Better to be) “open” – to have an open heart and an open mind. Stick with the Buddha right now, on the spot that you find yourself.
