en conclusio (?)

Incessant rains and vast flooding fit the mood of these posts quite well. I’m certain there’s a break coming, a shaft of light piercing the horizon, sunlight dappling through the breaking storm-clouds. But the storms remain ever-strong and ever-present, and the only light is that of the lightning, brief flashes that may inspire hope but in the end serve as signposts to the reality that the storm continues to rage. They say every storm comes to an end, and that’s true: but the damage exacted in its duration may mean that the storm’s end is but the beginning of more trauma to be undergone even under the daylight. The sum word of all these posts, which I hope to cease after this (but which may continue for as long as the shadow lies), is hope; and not just hope, but the yearning for that hope. I’m looking for any reason to have hope, and the two most obvious “hope-givers” end up being not as certain as it might appear.

Take the “secular” route, if you want to call it that. Yank God from the equation and what do you find? Hope is to be found in yourself, and you can manipulate your circumstances—a little thing called “wisdom,” there’s no need to attach religious lace to the term—in order to bring about a desired response. Going back to the mathematics, or blackjack, you can stack the cards in your favor. Some call it cheating, I call it wisdom. Yet no matter how you stack the deck, there will always be uncertainties; and no matter all your manipulations, no matter your air-tight wisdoms, there will always be the threat of a broken seal, of a flood, of something going wrong. After all, no matter what we may think, we’re not the gods and lords of our own lives. Even if there is no God, hypothetically speaking, we’re still at the mercies of the decisions of others and the fortunes of chance. No one’s really in control.

Now for the religious route. “Hope in God,” they say. And that’s fine and well. But often we hope in God for things we shouldn’t hope in him for; not because he doesn’t care, nor because he’s impotent, but because our hopes and aims may be selfish or, really, peripheral to God’s ultimate causes.  We tend to care about things he doesn’t. Yes, there are things to hope in God for; but there are things which we shouldn’t hope in God for because they’re things he’s not too concerned about. I know everyone says, “God cares about every little detail of your life,” especially all those uptight evangelicals who want to make everything a make-it-or-break-it spiritual moment (granted, not all evangelicals are like this; I know quite a few who are refreshingly down-to-earth); but I’ve studied the subject intensely, philosophically and theologically, and I’ve come to different conclusions, and I stand by them.

Hope is a shaky thing. You can spend your entire life hoping in something for it never to come to pass. When this happens, most often we thrust the blame on ourselves, or on others, or on God (I’ve done all three). But how often do we say, “Life’s a bitch, and shit happens”? The reality is that we live in a world that isn’t conducive to hope; we live in a world that isn’t yet heaven-on-earth, and to think otherwise is to become like the ostrich (a metaphor which I’ve beaten to death, but for good reason—those stupid bastards give us a little insight into our stupidity). I’m not saying that we shouldn’t hope, that I shouldn’t hope; and I’m coming to realize that hope is a good thing. It gives us sustenance, it breeds endurance, it keeps us moving when the world turns to shit both vertically and horizontally, diagonally and in multiple dimensions. But a little too much can be a bad thing: we use hope to suave the pains of life, and if we take too much of it, we’ll get sick. Think of it like easing a headache with aspirin: take a little, feel better; take too much, get liver cancer. Most often the effects of taking too much don’t become apparent till you’ve done it steadily for a long time; same with hope. The best route isn’t to toss out the baby with the bathwater, to curse hope as an illusion and escapist technique while abandoning all its good qualities. Perhaps a better route would be to embrace hope but with a realistic agenda: knowing that this is something good to pursue, and that it might come about, but that if it doesn’t, well… Life’s a bitch. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.