Where is hope now?

A message from Co-Director Marcy Jackson

Back in December a friend told of an acquaintance who said: Every week I get an invitation to join the recession, but so far I’ve managed to say “No Thanks!” He was, of course, speaking of a “recessionary mindset.” A mere two months later and you can’t go anywhere without hearing bad news that hits close to home: a painful personal story of a friend or family member getting laid off, stories of communities struggling to cover essential services, daily reports of the “the numbers” that indicate further decline in our nation’s economic health and in other nation’s economies. It feels a little like being under siege. Saying “no thanks” to a recessionary mindset becomes much harder as tough times come home to roost in our own midst, in our own families.

So where is hope now? How do we weather what some thought would just be a short-lived “winter of discontent” that now looks to stretch on much longer? Surely there is a need for belt tightening on all of our parts, and that’s not a bad thing in and of itself. But I’m beginning to notice other levels of impact from all this bad news. There’s something insidious here in the way I—and others I know—are looking at our own lives, our choices and what the future holds. The necessary external “pulling in” of frivolous spending or use of resources has translated into a kind of internal pulling in or pulling away. It’s subtle in some ways and can look like a person is just being prudent or thoughtful about committing time, money or energy. Better to wait until things become clearer, less volatile, more stable. The risk, though, is that the need to “hunker down” too easily becomes a kind of immobilization.

Perhaps a better question about hope might be “How do we hope now?” or better still, “How shall we live now?” The latter hits the mark more squarely as that’s what we need to keep doing: Living! And being “alive” is as much about our spirits and internal orientation to the world as it is about the external arrangements and necessities of our lives.

 

In 1986, three years before he became president of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel was asked, "Do you see a grain of hope anywhere in the 1980s?"

He replied:

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.

Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
 

Hope “is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart…” Those lines help me to recognize that I can, in fact, find an internal orientation that can hold its own when I’m overcome by scarcity thinking. I can incline my heart to hope—looking for the many small ways hope is in evidence around me every day, even as I know there is so much that remains out of my control.

Recently, Parker Palmer was interviewed by Krista Tippett on her program “Speaking of Faith” for a series entitled “Repossessing Virtue: Economic Crisis, Morality and Meaning”. An excerpt from that interview illuminates another way of holding hope in the face of fear and uncertainty:

Ms. Tippett: …you note that there is a core message in all the great spiritual traditions and that is "Be not afraid." Wouldn't that be folly now not to be afraid?

Mr. Palmer: I actually think it would be folly not to hear that message properly. “Be not afraid" is something I've thought about a lot in my life. When I first heard that biblical admonition "be not afraid," I really found it very condemning of me because I have fear in me. I always have and I suspect I always will. I know I always will. At age 70, you know certain things about yourself that you can no longer pretend that you can go to a workshop and change.

Ms. Tippett: That you might outgrow it. Yeah.  [Laughter]

Mr. Palmer: Yeah, right. So I have that fear. When I listened more carefully to the words "be not afraid" I realized that they didn't say you can't have fear. They say instead you don't need to be your fear. And I think there's a big, big difference. That if you learn your inner landscape well enough you realize yes, there's a piece of turf in there called fear. And you can choose to stand there if you want, but there are other places in that inner landscape where you can stand as well if you work at it. You can stand in a place of hope. You can stand in a place of fellow feeling. You can stand in a place of appreciation of beauty. You can stand in a place of being aware of your own mortality, mindful of the simple fact that you are going to die, which, as you cultivate it, kind of relativizes a lot of other things!

You can choose where you stand within yourself if you know your inner landscape, where you stand as you move toward other people, the news of the day, the events of your own life, the situation of the moment. Those are actually choices that you can make. They're not always easy, but they're impossible if you're not reflective about your own inner dynamics.

Once you become reflective there comes with that the possibility of making choices and then the next frontier is the courage to make good choices about that, to move from a place in yourself—and the way I like to say it to myself—is to choose to move from a place in myself that is more likely to have life-giving results for me and other people than death-dealing results.

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I find Vaclav Havel and Parker Palmer’s sensibilities about hope to be grounded and reassuring. Their words not only make sense but remind me that as hard as I may be pulling back on some things I also need to remember to reach out! To reach out to connect with others in my family and community, to reach in to find the courage to continue to take risks, to reach toward those things—many of them simple and close at hand—that bring me joy.

I’ll end with the last two stanzas of a beautiful poem by Jeanne Lohmann, called “What the Day Gives.” May you find hope in these winter days and experience the fullness of life celebrated in these words:

In the frozen fields of my life
there are no shortcuts to spring,
but stories of great birds in migration
carrying small ones on their backs,
predators flying next to warblers
they would, in a different season, eat.

Stunned by the astonishing mix in this uneasy world
that plunges in a single day from despair
to hope and back again, I commend my life
to Ruskin’s difficult duty of delight,
and to that most beautiful form of courage,
to be happy.

—Jeanne Lohmann
(The Light of Invisible Bodies)