Hope in My Soul

Hope is a very central issue to me. I was almost named Hope when I was born.  I was born out of the reconciliation of my parent’s separation, and my father wanted to name me Hope.  My mother vetoed this name.  Two years later when my sister was born his hope had died into a stubborn faith that they would continue, and so he wanted to name her Faith.  My mother vetoed this name, and she was named Fay.  Was his hope sucessful?  My parents were married till my mother died, for 11 more years after he reached for the name Hope.  But they were kept together by her dying and would have separated if she had not become ill.

I hoped my mother would live during the two and half years she lay dying.  Hope was disappointed when she died.  Thus also began my career of hoping for impossible things and yet needing hope to survive that which is awful.

For me at that time the Emily Dickerson poem was truth:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all

I then launched a lifetime of activism.  As a favorite quote of mine says: “An idealist is someone who is homesick for a land they have never been.”  Certainly activists always struggle for things that are not yet: justice, peace, community.  To struggle for these things which are not yet, one has to have hope.

Somehow I have been the champion of lost causes.  I worked for years as a volunteer in prisons, work which touched my soul and was deep and meaningful…and when I would go to fundraise for it I would see how clearly our society judged prisoners “hopeless”.  I tried to stop nuclear weapons which amassed more quickly than demonstrators.  And now in my most challenging of impossible causes I’m fighting climate change.  So I have spent a lot of time over the years thinking about the significance of hope.

Recently, I went to hear Meg Wheatly, a Buddhist, talk on being a warrior for our time.  For me the most significant part of the talk was when she talked about hope.  She started to say something about the “ambush of hope” and how people’s disappointed hope can make them give up on what they are trying to do.  She said: “The space between hope and fear is inseparable.”  I have heard people who are without hope sort of bash hope, say it is just a form of trickery, a fool’s gold…something to be avoided.  I really cannot stand that message, it seems so dark and so fatalistic.  I was concerned that that was where she was going.   I have usefully heard people say the opposite of love is fear…but it was interesting to think that hope and fear are inseparable.  Because yes, I had to admit that when I have hope there is always a niggling fear somewhere that I will be wrong, be foolish or be disappointed.   And when I have fear there is also a little niggling hope that it will be ok and everything will turn out well.

Then Meg said she’d heard the joke: “expectation is pre-meditated disappointment.”  I laughed in recognition of how often my expectations have brought me disappointment.

I have written in my Jan blog on Gratitude and Expectations: “I have been thinking about how expectations, like goals and dreams are generally a good thing and help us aim for things and collectively move forward in life.  And yet I am aware of how we can become so attached to a dream, or a goal as to have the expectation that life will be a certain way and experience great disappointment or frustration when it is not that way”. 

It all comes into clearer focus for me that goals, visions and dreams are a good thing that help us move forward, but that expectations do lead to disappointment.  Certainly the relationship between disappointment and fear is clear…and now leads to the issue of hope.  Then someone said: “I think an aspiration is hope without expectation.”  Whether one agrees with that term it does begin to distinguish a way of hoping that is unattached.

Another person said: “Hope is being willing to face the pain of disappointment”.  Which I think speaks to the idea that we realize there are no guarantees for the things we hope for, and we do it anyway.

Meg then introduced these two quotes.

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”  Vaclav Havel President of Czechoslovia  1989-92

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
― Thomas Merton

These two quotes are important to me because of the work on “Active Hope” that I have done with Joanna Macy.  Joanna has been for decades, starting with our responses to the nuclear arms race been inviting Americans to look at our grief and despair about the world.  She says in her Work that Reconnects that we must start with gratitude for what is and then experience our grief so we are not dragged down by it and can then see with new eyes and be freed to act.  The part of this formula that did not resonate with me at first was gratitude.  It was hard for me to notice what to be grateful for when I was so worried!   However, my work with Joanna has been very profound.

I recall at a workshop where I felt deeply sunk in a sense of despair over the threat of the dying of the oceans that I felt no hope.  Joanna’s assistant Anne spoke and said that she did not think we would survive but that she was sustained by “resting in the arms of all of you, in the love of you.”  I realized as I reflected upon this that I did not know if we will survive but that if the worst scenarios were to play out that I would still want in the descent of humanity for us to treat each other with as much respect as possible, without violence, to try to be fair with each other, to face our challenges cooperatively and with love. I realized that it meant I would make the same choices that I would make while fighting for our survival if I thought we would not survive.  I realized that I needed not to “concentrate on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself” as Merton says.  Or as Meg Wheatly said: “It becomes “What is”.  A place of gratitude.  Gratitude for what we still have.”

After my experience in Joanna’s workshop my “hope” changed.  It was not desperate, it was actually much deeper.  There was a calm I felt even in the face of much worse news.  There was the perseverance to just keep forging forward.  And strangely the gratitude showed up.  I felt like some people with chronic illnesses report feeling…just grateful for all the small things.  Grateful for what we still have, for as long as we have it.  Grateful to rest in the love of community.

The English language is said to be poor in that it has only one word for love.  It does not distinguish between the love of parents and children, from romantic love, or the love of a comrade or for the world in general.  The same could be said about the word hope.  There is this kind of hope that has expectations and the danger of much disappointment and there is this other kind of hope that has surrendered all expectations and that is just a steady direction and intention for Good – an almost instinct towards Light.