The Hope That You Have
In these days verse 15 in 1 Peter constantly announces itself to me: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” (NIV)
The people Peter was writing to were living dispersed as a small minority in the northern parts of Asia Minor, nowadays known as Turkey. They had it difficult, because they just didn’t fit into their society. As believers they were seen to be different and such people never have it easy. For that reason Peter describes them as foreigners and exiles.
And yet, despite their difficult circumstances, they possessed something that fascinated those around them. Those people came up to them and said: “We know for a fact that you have a difficult life. And yet, you display a certain aliveness, a hope that lives in you. What is the source of that hope?”
“Be prepared to give an answer when people ask you about this” says Peter. “That’s your starting point. Hope enchants people, they long for it.”
He not only encourages them to talk about it; in his letter he also helps them to look at the basis of their hope.
One cannot help but notice that what he says about the subject is strikingly different from our concept of hope.
We often confuse hope with optimism. Where people who find themselves in a situation like ours at the moment would say: “I know that things don’t look good, but I believe it will all turn out for the better.”
As wonderful as it might be to approach life’s challenges with a positive attitude, that is not the basis of true hope.
Peter’s hope is also not wishful thinking. Where you look at the steady rise in infected people and deaths and say: “This is going to blow over. We do not have to fear the effect of it.”
Hope indeed lets us approach the future differently, says Peter, but its basis is in the present, not the future. And it is more than an emotional attitude. In essence it is the integration, the braiding of a truth, or a given that remains unchanged regardless of the circumstances, into our lives.
The 5 chapters of his letter shed light on that given from different angles and in essence he says the following to his readers: “In the eyes of society you might seem few and unimportant, you might be marginalised, but within the bigger picture you are people who are dearly loved and who are secure in the compassion of God. You can live differently, now and in future, because you know who you really are, and you are aware of God who is not only present in your life, but who is that life itself.”
For me, chapter 1:17 in The Message expresses that beautifully: “Your life is a journey you must travel with a deep consciousness of God.”
A deep consciousness of God. That’s what hope is.
A quote by Thomas Keating has greatly helped me much in this regard:
“To hope for something better in the future is not the theological virtue of hope. Theological hope is based on God alone, who is both infinitely merciful and infinitely powerful right now. Here is a formula to deepen and further the theological virtue of hope with its unbounded confidence in God. Let whatever is happening happen and go on happening. Welcome whatever it is. Let go into the present moment by surrendering to its content..... The divine energies are rushing past us at every nanosecond of time. Why not reach out and catch them by continuing acts of self-surrender and trust in God?”
Hope as surrender and confidence. Again: hope as a deep consciousness of God.
Within different contexts this hope might play out with different accents. For the foreigners and exiles of Asia Minor it was the discovery of their true identity, a new understanding of self. Much of that surely applies to us as well but, the emphasis for us is also somewhat different.
And here the poem Hope by Wendell Berry acts as a wise guide:
It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
For hope must not depend on feeling good
And there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
Of the future, which surely will surprise us,
…And hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
Any more than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.
Because we have not made our lives to fit
Our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
The streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
Then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
Of what it is that no other place is, and by
Your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
Place that you belong to though it is not yours,
For it was from the beginning and will be to the end
Belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are
Your neighbors in it: the old man, sick and poor,
Who comes like a heron to fish in the creek,
And the fish in the creek, and the heron who manlike
Fishes for the fish in the creek, and the birds who sing
In the trees in the silence of the fisherman
And the heron, and the trees that keep the land
They stand upon as we too must keep it, or die.
This knowledge cannot be taken from you by power
Or by wealth. It will stop your ears to the powerful
when they ask for your faith, and to the wealthy
when they ask for your land and your work.
Answer with knowledge of the others who are here
And how to be here with them. By this knowledge
Make the sense you need to make. By it stand
In the dignity of good sense, whatever may follow.
Speak to your fellow humans as your place
Has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you.
Speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it
Before they had heard a radio. Speak
Publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public.
Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up
From the pages of books and from your own heart.
Be still and listen to the voices that belong
To the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.
There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,
By which it speaks for itself and no other.
Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
Underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
Freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
And the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
Which is the light of imagination. By it you see
The likeness of people in other places to yourself
In your place. It lights invariably the need for care
Toward other people, other creatures, in other places
As you would ask them for care toward your place and you.
No place at last is better than the world. The world
Is no better than its places. Its places at last
Are no better than their people while their people
Continue in them. When the people make
Dark the light within them, the world darkens.
He starts off by saying that it is difficult to hope, especially when you are old. Experience has taught you that what people see as hope isn’t really hope. You are no longer impressed or fooled by sweet words and stock phrases.
And yet, the young are asking the old to hope, to show them how to hope. In Peter’s words: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”
So what will the answer of the elderly be? Actually, Berry says, none other than what the elderly tell themselves.
And what do they say, what did they learn from experience?
That we have become disconnected from physical place, locality. The place where we live. We have stopped listening to the voice of that place, we are unfamiliar with the animals and people sharing that place with us, we do not speak a language formed by that place. We have forced our will, our preferences and dislikes onto it. “... we have not made our lives to fit our places.”
We’ve become separated from our roots and grounding and we’ve lost our hope.
Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
Underfoot.
When we become so concretely grounded, the unexpected happens – light shines on our ignorance and waywardness, but also on our imagination. From out of this apparent limited, small place of ours we discover how we are connected to the whole world and are called upon to care for all sentient beings we share the larger world with.
Not grounded, removed from and unfamiliar with place, people lose hope and the light with which they see fades. When the light in people fades, the world becomes dark.
As Keating put it: “Here is a formula to deepen and further the theological virtue of hope with its unbounded confidence in God. Let whatever is happening happen and go on happening. Welcome whatever it is. Let go into the present moment by surrendering to its content..... The divine energies are rushing past us at every nanosecond of time. Why not reach out and catch them by continuing acts of self-surrender and trust in God?”
It happens in the tangible, the concreteness of our lives and place, the ground under our feet.
Mysteriously, lovingly the Coronavirus lets us return to our places. In the days of isolation we become familiar with those places again. In ways that we can’t even articulate for ourselves, we experience the truth of Peter’s words: “Your life is a journey you must travel with a deep consciousness of God.” In different shapes, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, that consciousness grows.
And without us realising it, hope germinates.
George
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