Hope Is the Near Enemy of Faith
In my fantasy world Brené Brown throws her laptop across the room when reading the title of this article. In her world, that would be a shut-the-front-door kind of compliment. When it came to me, mid-morning-run the other day, I had to stop running… a move reserved for only the heaviest of insights. I’ve been struggling with the work of Stephen Jenkinson recently — and one of his key wisdom insights is that, “Hope is a Mortgage.” Now his perspective on hope is hard-won from decades of working with dying people in palliative care. Firstly, I must acknowledge that his argument is compelling, so I’ve been wondering whether it is true in the narrow sense of how it shows up in working with dying people, or whether his insight is more broadly applicable. So that we (you the reader and I the writer) are on the same page, let’s struggle together through some of his most cogent passages on this point.
Die Wise (pp. 132)
Hope is a mortgage. It is not like a mortgage: It is a mortgage. Hope is a mortgaging of the present, for the sake of some possible future that might come to pass and just as likely might not. Being a hopeful person with a terminal diagnosis means that… you are in some mysterious and compelling way not allowed to know what you know when you are dying. In a death-phobic culture like our own, knowing you are dying is not as healthy as hoping you aren’t dying while you are. When hopeful people are dying, and when dying people are hopeful, they buy a house on a street called Not Now, in a town called Not Yet, according to a Freedom 55 investment plan called Anywhere But Here. They become fighters, and the obligation they hold their families, friends, and caregivers to is that there be nothing but positive, upbeat, hopeful talk around them, no matter the diagnosis, prognosis, symptom buildup or failing strength, phantom capacity or fugitive alertness, until they themselves give the unequivocal signal that they have given up hope.
Die Wise (pp. 136)
So, a culture that sells hope to dying people is selling them anesthesia and management. Hope, as much as anything else and more than most, traumatizes people at the end of their lives. Hope, like any good shuck and jive artist, sells itself and its absence as the only two options in town. In our good binary oppositional style of argument and contention, many of us imagine for dying people and the people who love them only hope or hopelessness: either the faint possibility that things can be otherwise or the withering misery of being pinned by the brute fact that they will not be. In a death-phobic culture, dying is not a credible outcome: Dying is giving up, and hope is refusing to give up. In the health care system of a death phobic culture, dying is where the health care ends because dying has no place in any understanding of health. We have strategies for not dying instead, and hope is a large part of the creed that informs those strategies. It can make you crazy, being hopeful, and when you are dying in our part of the world it often does.
One alternative is first to wonder our way out of this false choice that we are offered when we are dying. “Hope” is not life, and “hopeless” is not death and depression. Hope is very often a refusal to know what is so, and steadfastly it is a refusal to live as if the present moment is good enough and all we really have. Hopeless is the collapse of that refusal, and it looks a lot like depression. The alternative is to live your life and your dying hope-free. If you are willing to seriously wonder about what being hopeful has done to you, what it has obliged you to know and not know, how it has hamstrung the caregivers of dying people and their loved ones who are only allowed to know what they know when they are not with them, then being willing to be hope-free begins to look more like a subversive move toward lucidity. Living and dying hope-free: that is a revolution. The chance to die that way is what dying people deserve.
For the purposes of our struggle in this article, I’d add, “The chance to live that way is what all people deserve.” There are a few things in there, beyond Stephen’s very compelling writing style, that point toward an interpretation of this argument beyond the bounds of (what he calls) the death trade. Hope.
- It is a “mortgaging of the present… for the sake of some possible future”.
- It is “Not Now”, “Not Yet”, & “Anywhere But Here”.
- It is a false binary trap — Hopefulness & Hopelessness
- “(I)t is a refusal to live as if the present moment is good enough and all we really have”
To my mind “the present moment is good enough and all we really have” is as cogent a definition of Faith as you’re likely to find. Faith isn’t in the past and it isn’t in the future. Faith is here in this present moment, holding embracing you in this present moment, or it is absent from your life. Hope is like saying — I’ll have faith later — an oxymoron and an impossibility. Your only possibility of ‘planning’ to have faith later is to begin practicing it right now, in this present moment.
Now, some will argue that this is a meager definition of faith… that we need some more serious theology or philosophy or epistemology to flesh out this idea. Well, okay, let’s flesh it out — but in doing so, let’s not mistake the window dressing for the window itself. The distinction that matters between hope and faith is located in their time references. Hope lives in the future — thereby, by all the lights of all of the mystics and prophets from all the wisdom traditions ancient and contemporary, it is a distraction from the only moment you can inhabit — this one — and from the only existence you have — this one. Faith is present within you NOW or it is never — you can’t hope for faith for later… you either reach down into the still quietness within you and touch the source, remembering that you are enough, that this moment is enough, that it all IS as it IS… or you stay stuck in your head, hoping for a future that may or may not arrive… But this choice, friends, has consequences. Your choice to stay hopeful instead of finding your faith, this choice further diminishes all of our chances for that future you’re hoping for… for that future that we’re all hoping for. It’s another paradox, isn’t it.
When I was doing small-group ministry, listening circles for spiritual deepening, I used to tell my group that if we got deep enough to run into an irreconcilable paradox, that wasn’t a sign of failure, that was an indicator of success. Running headlong and pell-mell into the brick wall of a good paradox — well, all the Zen masters will tell you, it’s one of the best roads to awakening there is. You see a good paradox is there because both sides ARE TRUE in ways that are difficult to point at with language and logic. The part of you that can make that discernment without and beyond reference to language and logic and thought, that’s you — your deepest self — your truest self. And it is in THAT DEEPEST SELF where faith resides, while hope is a product of the intellect used to prop up a flagging emotional system unsupported by the Faith it needs to remember that it is alive. So, in this way hope is the near enemy of faith. It is the unwitting substitute of the temporary and fragile and constructed for the deep and the enduring and the stable.
Now while we’re this deep into it, we also need to identify some other kinds of ‘faith’ which are also near enemies to faith-as-deep-virtue in the way that we’ve defined it.
- If it is external instead of internal, it is a near enemy of true faith. If your faith is placed on an institution, a book, a figure, an idol, anything that is not also in you… then it is a near enemy of true faith. Faith, when experienced, when lived, always includes you — accepted just as you are — and the world — accepted just as it is. This faith is the foundation for peace.
- If it is any time other than now, it is the near enemy of faith. You don’t have to use the word hope — if you’re faith is in ‘salvation’ that is in the future not the present, it is not true faith — it is hope rebranded into religious language. It is still a mortgage. It is still a distraction asking you to wait for some future time, a postponement unto death of you finding and living the power that is latent within you.
- If it is conditional instead of manifest, it is the near enemy of faith. Faith is not dependent — it is you, in touch, with your truest, deepest nature.
Our addiction to Hope — as a culture — is a symptom of our failure to remember, teach, generate, and practice faith. Being hopeless is only a curse if you are also faithless — if you have faith, being hopeless is insignificant. Despair is not the absence of hope, it is the absence of faith. Hope in the face of despair is a last minute lunge to prop up the roof of a collapsing mining tunnel before being buried alive, it might buy you a few extra minutes of anxious existence, but it is not the solution to the problem. Faith is like Neo’s moment in The Matrix: There is no Spoon. When you realize the truth, of faith, of your own worthiness and power, of the hamster-wheel to which culture and cognition have chained you, and of the single moment of faith required to break that chain. Then you will remember why you never needed hope, why you’re better off without it, and you’ll start your journey toward the realization of what your FAITH demands of you.
(This is the first of a three article series on hope, faith, and utopia, go to the next article: The Paradox of Hope & Faith)
