The Paradox of Hope & Faith
I wrote yesterday about hope as the near enemy of faith and I left us pressed up against a paradox: The future we all hope for, the one we can scarcely but vividly imagine, the one so remote it feels like another sci-fi utopia, the one so close it feels like our proper birthright, we can’t get there by hoping. Hope is the way we experience our imagining of that future condition, but hope is also the displacement of our energies from the ‘now’ where things can be done to a future we can’t do anything about. I called this latter aspect of hope the near enemy of faith and I defined faith as the bone deep knowledge (intellectual, emotional, and spiritual) that the present moment and all that it entails — us, as we are — the world, as it is — all of it is both ‘good enough’ and ‘all we really have’. We might go further and say that it is ‘perfect’ or that it ‘couldn’t be otherwise’… these are all ways we have with language of trying to ‘eff’ the ineffable. They are, to use the old Buddhist saw, fingers pointing at the moon, but not the moon itself. To bring in another favorite saw of mine, the scene from The Matrix where Morpheus says, “Sooner or later, you’re going to realize just as I did: there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” Like Neo, it is hard for us to put our finger on the bridge that might connect our ‘need to know’ with our ‘willingness to act’. We seek oracular intervention to assure us that the outcome is known and knowable, as Morpheus says, “She (the Oracle) told you exactly what you needed to hear, that’s all.” We don’t want to feel manipulated, we want the Truth. And the universe, like Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men, keeps screaming at us, “You can’t handle the Truth!” Except, there’s a critical difference. We hear it like Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Nathan R. Jessup, meant it — as an insult and a provocation… that’s how our ego hears those words. Listen closer and you’ll find that what you translated as a course scream is really a gentle whisper, “The Truth is larger than you.” You’re inability to ‘handle’ it isn’t a poke at your competence, it is a gentle reminder about your right size, your real size, your right role, your real role, in the beautiful dance of life. And it is a beautiful dance, joys, sorrows, and all. You aren’t the choreographer, you didn’t make the rules, and, yet, you are your own dancer. You may not be a snowflake, or you may be a snowflake (another one of those lovely paradoxes), but no-matter, you do dance like yourself, and it is unique and beautiful and irreplaceable.
What if I told you, putting on my best Oracular aura, that the future you hope for, but can’t get to by hoping, is there for the taking — all you have to do is your part of the dance. There will be some growing up and waking up and cleaning up required of you, before you figure out how to show up to your part AS YOU and not as a version of you buried under baggage. Although, at this stage of the dance— that might well be who and where you are, you might be a version of yourself still stuck with all that baggage and costume from your culture, your family, your situation — and shedding some of that baggage, it’s part of the dance too. Do it beautifully — pour your pain and sorrow, your joy and ecstasy into the process of deciding which pieces are to be cast off and which carried with you — props and costumes for dance moves you haven’t invented yet. Dance moves the universe needs from you.
So we’ve talked about A version of Hope that is a near enemy of Faith. And we’ve talked about Other versions of Faith that are near enemies of true or deep Faith. So let’s talk now about the version of Hope that has near enemies, but is, itself, a virtue to be embraced. We alluded to it earlier, “the one we can scarcely but vividly imagine, the one so remote it feels like another sci-fi utopia, the one so close it feels like our proper birthright.” The existence of this vision as a shared collective vision — well, that means something. It means that whatever or whoever the choreographer is — whether you like to point at it with the word God or the word Universe or the word Gaia or the words emergent-consciousness-phenomena — it is choreography that we are called to participate in. These moments of clarity about how the world wants to be — we, due to our limited temporal perspective, we displace those dreams onto the future. But they are ‘present’ dreams. They are the shared dreams of the still, small voices within all of us. To ask how they properly relate to faith — they, Hope as an amalgam of shared dreams, are part of the us-as-we-are and world-as-it-is that is good enough and all that is, or could, or should be. To acknowledge that our Hope, our shared dreams, are good enough, just as we acknowledge that we, ourselves, are good enough — these are all the callings of Faith, demanding our presence and our action. Demanding that we walk the path, knowing not where it leads — but suspecting it is to the place of Hope’s dreams. Demanding that we dance our part, knowing not what situations or dance partners will be thrown at us next — but suspecting it, all of it, manifests as the dreams of Hope we share.
(This is the second of a three article series on hope, faith, and utopia, go to the first article: Hope Is the Near Enemy of Faith or the next article: Utopia: Hope & Faith Part III)
