Who Needs Hope?

I do.

7-24-22

I can’t seem to make myself stop beginning the day with a dose of world news.

About what's going these days, you probably don't care to be reminded. But take heart;  horrors are nothing new.

A few years back, one Sunday morning before going to meet my son for breakfast, I read about political assassinations in Russia, and about the thousands of deaths and nearly unfathomable misery being suffered by the Syrian people and by refugees from at least a half dozen countries. 

Such horrors are all too familiar. I was born a month after we bombed Hiroshima, and my earliest years were often tainted by stories of the holocaust and of Stalin’s purges. All my life, the world has been, for countless people, a hideously tragic place. 

That Sunday morning, while driving to meet my son, I listened to an Andre Crouch song, “Jesus is the Light of the World” and felt happier. Because rememberoing Christ and the God he proclaimed gives me hope that all the horror will get redeemed; that people who die young, suffer in unimaginable ways, or have very little chance of living in anything like contentment, will at last find peace and joy; that in eternity, what happened during time will simply vanish.

In my favorite novel, The Brothers Karamazov, brother Ivan admits that even though God may redeem all the tragedy and suffering, he (Ivan) refuses to forgive God for allowing it. As I am neither as bright nor as sensitive as Ivan, I can accept that God has motives and intentions far beyond what I comprehend.

I worry about people who reject God out of hand, who take as gospel the Darwinian world view and essentially contend as did Steven, the skinny wrestler, in the film Nacho Libre, who asserts, “I don’t believe in God, I believe in science.” I wonder how people with such beliefs can live with the world’s tragedy. Maybe they compartmentalize and lock the grim facts away in some dark corner of their minds. If not, how do they accept such a world?

I’m a fan of science. My Zoe is a student at MIT, drawn by all things mathematical and scientific, and I encourage her to follow science as a career, since it offers so many exciting opportunities in so many fields. But to take science as the answer to everything is to ignore the very basic fact Plato portrayed about 2500 years ago in “The Allegory of the Cave”: we only perceive what our senses allow us to know, and our senses are limited.

Though I am glad my belief gives me hope, hope is where it came from. That would be nothing but wishful thinking. Reasons that led me to believe are given in a my book Reading Brother Lawrence. 

I suspect only people whose hearts are damaged or turned off can look at the human condition and fail to be driven to actively search for a reason to hope in some destiny fairer and less cruel than what our senses perceive.

A preacher offered this assessment: “One of the central symptoms of our sickness as humans is a rock hard shell of callousness, exhibited in self-absorption, belief in self-sufficiency, and consequent apathy that numbs us to God and people around us.” He attributed it both to the fall (the Eden one) and to defense mechanisms we create out of fear. He also mentioned God’s promise to Ezekiel. “I will remove the heart of stone from you and give you a heart of flesh.”

Maybe God will extend that promise to us all.

A sequence of events that began to soften my heart were the mysteries I wrote about in Reading Brother Lawrence. As briefly as I can relate them: Eric and I were seventeen. His father was long gone, then my father died, then my mother got sent away for some months. Eric moved in with me. During those months he introduced me to an author who convinced us we needed to cast away every value our parents and culture had burdened us with. We attempted to do that. Then: my mom came home;  Eric had premonitions; and he died.

So, largely bereft of values, I became an existentialist (long before I knew what that term meant). Now I know: existentialists are people who accept the necessity of choosing their values.

Over the next few years, I chose my values.  And the ones I chose have allowed me to believe all this life's misery will somehow be redeemed.

Like Ivan Karamazov's brother Alyosha, I can live with that promise. Otherwise,  I would need to re-petrify my heart.

So there you have it. 

Now please join me listening to Andre Crouch and friends.