Bruce Charles Johnson's Blog

Maintaining Hope When Things Seem Hopeless

Meditation preached at a "Bread of Life" Noon Service, First Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Wednesday, March 24, 2010. “But hope that is seen is not hope.”  What an astonishing thought.  The point of hope as a Christian, Saint Paul tells us, is not that we see the basis for our hope, but that we have persevering and indomitable and unconquerably strong hope when we have no basis for it at all. 

What a comfort this is.  I would like to take a look with you both at the ways this fact can give us a sense of new possibilities, and also, how in the world it can make sense to hope when we have no basis for the hope.

I think the easy part of the question is why being able to have hope when we can’t see a reason for it is such an amazingly encouraging idea.  If we are honest with ourselves, I think each of us can probably think of a major facet of our lives, or those of someone we love and care about deeply, where it isn’t easy to see a basis for hope.  It could be an illness, a terminal one or a painful or disabling chronic one, for which doctors see no cure, and where God doesn’t seem to have it in His plan to provide a miracle.  It could be a financial circumstance or a job situation which sharply limits the possibilities we or our loved ones have in our lives, and where there seems no way out of it.  It could be a disrupted relationship that once was very important to us, and which there seems no way to fix.  It could be a personality flaw or quirk that, despite prayer and best efforts, it seems impossible to live with, and like the “thorn in the side” that Saint Paul said he prayed and prayed to be delivered from, we just have to deal with it and make the best we can of life, in spite of it, taking advantage of our other, stronger points, and trusting in God to supply for what we cannot do.

We also may find areas where we don’t see a basis for hope in things we care about deeply for our country and our world.  Whatever our political philosophy, liberal or conservative or independent, we probably have issues we care about deeply where, year after year, efforts to make a positive change always seem to go down to defeat.  And there are human concerns that are not chiefly political that can break our hearts and never seem to change – human beings killing other innocent human beings, people starving or living lives of chronic hunger and want.  Our list could go on and on.  But I want to talk with you about hope, not grounds for discouragement.  Why is it that we can have hope in these situations?

I once read a meditation that said that the reason we sometimes get discouraged, even when we are praying about our problems, is that we are looking at the problems, not at the Lord.  The problems certainly can seem too big to solve, at least for us, and it can seem impossible to imagine anyone solving them.  But no problem seemed too big for the Lord.  When Jesus was told that there were five thousand people He’d preached to who had no way of getting food, He simply said to get the few pieces of bread and fish His followers could find together and to start feeding the people.  And when His friend, apparently one of His best friends, Lazarus, was not only dead, but had been dead for several days, He told Lazarus’s heartbroken sister not to lose hope.

And He supplied hope.  That, the great priest-psychologist-Harvard professor Henri Nouwen, who gave up his career to live in community with developmentally disabled people and to care for them, is the message of Lent and of Easter.  In Lent, we live through the reality that we may feel that we, like Lazarus, are sealed inside a tomb built like the ancient Jewish tombs were built, with a great boulder around it that would take many people to push away, and there seems no way out.  At Easter, he said, we awake to the reality that, no matter how deep the tombs in which we have been imprisoned, or have imprisoned ourselves, the Lord will raise us again to new life.

And this “will” part is the amazing part.  The fourteenth century English mystic, Julian of Norwich, said that there are many people who believe that God is all great and CAN do all things, and that God is all good and WANTS to do all good things for us, but they still fail to believe that God WILL do all good things for us.  But, she said, He Will.

So what does this mean?  Does it mean that everything you are hoping for is going to happen, soon?  Does it mean that just wait for Easter Sunday, and the loved one in a hospital ward will get a new diagnosis, that an unexpected inheritance will free you from the financial worries that are threatening a child’s ability to get a good education, that the chronic anxiety disorder or depression or bad memory that stands in the way of us being all we would want to be will suddenly go away?  I wish I could assure you it will, and it is, of course, possible, that it will.  But we know from experience that, more often than not, when we do find miracles, it will be like what the Presbyterian minister in Pennsylvania told a deeply discouraged member of my family 20 years ago:  “There will be a miracle, but you will not recognize the miracle until long after it happens.”  More often than not, at least in my life, what the Lord does is not to make our problems go away, but to stay with us in the midst of our problems, and somehow to give us a means of dealing with our problems.

I don’t know about you, but for me, it is quite rare to have an experience where it seems like God is directly telling me something to give me hope about something, but every now and then, it happens, and when it does, it is something to be cherished for years and years, and perhaps for the rest of our lives.  I’d like to tell you 2 stories, one about when that happened to me, and one about when it happened to someone else who shared the story – on Garrison Keilor’s “Prairie Home Companion,” actually – I can’t remember the singer’s name, but I think he came from Texas, and in a minute, you’ll realize why I remember that part of it.

The singer and his wife were, like me, fans of that fourteenth century English Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich, and as I was to do later, they’d made a trip to Norwich to see the sites associated with her.  They did it about this time of year, and when they got to the cathedral in Norwich, they saw an amazing site – the grassy space in front of the cathedral just covered with glorious, bright, beautiful daffodils, in gorgeous sunlight, revealing the beginning of Spring.  And the next day, they went back to the cathedral, and saw something else which would probably not have surprised them if they’d come from Michigan, but because they came from much further South, made a deep impression.  The weather had turned cold overnight, a deep snow had fallen, and all the daffodils were now buried under the snow.  And this musician wrote a song about how that made him feel, which he sang on the show.  “Ring out, oh bells of Norwich,” he sang, “and let the winter come and go.  Ring out, oh bells of Julian, and tell the people what you know – Love is coming, like the daffodils, love is coming to us all, and all will be well again, some day.”

That is the Lord’s message.  Our daffodils may be covered in snow.  Our problems may not have an apparent solution.  And – and I think this is often the toughest part – we may not be able to see the Lord, to have any sign at all of the Lord’s presence or the Lord’s caring and we may even – as Mother Teresa of Calcutta did, as Julian of Norwich herself did in the midst of her mystical experience of God’s love revealed in Christ – have to struggle not to lose our faith.  We may wonder, as Jeremiah did at one point, if we have been deceived in what we believed about God, or we may wonder if we ourselves are bad people, not worthy of our faith, or perhaps not having true faith.  The biggest part of our Cross is that our hope always has to be a hope that we cannot see, that we can’t find the basis for.  But in the darkest moments of our lives, in the moments when there seems no basis for hope at all, the Lord IS still with us, whether we can see the Lord or not.  Like the daffodils that are there under the snow, or like the Sun that is still shining somewhere above the clouds and therefore above us even when it is hidden by the clouds that are so often so thick in Norwich, England – or in Lansing, Michigan – in March, God is still there with us, knowing every sorrow that we face, our every tear heeded and, as the Bible tells us, some day to be wiped away.  No matter how great the sorrow, no matter how seemingly insurmountable the problem, God is there.  And if we look, not to the problem but to the God Who is greater than the problem, or to our memory of believing in God, or the faith that is so strong in someone else that we trust, we can know that, in ways we don’t understand, God will supply an answer of some sort, even if we don’t recognize it until years later.

I told you I was going to share a story about a time God gave me a hint, a glimpse, and I’ll close with that.  It happened a very long while ago – I can remember the date because it was the day before a holiday, and it also had been one of the toughest weeks I’d ever gone through.  Things were easing up, though, and I knew I was going to get through the struggle of that time.  I was walking from my office to the train station to catch the train home from work, and as I walked through the square in front of it, I saw an older man singing and playing a guitar.  I felt a little conflicted about whether to walk up to where he was and put a little money in his guitar case, but I decided to do it.  And when I walked up close, I could hear the words of his song, and it was all about God, and every word seemed to fit my own situation.  “He was there all the time,” he sang, “He was there all the time – you may not have seen Him when you wanted Him, you may not have seen Him when you needed Him, but He was there all the time.”

He was.  And He is.  And He always, always will be, even when you cannot see Him, even when you cannot see reasons for hope.  For there truly is “Hope For What We Do Not See.”

Trying to Measure the Significance of Our Actions...Our Lives...

What a mystery life is, how we never know what the signficance of all our actions is. C.S. Lewis, in his understated English way, has a great thought in "Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer," about how we will never know if, long after we are gone, someone we have influenced (or perhaps even one of our descendants) will influence the world as powerfully as Plato or Mozart. And my favorite modern saint, the young French nun Therese of Lisieux, who died of TB at about 23 but left behind an incredible unpublished journal that started a whole movement toward simplicity in prayer, wrote that we may never see the fruits of our good acts in our own life, but if not, "we will infallibly see them at the moment of death." It's that sort of thought that sometimes gives me encouragement when days are long & the sun is hidden by clouds.

Unfortunate Change in Intellectual Atmosphere of Political Discourse

I heard a fascinating comment by a country musician, I think on a music show rather than a news one, that puts the finger right on what I think is wrong with political discourse today - and also why I don't enjoy engaging in it as much as I used to. He said (no, I can't recall who "he" is) he can't remember the last discussion he was in where people exchanged viewpoints with the genuine desire to discover whether they might be wrong & it might be appropriate to change their mind about something. He said nobody seems to be interested in having their views challenged any more - it's all become like talk radio, where people never listen to a spokesperson for an opposing view, but always listen to somebody they already agree with, wanting only to be confirmed in their pre-existing viewpoint. He contrasted that to England, where you never know what you're going to get on the BBC, and whether you want to or not, you're going to be confronted by viewpoints - and even styles of music - you may not particularly care for.

Political Direction to Scientific Activity

Disturbingly, a totally irrational and dangerous proposition seems to be on the point of being quietly accepted as a truism, after unchallenged repetition.  The idea is that scientific activity should be judged solely on a scientific basis, free of political considerations. 

Prominently, President Obama (in authorizing use of embryos in stem cell research) and a federal judge (in vacating FDA restrictions on birth control for minors) have used this line.  Superficially, it may sound not only correct but self-evident, but actually, the notion is dead wrong and very dangerous.

The problem is that, as scientists have said for years, science does not make normative ethical judgments about what should or shouldn't be done; it only provides descriptive information about what is done and what can be done.  Normative judgments, hopefully resting on an ethical basis, have to be made by others.  In a democracy, those "others" make the judgments through politics.  The only alternative to allowing political considerations to govern scientific research is for society to surrender control over the morally correct use of science.

The two issues in which this line has been trumpeted are good illustrations of why science cannot answer the question of what should be done.  As far as stem cell research goes, science supplies the information that research can be done that may lead to the cure of some diseases if cells are taken from living embryos, and that this can only be done if the embryos are killed.  This begs the question of whether it is right or wrong to kill the embryos (which, science also tells us, will not live to be born in any event) in order to find cures for diseases.  People can and do argue both sides of this question as a moral matter.  Science cannot answer the moral question of who is right.  If we think that morality matters, society has to answer the question of what is right and what is wrong here, and to say that it is wrong for this to be done through the political process seems to be saying that it is wrong to have a democracy as opposed to an enlightened despotism.

Similarly, one can argue both sides of the question of whether a teenage girl and her doctors should be able to decide, without involvement of the girl's parents, whether she should take a "morning after" pill after she has had sexual intercourse without using birth control.  Again, there are moral questions involved.  Should minor children make important life decisions on their own, or should their parents, until children reach adulthood, have a voice in these decisions?  Is it right to destroy a fertilized egg, which some people regard as a live human being, in order to avoid going to term with pregnancy?  These questions can be argued, but they can't be brushed aside, and science can't tell us what the rights answers are.  So for a judge to say that the FDA should not have considered the questions from a "political" point of view - i.e., what society, expressing its view through its elected officials, thinks is the right answer to these questions - but only from a purely "scientific" one - is to say that moral judgments should be vacated, and that simply because something can be done, it is all right to do it.

The same reasoning could be applied to any number of political issues which have a scientific context - or scientific issues with political repercussions.  At the risk of offending some who would debate the scientific issue of global warming, I will submit for the sake of argument that science supports the idea that the planet is getting warmer, that human burning of fossil fuels is contributing to rising temperatures, and that if temperatures continue to rise, there will be consequences, including extinction of some species, greater agricultural productivity in northern latitudes, and a more comfortable climate in some places and a less comfortable one in others.  But science cannot tell us what the right or wrong thing to do about climate change is.  If global warming is taking place, is it right to allow extinction of tropical rain forest species in order to increase farm production in Canada and Russia?  Or does saving these species from extinction justify preventing people in Maine from enjoying a Florida-like climate without having to move from their homes?  These are ethical value questions, not questions of scientific knowledge, and in our society, the answers are political.

If one were to take the issue to its logical extreme, there are many other moral questions that involve scientific issues but can be answered only by moral and political judgments.  Some of these questions may concern people untroubled by the questions raised above. 

For example, should we clone human beings?  All science can tell us is, we can.  Whether we should, is a moral and a political question.  If scientific questions should be decided purely on the basis of science and not politics or moral opinions, as some argue, I guess that means we can't restrict cloning, but I doubt many people would be willing to forego political restraint in this area.  How about euthanasia?  All science can tell us is that it can be done, not whether it should.  Is there no place in poltical discussion for debate on this issue?  How about involuntary euthanasia for the incurably ill?  At this point, in all 50 states of the United States, this is punishable as murder, and an overwhelming majority of citizens would probably say, rightly so.  Should this "political" judgment be surrendered, too, and hospitals be allowed to kill patients instead of cure them in the interest of unrestricted science?

Some interplay between science and politics is inevitable.  Science can tell us only what we can do, not what we should do.  What we should do is a political judgment.  Some of the current critics of the politicization of science may really mean that they dislike the political judgments the Bush Administration made on scientific issues.  One can certainly engage in political debate about whether those judgments were right or wrong.  But to say that the Bush Administration was wrong to decide what scientific courses of action were appropriate on the basis of political judgments, period, is tantamount to saying that society has to surrender control of the ethical governance given to scientific experimentation. 

It has not been too many decades since scientists, not only in Nazi Germany but even in some American states, engaged in conscious "eugenic" experimentation that people today universally condemn as wrong.  One is not an intolerant bigot to believe that those societies were wrong not to impose proper ethical restraints on what could be done in the name of science, or to think that society today should not surrender ethical and political control of what is allowed to be done in the name of science.   

Tim Russert and Catholicism

It's people like Tim Russert who keep me a Catholic. I have trouble with some of the Pope & Bishop stuff sometimes (tho' they seem basically okay, mostly) but the fact that people like Russert can handle them is encouraging.

I think my favorite memory of "Timmy" (as his friends called him, apparently, & he does seem like a friend) was on that momentous & dramatic election night in 2000 when one of his colleagues kidded him, "Sister Lucille isn't going to be happy with your handwriting." Catholic schools, as you may know, are famous for being strict about good penmanship. Apparently Sister Lucille was, apart from his family, the most important influence in his life.

 

I feel with Tim Russert as I did with Jerry Ford & Pope John Paul II & actually with my father LESS a sense of loss than of gratitude for a wonderful life & inspiration to try, as best i possibly can, to the extent that such gifts lie in some measure in me too, to live them to the full. As you may recall Pastor Pete saying at my father's funeral, Eternity means something only if it begins now, & I believe that.

 

I am struck not only by his Catholicism but by his Celticness . . . A couple of Celtic traits he showed, I think, are that incredibly "small d democrat" (as David Brooks called him) way of valuing EACH person whatever their rank - "a man's a man, for a' that," as Bobby Burns put it - & that gift the Celts have, despite their bent toward melancholy, to have an incredible zest & passion for life in all its goodness.

 

"For the great Gaels of Ireland

Are the men whom God made mad,

For all their wars are merry

And all their songs are sad."

-G. K. Chesterton, "The Ballad of the White Horse" (which, incidentally, has another of my favorite lines of poetry ever which, incredibly, Christian, not yet 4, asked me to repeat more than once when I first recited it for him - They are the words that the Virgin Mary speaks to King Alfred the Great when she asks him, on Christ's behalf, not to give up trying to save England from the Viking raiders -

 

"I tell you naught for your comfort,

Yea, not for your desire,

Save that the sky grows darker yet

And the sea rises higher.

Night shall be twice night over you

And Heaven an iron cope.

Can you have joy without a cause -

Yea, faith without a hope?"

At bottom, it's that very simple faith, something that has nothing to do with dogma or hierarchy, that there are people up there in Heaven pulling for us, and God is with us, & if we do our best, it'll all be good in the end.

 

Joe Gallagher, my beloved priest who died in November, was like Tim Russert was an Irish Catholic lawyer from New York State with a somewhat salty tongue but kind heart. He had a wonderful way of putting all that: "God is good, life is difficult, the rest's a mystery."

Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith

On the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Richard Rodriguez had a powerful essay about Mother Teresa's anguish over what she considered the weakness of her faith, which has led some militant atheists to crow that they were right all along, and that she was a hypocrite. Rodriguez said that the contrary is true - that not only did many great Christian saints wrestle with doubt, "the dark night of the soul," but Jesus Himself, on the Cross, cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Although Mother Teresa did not want these private letters and journals published, the Mother Teresa Foundation decided to print them, believing that they could help others who struggle with doubt. Mother Teresa believed, Rodriguez said, that if she were ever a saint, she would be a saint for people in darkness.

This resonates with me. To me, a faith that faces doubt and goes on believing, having faced doubt full in the face, is far more vibrant than faith which never knows doubt. Dostoievski said, "My faith is not that of a child, for it was forged in a furnace of doubt." And the experience of these great believers resonates with mine as an obscure one. I have had blessings which made me feel, at the time, that it was literally impossible for me ever to doubt again - and though I once was puzzled why I received such blessings, I now realize that God's mercy gives blessings to those who need them, which may be the opposite of those who would merit them. But despite these blessings, they did not prevent, at later times, darkness closing in, and the terror of wondering if I might be deceiving myself surrounding me.

Saint Therese of Lisieux, considered by some the greatest modern saint, was tormented by horrible doubts almost until shortly before her death. And Julian of Norwich, in her book of mystic revelations, tells of how just after each of the moments of amazing ecstasy she received from God, diabolical temptations to despair and surrendeing to emptiness swept over her.

To me, the fact that Mother Teresa is like modern humanity as a whole in not having been able to escape the darkness, but persisting in believing in the Light despite that - and, far, far, far more importantly than believing, acting to share the Light with others, even if she doubted it herself, for their sakes - does not make her a hypocrite, but a heroine whose heroism is an exemplar of the heroism of so many modern people who also have outstared the darkness.

Dear "Myanmar" - or BURMA,

I find your government dreadfully difficult to understand. Can you answer a few questions for me?

Why did the government have your own people's monks killed? Why does your Army support your Dictator instead of joining the people in establishing freedom, the way we won freedom in our country, years ago? Why do your Dictators not want you to have freedom? Why, of all things, did they insult the heritage of your people by changing the name of your own country? And why did they change the name of the capital - and then change the capital itself?

I suppose your Dictators will not allow you to answer these questions. That's how Dictators are - Stalin, Hitler, and that silly Dictator of yours who was on TV inspecting an umbrella factory, of all the silly things, while monks were seeking freedom.

"No lie can live forever," Martin Luther King said. Freedom WILL come to your country, as it has to other oppressed peoples, and your Dictators will join the likes of Mobutu and Conescu in the dustbin of history. I hope and pray you will not have to wait too long. In the meantime, be assured that throughout the world, all right-thinking people are on your side, as you seek to rid yourselves of these evil Dictators who keep you in bondage.

Sincerely yours,

Bruce C. Johnson