My friend Gunfighter over at
A Modern Warrior's Life just posted some of his thoughts about hope: what it is, what it means. I've been ruminating about hope as well, though I confess that my thoughts are a little more scattered.
"Hope" is such a...loaded...word in our society. Culturally, I think we sometimes conflate 'hope' with 'wish,' or 'desire,' or even 'want,' which leads to a host of problems as we come to grips with our lives and struggle with faith.
But I've been wondering about the myth of Pandora's box: Pandora finds a box that she is not supposed to open, but then succumbs to temptation and opens it, only to discover that she has unleashed upon the world a whole host of evil. The last thing left in the box is a butterfly, which is 'hope'.
Why was 'hope' in that box in the first place? The myth of Pandora's box is a theodical exercise -- it developed as an answer to the question of how did evil get into the world -- but I wonder if there's not a word of caution, as well. 'Hope' can be a tool of evil. The chancellor of the Third Reich hoped to have his perfect society. Long centuries of Christians - really, of all religions - have hoped to create their perfect world, usually at the expense of someone else. Unrestrained, wild hope can be used to justify great evil.
St Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthian church that three things abide in us and around us -- faith, hope, and love. That's at the end of chapter 13, where Paul concludes what most label as his 'great hymn of love', and true to form he tells the listener that the greatest of those three things is love. So do faith and hope fight it out for second place?
But back to Pandora for a minute: in the first version of the myth that I heard many years ago, Pandora left hope shut up inside the box -- it never got out, to run wild over the world. But later versions have it that the last thing to escape was hope. But which is it?
If hope is a mirror image of our own sense of self-worth or self-entitlement -- and then all that we hope for is that the world conforms to our selves, wants, and desires -- then may God help us all; hope is then indeed an evil thing.
But what can hope then be? If hope cannot be self-centred, then it must be other-centred; it must be guided by a kind of selfless love that admits our own selves often perversely seek our own self-destruction. Hope must be centred outside of our reality, seeking some greater understanding -- not to be understood, but to understand -- of this world and all that is in it. The good and the bad, evil and beautiful, life and death, all things that are beyond human understanding must then be somehow linked to hope. Hope then is rooted in a kind of whimpering faith that seeks something upon which to cling.
If hope, then, is a butterfly; faith is the flower upon which it rests and refreshes itself.
Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (I didn't say this first, folks). Faith feeds hope, keeps yearning alive, keeps hope from shrinking and putrefying into nothing less than shameless self-absorption. Faith is necessary to carry hope at times when hope along cannot be strength for the journey.
What then of love? How do faith and hope really relate to love?
Love is the great animating wind that brought the seed of the flower to ground, the breeze that pushed the butterfly along on its first trembling flight. It is unmeasurable, unmeasuring, the only thing it desires of people is know how to move around, along, and through them. Of those three, it is the greatest. It is respired, inspired; the last breath of one becomes the first of another. Neither hope, nor faith, can exist without love.
I live in hope. I am blessed with faith. But I am nothing without love.
