September 16, 2024
Happy Monday, my friends! Hope is one of those emotions and immaterial realities which tend to bubble to the surface when we want something. When something’s wrong in our families, when someone’s ill, when someone is up for a big opportunity, or when one of our teams needs a win. In many of these cases hope goes along with faith. Indeed, faith is what we have when we don’t have certainty and hope is what we have when we don’t have certainty, but there is one outcome that we want to have happen.
I’ve been learning a lot about hope the last few days. Early on Friday, September 6, my mom was admitted to the hospital for emergency surgery which was followed by a second surgery on Monday. Since then, she has been in the ICU at different levels of “stable but critical.”Faith and hope have been a constant part of these days because no one could tell us what the outcome might be. We have been waiting for her to wake up, telling ourselves that while the healing process will likely be a long road, there will be a healing process.
Having read enough theology, philosophy, and literature, I know, as I imagine many of you know, that hope can also be intoxicating. Hope, like fear and ego, can cloud our judgement and blind us to the truth of a situation. The loss of hope can be more devastating than the loss of a person, a place, or something else we hold dear. Above the gates of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, the words “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here,” were carved. Despite the grotesque depictions of punishment and suffering in Dante’s vision of Hell, the real suffering was not physical. The worst suffering was hoping for relief and never finding it.
Hope and its companion faith can help us through troubling and difficult times, yet they can also lead us down paths to our own existential decline. Knowing that dynamic, why would anyone choose to hope? Because hope is natural. Hope is hardwired into the fabric of what it means to be human. While some people reach a point where they abandon hope and harden their hearts against joy, the majority of us choose to hope because we can’t imagine not hoping. I imagine that as most Monday Moment readers are people of faith, it is even difficult for us to imagine a reality where there isn’t something beyond this life. Yes, it might not be the heaven we imagine, but we struggle to think that this life is it and that once we close our eyes the last time that there is nothing else. So we have hope for whatever is next and we have faith in God, even though we have never seen God.
For what do you hope? When in your life has hope been among the most important emotions?
Let us pray: God of hope who we know and experience by faith, make us people who hope extravagantly. When hope seems lost, even impossible, guide us back to your care. When we need other emotions as our guides, help us see through to the reality in front of us. Fix our hope and faith always on you and on the people we can be you to. Amen.
Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.
Faithfully,
Ben
PS. Please continue to keep my mom and our whole family in your prayers.
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