The Hope That Does Not Disappoint
“Everyone with any experience of life is aware of the extent to which the characters of people [we have] known have been given their particular forms by the sufferings through which they have passed. But it is not simply what has happened to them that has defined them; their responses to what has happened to them have been of even greater importance, and these responses have been shaped by their interpretations of what they suffered.” (H. Richard Niebuhr)
Agency and interpretation go together. In my own life it is unfinished, being worked out. Not only what is happening to me—and my response-ability—but what happens to others. I focus on truth-love as the walking path, including through that which would break and remake us.
My joy is going for contemplative walks by the river, enjoying the beautiful trees, red-green buds, giving thanks for wild grace, a very present Presence in trouble. Sometimes I wake up early in the morning and sense this higher love, true Peace, streaming like a river into my heart. I turn toward and not away.
We Americans can lack the moral imagination and humility to discern dynamics of evil and grace in our midst. Certain things like glitter and gold, lust and war, racism and greed, are addictive, consuming—even blinding. Yet prevenient love reveals, frees, endures, engenders living hope—even through fire.
What is on the other side?
Radical love strengthens and liberates to say a fierce Yes, and no. No with our whole being to what is finally destructive. It is necessary to unmask and name these forces of non-being, especially now. This is the critical labor of intelligent love.
I am an old school worrier. I worry about beloved brethren avoiding threats of destruction and finding their way into pathways of forgiveness and hope; transformation from “what we most dreaded,” into “the habitation of our safety.”
Despite our fears, unrelenting grace and deliverance is at work nevertheless in the depths.
“Have we experienced now and then in moments of grace that we are made whole, that destructive spirits have left us, that psychic compulsions are dissolved, that tyrannical mechanisms in our soul are replaced by freedom; that despair, this most dangerous of all splits, this real sickness unto death, is healed and we are saved from self-destruction?” (Paul Tillich)
May it be so with ourselves and our nation—through the transforming fire—in body, mind, and soul. In persevering love for all people.
Each day we are finally not in control. Life is gift and task. We can affirm and encourage our brethren, embody with intensity the Yes and no, live the serenity prayer with awe and agency through suffering and joy with beloved others in community. Radical love is the greatest of all; it reveals, forgives, liberates, endures— engenders hope. “What eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love God. For God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.”
A Meditation: The Gift of Hope That Does Not Disappoint
“Paul the Apostle often puts things—how should we say?—“compactly.” And I want to spend a few minutes trying to break open those verses from Romans 4–5:
“Jesus was put to death for our trespasses”—
for our false steps Paul means;
because we have missed the mark with our lives;
because together, we human beings have cut ourselves off from the source and fulfillment of our real life;
and cut ourselves off from others,
and from ourselves.
Jesus “was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification”: God finds glory in making all things new for us.
Jesus has been raised to establish, without qualification and without hindrance, our right to be. Jesus has been raised to establish
our acceptability;
to establish our freedom to be ourselves—without apology
or self-condemnation;
Jesus has been raised to establish in our heart of hearts—and in the presence of all the world—enduring knowledge of our own worth;
an enduring sense of self-worth;
and thereby establish in us, even as for the first time, the power to worship—to declare in our words and in our lives, the worth of God; to begin to forget ourselves, to begin to lay ourselves aside, and to love the One who sets us free; the One who establishes us in the face of the world, the flesh and the devil, who give us a place and a life that cannot be taken away.
“Therefore,” Paul continues, “since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.”
It is as though there were—as often there is according to our perceptions or our feelings—an angry crowd of accusers who say, “you can’t come forward to this table, or come forward to anything else. You are to be ashamed of who you are. You are worthless. You should go off. You should go off and hide yourself. Indeed, if really you knew you should go off—and die.”
It is as though—indeed, it is the fact that Christ rebukes our accusers, those within and without, whether they speak truly or falsely and then opens a way through them, takes away the power and authority of those who condemn us (the voices without and the voices within, conscious and subconscious), clears the way, makes room, gives us a place to stand; to be; and lets us rejoice—rejoice in our hope: rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God.
“More than that,” Paul goes on, “now we rejoice” even “in our sufferings,” knowing that suffering—
suffering produces endurance when our lives have been justified;
suffering produces endurance when our worth has been established;
suffering produces endurance when a place has been opened for us and a place given us to stand; and such “endurance produces character,” and such “character”—in us, and before others—“produces hope.”
That is, character, which comes when we suffer and endure no longer ashamed of ourselves, no longer believing ourselves worthless, no longer having to answer to our accusers—within or without no matter how right they may be; but, instead, confident that we are meant to be, confident that we have right to be: such character participates in producing hope. For God is its source.
And this hope—this “hope does not disappoint us.” Because something has happened. Something has happened. “God’s love has been poured into our” dry hard “hearts.”
To have God’s love poured into our hearts is not to have some special feeling—though it may transform our feelings about everything. Paul uses the image of something being “poured” into us to make this point: something has happened which is not of our doing—any more than our being born is of our doing.
Hope which endures, which does not disappoint us, is not something we produce out of our own hearts. This gift, I should point out, comes often in unexpected ways. It may seem, for example, like an attack upon us. Something happens, and we lose confidence in our ability to control our lives, to have life on our own terms.
But then we may begin to understand Paul’s image of God’s love being “poured” into our hearts. It is an image for the help that is not of our own making, that comes to us through another.
To feel the image a little—let me play for a moment: think of your mouth on a hot summer day—if you can—dry and thirsty your mouth and your whole body, and poured into it cold water or an iced lemonade;
or think of your mouth—better again, your whole body on a cold, windy winter night when your feet hurt with it and your back shivers with it, after a long, unexpected walk—and poured into you, softly, gently, but fully, a hot cider or chocolate.
The point is that it’s not something we produce out of ourselves: any more than that fresh water or lemonade in summer, or that hot drink in winter, comes out of ourselves. It comes into us. “God’s love” is “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit”—not through our spirit but through the Spirit who helps us in our weakness, the Spirit who intercedes for us: the Spirit “which has been given to us”—simply given to us.
Because God’s love has been poured into our hearts; because we have been given space, a place to stand; because Jesus died for us while we were isolated, cut off, and has been raised to establish our sense of our worth, to give us unity and real life, we begin to worship, to rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And that hope does not disappoint us.”
From Coleman Brown, Our Hearts Are Restless Till They Find Their Rest in Thee: Prophetic Wisdom in a Time of Anguish