This year, a small word has been following me around, asking me questions, and honestly, pestering me a bit. Hope seems like an innocuous word, but there’s a lot in there to wrestle with. I think I’m often tempted to see hope in utilitarian terms, a means to an end. Hope is something that keeps us going until we arrive at the actual gift of getting whatever it is that we want. It’s nice to feel hopeful, but maybe a bit superfluous to getting to where we’re going. We’ll get there either way, it’s just that one of the journeys is nicer.
But recently, I have been wondering if I’ve been getting hope a bit wrong. I recently came across some notes I took while listening to a talk by Barbara Brown Taylor. She compares two kinds of hope— anticipatory hope and participatory hope. Anticipatory hope is the kind that waits with expectation for what we want, but it mostly just waits. It doesn’t dig in or get involved, it just yearns. But she encourages us toward a different kind of hope— participatory hope, which she describes as “hope with cleats.” This is active, roll up your sleeves kind of hope. This is hope that doesn’t just wait for what is coming but also participates in making it happen.
I think I often conflate hope with optimism, this strong feeling that it will all work out in the end. And it is that to a certain extent. But it is an activity, too. A posture. A practice. And perhaps it is a gift in itself, regardless of the outcome. One of the gifts of hope for me is that is keeps me tethered to a reality beyond myself. It’s not so much about wresting control away from God, or trying to make it all happen with my own effort and on my own terms, but instead about participating in what is already coming anyway. I think the thing I forget about hope is that the end isn’t the question mark we think it is. Well, it is to us in a lot of ways. But cosmically, from God’s perspective, it isn’t an unknown. We have a connection to the way it all works out and we’re told that the answer is good, better than we can imagine, in the end. Clearly we’re not there yet. We find ourselves in the middle still, sometimes finding beauty and healing and hope and joy, but also sometimes being completely devastated by the world. What does it look like to hold on to hope, to act towards it, here in the middle?
I find myself in a season of wrestling with how to keep hope both active and open handed. What does it look like to hope fervently and actively, and to participate in its fruition, but also hold my expectations loosely? How can I make a home for surprise in the midst of my hope? How can I trust the End, while recognizing that some of the smaller endings will probably break my heart? Even if our hopes around a certain thing are dashed, isn’t it better to have hoped anyway?
This is a genuine question for me by the way, not a flippant one. It’s something I’m trying out. I don’t know that I have an answer to it, but I do know that the opposite hasn’t worked out well for me— no matter how prepared I have thought myself to be for impending disaster, none of it has ever helped. When the worst things come, they’re still very much the worst things. So I’m trying this hope as a practice stuff. Big hopes too, not just the little ones. I’m trying to live with my cleats on a little and see what unfolds before me.
Wellspring 