Beyond hope: Paul Hodgkin seeks joy and courage

‘When the Earth crises disable hope, where can our hearts turn?’

Hope has been making me uneasy. It’s begun to feel like an obligation, something I have to do: if I’m not hopeful then somehow I’m letting the side down. It seems impossible to get the balance right. There are so many reasons not to be hopeful, but the alternative – despair – is worse. So I often end up in a shadow play of inauthentic hope.

Hope is always directed to the future, and often has a conditional ‘if I do this, then I can hope that’ quality to it. But the Earth crises have changed our sense of the future itself. In these existential times, the future, which contains all our hopes, has itself become uncertain. So climate breakdown has changed how truth and hope intersect.

Truth has to come before hope, and the truths that the icecaps and the coral reefs and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are telling us is that most of the futures we hope for, may not happen.

If hope is not based on truth, it becomes the accomplice of cynicism. Manipulation then follows easily: ‘You’ve got to leave them with hope’, we say, as if getting the message right is more important than truth.

Matthew Fox, the US Catholic theologian, one of the founders of modern eco-spirituality, thinks that when hope is not aligned with truth it gives rise to something called ‘acedia’ – a numbness and indifference to everything that matters most. An earlier Catholic theologian, Thomas Aquinas, defined acedia as ‘a sadness about divine things’ and ‘the lack of energy to begin new things’. The fatalistic paralysis that acedia names feels very twenty-first century, and our acedia, our numbness and indifference to everything that is most important, is intertwined with our needy, desperate hope. We must hope, we must be positive, otherwise everything will fall apart. But in our hearts we fear that everything is already falling apart, so why bother?

So when the Earth crises disable hope, where can our hearts turn?

The Buddhist environmental activist Joanna Macy calls for Active Hope in her book of the same name. This, she says, is ‘something we do rather than have. It involves being clear what we hope for and then playing our role in the process of moving that way.’ This focus on trying actively to bring something into being is helpful, but as the future darkens, I still find myself wondering about whether I am being completely honest. Looking fully and honestly at what is happening, and what is going to happen, contradicts hope – and into that gap sneaks acedia and all its sadness about divine things.

Often, when we are stuck, we need to seek out the opposite of what we think we are seeking, and bring it into the light. I think the alter ego of hope is lamentation, and we need to honour it. Lamentation is the active mourning of everything we have lost. When our hope is directed at an unrealistic future, lamentation can be directed at the all-too-real past. When we lament, we bring the darkness of the past, and our part in it, into the light. To lament is to say: ‘Look. We did this. This is what we have caused.’ Lamentation is another name for what Joanna Macy calls ‘honouring the pain of the Earth’.

Lamentation begins by recognising the truth of what has happened. It is the active and honourable grieving for what we have become.

Matthew Fox directs us to two other things that help when hope seems dishonest: joy and courage.

Joy is the opposite of the cynicism and of acedia. And joy is a very present way of being in the world. Joy is about now, not about then.

I don’t have to lie to myself about the future to be joyful. To be joyful is to be present, here and now. When I am joyful, I am not lamenting the past – though that pain is often contained within the tenderness of joy. And I am not being forced into being dishonest, or hoping in an unbelievable future.

Joy cannot be commanded in the way that we can sometimes persuade ourselves to be hopeful. So joy feels daunting. It feels like we just have to happen upon it. But perhaps there is a practice of joy. As the world darkens, perhaps we need to practise looking each day for miracles. There are many such practices to help develop a disposition of gratitude. With them, we can find an openness to the joy of the world – a joy that is magnificently half full rather than despairingly half empty.

The other virtue that can help when facing the truths we fear the future will bring, is courage. Courage always feels like a word that belongs to other people, not me. But to quote Matthew Fox again: ‘Courage is everywhere, it is in all of us. But we need some great love to call it forth.’

In the Earth crises we have that love. We can all feel an overwhelming, urgent love for the Earth, its beauty and its peril. Courage comes from cœur, the French word for heart. Courage is not about being fierce, but about being big-hearted – for our hearts to be big enough to hold others as we act. I don’t think I’m very courageous, but I have found it useful to ask myself what is the more courageous path? What is the path that holds more heart? And, just as important, what is the least-courageous choice facing me? Asking this helps me to see that there often is a path that does require courage, even just a little bit. And that I could take it. Of course, asking ‘What is the more courageous path?’ inevitably points me to what it is that I am afraid of. Bringing those fears to mind is in itself helpful in trying to discern what we should do.

So as we go out into the world again, let’s be hopeful – if we can honestly be so.

But let’s also give ourselves permission to acknowledge that the Earth crises may make hope less meaningful than it used to be, and that lamentation, joy and courage may serve us better.

---

Comments

Please login to add a comment