Hope, part III

It's been years since the days when Andrew and I would toss this one around until 2am, but our long-running conversation on the difference between hope and optimism always comes up for me. Somewhere in the midst of our long nights of philosophical rambling, I came to the conclusion that optimism, while a very good thing, is ultimately self-generated, and therefore at the whim of my capacity to generate it on any given day under given circumstances. Hope, on the other hand, has to be rooted to something outside of me - something that exists and persists outside the bubble of circumstances that undercut my ability to be optimistic.

If optimism is simply choosing not to see the glass as half empty, what happens when there's just a drop or two clinging to the bottom? Is it just naivete, or even stupidity, to see that glass as half-full?

School is kicking my butt right now. Classes are a barrage of laws and ethics regarding sexual abuse, perpetrators, mandatory reporting of child abuse. Professors with years of experience treating clients share stories about how they have never seen a pedophile be "cured;" the best case scenario is that they stave off perpetrating for longer and longer. Schizophrenia is incurable. And even when you gain the trust of your clients to the point where they share something with you even though they know you are mandated to report it, once you make that call you have no control over whether the investigators treat your clients with any sort of dignity or respect, or whether the kids actually wind up in a situation that is any better than the one they left.

There are facts that stare us in the face that prevent naive optimism, that make seeing a glass half full as absurd as flattering the Emperor for his new clothes. So I suppose I am asking more questions about hope right now. Does it exist? If so, and it is rooted in something (or someone) beyond us, then it has to exist regardless of circumstance. How do you hang onto it? And can you hang onto it for someone else, who has run out?

Most days, I don't find it so much a depressing topic as just a constant one. I don't have answers for too much of it. When I read the first few verses of Isaiah 61, I can't help but wonder what it means to be part of bringing good news and binding up the brokenhearted, in the midst of all this. I hold onto those verses in faith that what I hope for and the God I hope in exist, and are very, very good things, but I think I have to leave room for what I'm hoping for to look really different than I think it will look. That's generally the hard part, when we cease to be able to see the bright side because we can't see how the outcome that we would vote for is possible, like a cure for cancer or a magic pill that makes paranoid delusions go away for good and makes pedophiles stop fantasizing about little kids and stops parents from doing or saying anything that won't help their children grow up to be strong and healthy and know they are loved. Maybe hope only really kicks in when our idea of a 'bright side' is revealed to be insufficient, at best, or even impossible.

But another way I've been thinking about hope lately is in Spanish. Not "thinking in Spanish," per se, because that would not help un-muddle my thoughts on the subject, but in remembering a word: esperar. It means to hope in Spanish, but it also means to wait. They do not have a separate word for the two concepts. To hope is to wait. Wait for what? I don't know. That is part of waiting. Waiting for something to be completed. Waiting until it is completed to know what it will look like. Waiting to know what 'the year of the Lord's favor' really means. Maybe tearing some hair out and chewing down your fingernails in the meantime, but knowing that nothing you do can bring it any clearer any faster. Sitting in that, and being OK with it, because it is bigger than you are and you don't have a choice and you are not in control, and maybe your job in the middle of all that is just to sit with people who have lost their hope and letting people sit with you when you've run out.

OK, so I suppose this comes across as down with optimism. That's not really my intention. I just think it's not enough, and that I'd take hopeful realism any day.