Hope

A User's Manual

MaryAnn McKibben Dana

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781467465175
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What hope is, what hope isn't, and how to find it in hopeless times.

Hope is not optimism. It's not toxic positivity. It's not a promise of future success or progress. And it's definitely not something that can be reduced to a scripty-font platitude on an Instagram post.

So what is it?

One thing is certain: real hope demands that we do something with it. That we live it out. That we use hope to participate in a bigger story playing out behind the bleak world we see on the news or in our social media feeds every day.

It doesn't matter whether you're a person of faith, or someone disillusioned with faith, or someone who hardly ever thinks about faith: if you're a human being who longs for a spiritual counternarrative to live by, this book points to one resilient enough to endure crises and crushing defeats. If you're tired of hearing about some heavenly hereafter amid the pressing need for justice here and now, this is a book about hope for this world—not the next.

After exploring what hope isn't and then what it is, MaryAnn McKibben Dana reflects on the surprising place where hope is often found—in the messiness of our imperfect, flawed, beautiful human bodies. In the second half of the book, she talks about making hope real: sharing hope through stories, cultivating hope through simple practices, and nurturing hope in hopeless times—when only real hope can persevere.

1

What Hope Is Not

When it comes to hope, our culture peddles a lot of cheap knockoffs.

This section of our user’s manual invites us to clean out the toolbox, removing all those dull and rusty tools that don’t work for us anymore.

As you read these reflections, take time to rummage through your own life. Are any of these ideas present? How do they help you access hope? How do they get in the way of hope?

Hope Is Not a Prediction

BEFORE THERE WAS YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, there was public access television.

When I was a high schooler, I participated in a Great Books discussion with a group of classmates as part of an afternoon enrichment program. We met regularly to read short passages from works of literature and analyze them. For reasons lost to time, and to my great bafflement both then and now, one of these discussions was recorded for a local-access channel. We reported to an actual studio and attempted to do there what we normally did in a classroom after school. We sat at long, heavy, conference-style tables. Lights glared in our faces, rendering the rest of the room pitch dark. I wore a nice dress—solid colored, no print, as I’d been instructed by the producer via our faculty sponsor.

For the discussion, we were given a short portion of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s novel about a man who’s shipwrecked and alone (he presumes) on an island. The excerpt included a diary entry in which Crusoe detailed some problems he’d solved that allowed him to survive more easily. He salvaged supplies from the ship; he made candles. The question for discussion was, “Does Crusoe feel hopeful or hopeless about his situation of being shipwrecked?”

One by one, my fellow students argued one side or the other, citing various bits in the passage to support their assertions. I listened with a mounting sense of alarm. For one thing, there was a huge camera with a blinking light right in front of me, examining me as if with a huge judgmental eye. (Perhaps I overestimated the number of people who would watch a bunch of fourteen-year-olds on public access.) But also, I couldn’t decide which way I wanted to argue, and a big part of me didn’t want to take a side. But everyone else did.

Finally it was my turn. I said something like this: It depends. It depends on what we think the “situation” is. Is it rescue, or is it survival? Does he have hope for ever being rescued? No, it doesn’t seem like it. But it seems like he’s hopeful that he can live well and in good health for quite some time. So … it depends.

I felt dumb for not being able to take a firm position like everyone else. But as I would learn years later in college, the answer to the question depends on how we frame it. Mostly, though, middle-aged me wants to put a sisterly arm around that awkward teen in the solid-not-print dress because she stumbled on something important, maybe even a core belief: that hope is often more general than specific, more internally oriented than outwardly predictive. Crusoe doesn’t know whether he will be found; how can he know? What he does know is, he’s built a shelter for himself and a cellar for food. He’s found goats he can butcher for meat. He’s resilient, to use a word much more common in the twenty-first century than the eighteenth when the novel was written. He’s relatively comfortable and he’s alive.

When we say we’re hopeful, we often follow it with a “that.”

I’m hopeful that the chemo will work.

I’m hopeful that I’ll find a job soon.

I’m hopeful that the new meds will help curb the depression.

There’s nothing wrong with hope that points in a particular direction. But when the world is falling apart, it can be hard to find a suitable “that” to complete the sentence. I have a friend who’s worked on climate change on the local level for many years. Her organization has made clear but modest progress on a number of small initiatives. But she doesn’t feel any hope that humans will act quickly and broadly enough to stem the tide of the catastrophe that’s coming.

What then? Can we still have hope if the facts argue against it? How? Is hope possible even if we aren’t attached to a particular outcome? The rest of this book will help us address this question, though maybe not answer it definitively.

But Cornel West says yes. The professor and activist borrows from the blues, a tradition that acknowledges the pain and glory of the present moment but doesn’t revolve around a clear and chipper that in order to persevere. “A blues man is a prisoner of hope,” he says. “Hope wrestles with despair…. It generates this energy to be courageous, to bear witness, to see what the end is going to be. No guarantee, unfinished, open-ended. I’m a prisoner of hope. I’m going to die full of hope.”¹

In almost forty years since that Great Books discussion, including four as an English major, I haven’t read Robinson Crusoe beyond what appeared on that single photocopied sheet of paper. I don’t know what becomes of the titular character. I doubt he’s a blues man. But we can learn to be blues people. Our first step is to divorce “hope” from “that” … to embrace hope as mysterious and open ended and see where that takes us.

Reflect

Do you consider yourself a hopeful person? Why or why not, or in what circumstances?

Practice

Write a hope poem using all or some of these prompts:

Hope looks like …

Hope sounds like …

I hope that …

I hope despite …

Hope draws near when …

Hope feels far away when …

Hope Is Not Optimism

I DECIDED TO DROP OFF a little something for a friend while driving through his town on a long road trip. His young son was in a health crisis and I wanted him to know I was thinking of him. I didn’t call beforehand, unsure of my timing and not wanting to create an expectation that he work around my schedule. When I arrived, my friend’s mother-in-law came to the door and accepted my small token. My inadequate token. She said, “They’re actually at the doctor right now, confirming the diagnosis.”

As I left, the memories came in a rush of the many people I’ve known who’ve experienced that Before-and-After moment. I’ve had a few of them myself, when things look bad, but you don’t yet know how bad because it’s still the Before. You cross your fingers, and maybe you pray. You do a little bargaining with the universe. You analyze the facts, scrutinizing the data from every angle, blurring your eyes if you have to, like with one of those hidden 3D pictures, to convince yourself that maybe it won’t be as bad as you think. And then comes the After. And it is.

In talking to people about hope, I find one of the biggest sticking points is the distinction between hope and optimism. Many folks use the terms interchangeably. But there’s a vital difference. Optimism does its best work in the Before—when the evidence points plausibly in a positive direction, when you can still anticipate the best possible outcome, when things could work out OK. But when the facts suggest otherwise, optimism isn’t enough. This is when hope comes in, rolls up her sleeves and says, “Optimism, take a seat.”

I’ve heard optimism described as a mathematical construct, an equation in which past experience + present striving = future greatness. Optimism relies on external circumstances lining up a certain way. Hope isn’t mathematical; it’s philosophical, physical, maybe even musical. True hope defies cause and effect and has impact regardless of outcome.

Having seen the facts and reports from every organization studying the climate, I have no optimism about avoiding the ravages of climate collapse. When the worst comes to pass, I don’t know whether people will rise to the occasion or if there will be enough of us to blunt the full horrific impact. But I know that’s the work I have to do: to embody that kind of hope. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says, “Optimism and hope are not the same. Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better.”¹

It’s understandable that hope and optimism would be so easily conflated, especially in the United States, which seems to lift up optimism as a civic virtue. That optimism has been a source of inspiration and innovation both here and abroad. But recent events are testing the tensile strength of optimism. The trajectory of unchecked, unfettered growth seems virtuous and unstoppable, until the ecosystem collapses and staggering inequality threatens our social fabric. American-style democracy seems inevitable because the Cold War ended and we won … until anti-democratic insurrectionists breach our own Capitol and we realize how fragile the whole enterprise truly is. Too often, optimism serves as a kind of autopilot at a time when we need to be scrupulously minding the controls.

At this point I need to pause and clarify the “we” who possess all this historical optimism. Thanks to conversations with Black friends and other people of color, I understand the extent to which optimism is a largely White or privileged phenomenon. It’s easy to put your trust in things working out OK when they typically have. As Chris de la Cruz writes:

American optimism and positivity may have helped individuals cope with some of the stresses of our over-worked, capitalistic system. But did these mechanisms just help us soothe ourselves enough so that people don’t adequately process how inhuman and unjust the modern systems are, and therefore not stir the drive and desire to change the system itself? Rich people are optimistic that “things will work out” because they in fact always do – because they have rigged the system to make it so.²

To be clear, many members of marginalized communities and people of color feel hopeful, but if they do, it’s often in spite of the facts on the ground, and unbuoyed by optimism.

The good news is, no matter who we are, hope is a muscle that can be exercised. Research shows that hopeful people have access to two kinds of thinking that merely optimistic ones don’t. The first is called “pathway thinking,” which allows people to imagine many possible approaches to a situation in pursuit of a goal or outcome. The second, “agency thinking,” is a sense of personal empowerment and motivation to work to pursue those goals or outcomes. Pathway thinking dreams of many potential futures; agency thinking tries to bring them about.³

My therapist has a personal mantra she’s been kind enough to let me borrow: I know there’s another way to look at this. That’s hopeful, pathway thinking at work.

“Another way to look at this” doesn’t give us license to gaslight ourselves when bad things happen. Sometimes things just suck. But a hopeful orientation ruminates, turning the situation over and over, refusing to give up on possibility. Meanwhile the poor optimist, bound by circumstance, has nowhere to go.

Reflect

How do you understand the difference between hope and optimism? Do you consider yourself a hopeful person? An optimistic person? Is one a requirement for the other?

Practice

Think about a situation in your life that requires hope. Practice pathway thinking: imagine as many possible outcomes or solutions as you can. Don’t worry about how realistic they are—go for quantity over quality. Then practice agency thinking: develop a phrase or mantra to help remember that even when we get overwhelmed, there is always something we can control, however small it might seem.

Hope Is Not Charging into the Future

OF THE SEVEN THOUSAND LANGUAGES currently spoken around the world, a shocking number are vulnerable to extinction, with one language dying every two weeks.¹ Thankfully there’s a desperate and beautiful movement afoot to learn and document as many of them as possible. One of these documentary efforts has occurred among the Aymara people in Bolivia, Peru, and northern Chile. Anthropologists have long sought to learn the people’s idioms, and in their study, they discovered a peculiar feature. Specifically, the Aymara speak of past and future in very different ways than the researchers’ home customs. The Aymara word for past is nayra, which literally means “eye,” “sight,” or “front.” The word for future is q’ipa, which translates as “behind” or “the back.”²

Language is more than words; it is also gestures, and when describing eve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. What Hope Is Not
• 2. What Hope Is
• 3. Hope Lives in the Body
• 4. Hope Travels in Story
• 5. The Practice of Hope
• 6. Hope Beyond Hope
• Notes