During one of the longer dark nights this winter while watching television, I came across an interview with a well-known criminal defense attorney. It caught my attention, as I recognized her name from one or two famous trials that made news over the years. I listened as familiar questions got familiar answers until one question sparked a pointed response I won’t soon forget.
“What gives you hope for the justice system,” the reporter asked the seasoned, serious attorney. Nothing, said the lawyer. Hope is for children.
I have thought often of that comment as we have been struggling with this continuing pandemic. So much of our common focus has been on the future: what to expect with this virus next, how to plan for changing work expectations, what to make of an interrupted school year, whether to schedule a surgery or vacation. We have things that must be done today to best manage tomorrow. Many of these plans have had to be scrapped as the virus spreads beyond our control, even with helpful vaccines, killing 5.6 million people worldwide since 2020.
Is it a childish thing to be optimistic about the future in a natural world like this?
Even before experiencing this pandemic, some found it helpful to expect regular trouble in life. Bad things happen and continue to happen, despite our best efforts of avoidance or preparation, they say. The best way to get through this life is to expect less so that when the rare positive outcome arrives, we are pleasantly surprised.
While this mental frame may seem like a reasonable concession to experience, it’s a short path to emotional stress and depression. Few really live this way; human minds are not patterned to expect suffering with every breath. When all that ahead is darkness, we experience it as a slow death.
What is your natural frame of mind when it comes to considering suffering and expectations of the future? Are you naturally pessimistic, viewing the world as a place of struggle, pain and the occasional sunny day? Or are you more apt to put such ideas aside, trusting that some unreachable power determines our every move anyway?
Serious hope is for adults. I believe that a hopeful view of the future is a mature perspective, adopted by those who observe that within the randomness and chaos of the material world, there is also an observable return to center, to balance, to growth and healing that occurs in daily human life. While we may be swept away by sudden illness, or political turmoil, or personal violence, even these terrors aren’t a permanent state of being.
Everything changes, and as it changes, life has a global orientation that returns it to a new developing state.
As a Christian, I see this life orientation toward renewal a mark of God’s grace and presence in the living world. It’s because I have seen that both joy and suffering are not permanent experiences in this life, that the natural world, us included, is always working to restore and heal itself. I trust that within and underneath this life is an energy far larger than we, the life force that birthed the universe and is still creating it.
Perhaps this time of worldwide suffering has birthed a new life perspective for you. Along with fear, exhaustion and distrust, may you find an optimism that moves you toward hope and renewal. Without it, we are unprepared to embrace the life that awaits us, whatever it looks like, in communities worth living in.