Hoping Even When It Seems Hopeless

Devastating news: it seems hopeless.  But how can we move forward without hope?  Hope is a spiritual practice, something we learn and develop.  It is what empowers us despite all odds. These days, when hope seems empty, I want to talk more about hope. 

The following is a text version of this posting.

What does it mean to have hope? To live with hope?

Hope is a difficult topic for most people.  We’re not sure what to make of it.  My experience working in medical settings was that many medical providers were afraid of people having “false hope.”  I think the term “false hope” is both judgmental and dangerous.  I think false hope is associated with denial.  But denial has nothing to do with hope.

I was talking with someone who recently completed a course of aggressive treatment for cancer. It included surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.  In case you’re not aware, once a person completes cancer treatment, there’s generally a two-year period of frequent exams to see if cancer remains.  It’s two years in limbo – of not knowing.  But even at the end of the two years, no one is considered cure.  At best, the cancer is in remission.  What does it mean to hope in that situation?  What does it mean to hope when you’re loved one is receiving treatment for a serious illness?  Or to hope when doctors have said that, well, it’s only a matter of time.

I think we confuse hope with a kind of wishful thinking that wants difficult things to go away.  Or we think of hope as our desire for a certain outcome.  Like, I hope I win the lottery.  While we use the hope in that way, I don’t think that’s what hope is all about.  It’s deeper.

I understand hope as a kind of trust we learn to develop about life.  When we have hope, we orient ourselves to the possibility of something good occurring.  Yes, there may be dark clouds hanging in the sky as far as we can see.  But hope leads us to anticipate the possibility of a ray of sunshine. 

Hope is something we nurture in life.  We don’t just go from assuming the worst in life to anticipating the best.  We learn to hope as a spiritual practice, as a daily discipline. 

As I look back over my life, I realize that I learned hope for myself in the AIDS crisis.  In 1992, I moved to South Florida.  A large reason for the move was that I didn’t know how to deal with the enormity of grief I had experience.  I was overwhelmed from experiencing dozens upon dozens of deaths, sitting with friends I had known since early college days as they died and watching those who were my age and younger wither with suffering and pass in agony.  Everywhere I looked, I faced the memories of loss, suffering, and grief.  My solution was to start over.

Over the first year I lived in South Florida, I frequently left home before sunrise and drove to the ocean.  I’d sit in my car sipping coffee facing the water.  I’d keep vigil watching and waiting for the sky to begin to get lighter and eventually for the first rays of the sun to shine.  In time, I began to understand no matter how long the night may seem, the sun rises.  For me, that’s how I learned to hope.

From that point I could look back and see how other people understood hope.  There were people I had known who faced day with a hope to release their pain.  There were those who hoped that others would keep their memory alive.  Some hoped that their loved ones would heal quickly and get back into life.  As my mother was dying, she shared with me her hope:  that she would rejoin my father and that they’d go walking together in the woods as they did when they were first in love. 

Your hopes may be different from these.  But I know many of us are having trouble today with hope for the future.  In the two years of the pandemic, we’ve lost so much.  Others of us live with complicated illnesses.  And some of us aren’t sure what to make of the challenges that come with aging.  How do we hope?  What do we hope for? 

Hope is important to me.  But my hope isn’t to be spared from what is a natural process, like bereavement or aging.  Instead, I hope to be surprised again by life’s goodness.  My hope has grown to anticipation.  Somehow I know, I hope, and I trust, that even in the gloom of cloudy days, light will still shine.