What if our moral evolution ever caught up to our breathtaking physical evolution?
What if?
Brian Doyle
Grace Notes
A recurring reaction to my column last week, “What we learn from loss,” involved my statement that I “lost hope” following the Nov. 5 election. Some said they were sorry to hear that. Others said they felt that loss, too. In that column, I also said I learned you can live without hope and without despair.
I guess I’m not really hopeless because hopelessness is a pre-condition of despair. There have been times when I wanted to descend into the pit, which seemed the only appropriate reaction. But every time I hit bottom, I bounced back, often to my annoyance. Thus far, anyway, I seem impervious to despair.
In some ways, I’m the opposite of hopeless. I have too much hope. The wrong kind. I latch onto false hopes like life preservers. I may not be in despair, but I sure seem desperate.
The Nov. 5 election broke me of my habit and woke me up enough to declare a trial separation from hope. It may not last, but for the time being, I’ve stopped attaching myself to the latest flotation devices drifting by. It’s time to start swimming.
The biblical God declared, “You shall have no false gods before me.” I declare there will be no false hopes before me.
So I have started a hope fast — just as, once upon a time, I declared temporary atheism and went on a god fast because I was too willing to believe in false deities. If I were going to believe in God, it would have to be a God, and a hope, that engages my whole soul. I am as sick of phony hope as I was of phony gods, which are mainly projections of our own lesser angels — such as the God that many “Christians” claim to believe in while voting for the anti-Christ.
My atheism didn’t last. I have progressed as far as “creative agnosticism.” I don’t know that there is, and don’t know that there isn’t. But my foundational not knowing allows me to search (the “creative” part of creative agnosticism) for what I call “The God who may or may not exist” — and now for the hope that may or may not be real.
My hunger, though, is real. Buddhism says desire is the culprit that causes our suffering. But I think it’s the obsession with satisfying those hungers that causes suffering. As I’ve written before, cultivating a tolerance — even an enjoyment — of hunger can be liberating. It is a form of freedom to not be controlled by our hungers. Neither do we control our hungers. We may always hunger and thirst for hope. We just can’t allow it to make fools of us.
So I let go of hope, just as, once upon a December, I let go of Christmas. It worked. I rediscovered/recovered the holidays. Maybe that will happen with hope, which at the moment seems little more than heightened expectation, moving from long shot to long shot, letdown to letdown. Hope feels like living in an endless series of TV cliffhangers.
Hope is like caffeine — a virtual buzz that wears off quickly.
Hope is all possibility, little payoff; it’s like being doomed to perpetual disappointment.
And yet, and yet … as winter wanes, I still look forward every year to spring’s new beginnings and the uplift it brings to the natural world and my flagging spirit. Every March, I experience something akin to joy as the sun returns, as shoots break through the softening soil, as birds — dinosaurs reborn, no less — start singing out my window in the morning.
For the late, great Brian Doyle, it’s all about Hope’s step-sister, Curiosity:
“We can move mountains and fly to the moon, we can murder by the millions and map the mystery of our genetic making, but what if we ever dropped the dagger, plucked the beams from our eyes, and grew up? What if? And we have maps of that bright country already, in the brilliant bones of every religion, all flawed and greedy, but all, in their absolute essence, about the same thing: praise for the miracle of life, awe for the mysterious force that creates life, yearning for life after death, and most of all, inarticulate desperation for a future in which mercy trumps murder. More than any other force on this bruised earth, religions keep that desperate dream alive; for which this morning I sing and celebrate them, and bow to what is best in us. What if …?”
And where Hope’s rubber meets the road, poet Rosemary Wahtola Trommer writes:
Hope has holes in its pockets. It leaves little crumb trails so that we, when anxious, can follow it.
Hope’s secret: it doesn’t know the destination — it knows only that all roads begin with one foot in front of the other.
Keep going, Hope says. You never know.
What if?