Bringing Hope to Despair

Sermon

“Bringing Hope to Despair.” That’s a sermon title-ish rendition of today’s line in the Franciscan peace prayer we’re focusing on for Lent: “Where there is despair, let me sow hope.” The traditional way to set up this sermon would be to help you see the despair before making the case for hope. But do I really need to list the reasons for despair? The pandemic’s legacy of fear of disease, isolation, crumbling social institutions. A divisive presidential election politicizing everything from violence to children’s books. Too much news. Criminal justice, race relations, the state of our climate and environment, whether to breach dams, immigration, education. Not to mention our own family. You can make a pretty good case for despair as the rational response.

Besides despair being the easy option, as a culture, we’ve developed the unspoken notion that despair’s cousin, cynicism, is what all the cool kids do. Hope is perceived as naïve and simplistic. Theologian Rob Bell calls cynicism the laziest form of thinking. At least despair is not one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Brené Brown, in her book Atlas of the Heart, puts despair in her chapter on hurting, with companion emotions anguish, hopelessness, sadness, and grief. Although my dictionary uses hopelessness to define despair, Brown makes it clear that despair is not the same as hopelessness. Both are emotions, but hopelessness is specific, often accompanied by a dose of self-blame. Hopelessness sets goals, can’t achieve them, can’t reset and try again. “Well, I only have myself to blame.” Whereas, despair is a global sense of hopelessness about everything, about one’s entire life and future. Despair believes that tomorrow will be the same as today. Think: Bill Murray in Groundhog Day waking up to Sonny and Cher every single morning to run an identical day to the previous one. When his character realizes he has some agency, he can interrupt the chain of events leading to small catastrophes. He can begin to be compassionate. His sense of despair, “there’s no way out,” is informed by what they say in twelve-step groups: “The only way out is through.”

Brené Brown says the way to defeat despair is to learn to develop realistic goals and the means of accomplishing them. Instead of being overwhelmed (for instance) about the mammoth task of “downsizing,” for today, clean out the kitchen junk drawer. Tomorrow set another goal to accomplish. Pain and struggle, says Brown, are necessary for hope. Which makes me believe she’s seen my junk drawer. Speaking of pain and struggle–! Brown urges us to develop a hope practice, starting with acquiring that realistic goal-setting skill. She portrays this as part of the process of maturing, about growing as a functioning human.

Jesus puts this process in a more spiritual context when he poses the paradox of dying in order to be fruitful. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,” he says, “it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” This is not a logical process; it’s more like one of the great mysteries of life, death, and resurrection, but experientially, you may have already discovered that your own less-than-desirable attributes might be better off at least figuratively dead in order to make room for new life. And I agree with that. I’ve spent a long time trying to put to death some of my own more selfish, mean, despairing bits. It’s a paradox, all right, but as if she’s making the paradox more mystical, contemporary Franciscan scholar Ilia Delio says, “Sometimes the very struggles we try to avoid are the very blessings of our lives.” Darn it! It’s the invitation to love, to deepen our loves, she says. To accept the limits of our humanity is to give permission to pay attention to our foibles without judging and thus embark on a maturing and healing journey.

Psychologist and mystic Ken Wilber has a catchy way to summarize this process. “Wake up. Grow up. Clean up. Show up,” he says. That’s pretty concise. Rabbi Sharon Brous, author of The Amen Effect, recently wrote about how community supports people in their journey to wake up, grow up, clean up. Since her New York Times article is entitled, “Train Yourself to Always Show Up,” you will know the practice is about “show up.” She riffs on a 2,000-year-old Jewish pilgrim practice described in the Mishnah. Her conclusion is, when your heart is broken and you experience grief or loss, when you feel lost and abandoned, rather than withdrawing or retreating, you entrust your pain to the community.

As Brous tells it, during the prescribed pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem, when thousands of Jews gathered, the practice was for pilgrims to climb the steps of the Temple Mount singing the psalms. When they reached the plaza, they would turn right and begin circling counterclockwise—except for the pilgrims who had arrived with broken hearts, those mourning or carrying some terrible weight. These pilgrims would turn left and begin circling clockwise, walking against the flow of pilgrims. Each person who encountered another pilgrim in pain would look into that one’s eyes and ask, “What happened to you? Why does your heart ache?” The pilgrim who had turned left would tell their story. The pilgrim who had turned right would listen, then offer a blessing: “May the Holy One comfort you. You are not alone.” And then they would continue to walk in their own direction until the next person approached.

Rabbi Brous says, “This timeless wisdom speaks to what it means to be human in a world of pain. This year, you walk the path of the anguished. Perhaps next year, it will be me. I hold your broken heart knowing that one day you will hold mine.” A beautiful practice. For those who turn to the left, the message is, do not take your broken heart and go home; don’t isolate; step toward those whom you know will hold you tenderly. And when the good days return and your brokenness is healed, the message is, show up then, too. Because, the very fact of seeing those who are walking against the current, people who can barely hold on, and asking them with an open heart, “Tell me about your sorrow”—that may be the deepest affirmation of our humanity, even in terribly inhumane times. Brous calls this an act of “both love and sacred responsibility to turn to another person in her moment of deepest anguish and say: ‘Your sorrow may scare me, it may unsettle me. But I will not abandon you. I will meet your grief with relentless love.’” Where there is despair, let me sow hope. You don’t have to be a hero, but you do need to practice, to train yourself to approach, even when your instinct tells you to withdraw.

There is a Hasidic tale shared by Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. The tale he shares probably originated in the medieval folklore of European Jews, constantly subjected to pogroms. When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening his people, it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and misfortune averted. Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say, “Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayers.” And again the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say, “I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place, and this must be sufficient.” It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished. Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God, “I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and that must be sufficient.” And it was sufficient.

Wiesel concludes that God made humankind because God loves the stories from a hope-filled, courageous heart. God loves a good story! We are made in the image and likeness of God, so perhaps we, too, might practice showing up to hear a good story. Show up—for your own sake, for the sake of others. As Richard Rohr writes, “I believe that only people who have suffered in some way can save one another—exactly as Twelve Step programs have discovered. Deep communion and dear compassion are formed much more by shared pain than by shared pleasure. I do not know why that is true. We’re not saved by any formulas or theologies or any priesthood extraneous to the human journey itself.”

Jesus reminds us of this when he holds the lesson of a grain of wheat. To suffer and struggle is to be as the grain of wheat, to die. But that is not the end of the story. The grain of wheat goes on to bear much fruit. To turn left at the temple pilgrimage is to suffer and struggle. To turn right at the temple pilgrimage is to take your suffering and allow it to bear fruit as you bring your presence to others who, for this time at least, are experiencing the struggle. You know what that struggle is like. Perhaps today you turn left, but there will be a time when you turn right. And when you do, the simple courage of your presence is what will bear fruit. Tell me your story. Where is there despair, let me sow hope. It is what and who you are called to be.