Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.
(Psalm 42:5)
Psalm 42 is a psalm of hope in the face of despair, but there isn’t a hint of optimism in it. The literary critic Terry Eagleton once said that the optimist is just as bereft of hope as the nihilist—neither has any need of it.
In common usage, though, the language of “hope” is on a continuum with optimism, only weaker. Imagine you have plans for a picnic with friends this weekend, but the forecast is predicting a strong chance of rain. You text one of your friends, “Do you think we will still have the picnic?” They respond, “I’m hopeful, but not optimistic.” You would think they were saying, “I’m wishing for it to happen, but I really don’t think it will.” In this usage, hope amounts to something like “wishful thinking” which doesn’t even rise to the level of optimism.
But the psalmist is not an optimist, and he is certainly not engaged in any wishful thinking. He’s hopeful.
Herbert McCabe defines optimism as the superstitious belief in “inevitable progress.” Everything will naturally work itself out in the end. Bad things are always followed by good things. “Happily ever after” is the arc of the universe.
If this psalmist was an optimist, his psalm would’ve sounded something like this: “My tears have been my food day and night and my enemies taunt me, my soul is cast down within me, BUT I’m sure tomorrow things will start looking up.”
This psalmist is not optimistic, but he is filled with hope. Optimism is impersonal, but hope is relational. Hope is the belief in a living God you know you can count on, even if you can’t predict what he is up to. His hope is in God.
When we talk about “hoping in God” today I think what we often mean is: “I wish my life would go a certain way, and God is the one who can make that happen.” It’s basically optimism with a dash of “God” thrown in. God becomes the mechanism that ensures the outcome we want.
But notice that the psalmist does not actually hope for any specific outcome in his life. His hope is only in God. I think we could put it in even stronger language: the psalmist’s hope is not just in the Lord, his hope is the Lord.
The prophet Jeremiah says, “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord” (Jer. 17:7). We could use this same formulation for the psalmist, and insert the word “hope.” His hope is in the Lord, but even more than that his hope is the Lord.
Your treasure could be in the bank but your treasure isn’t the bank itself. Our way of using the language of hope turns God into the bank that ensures our desires are fulfilled. Of course there isn’t anything wrong with hoping in God for certain outcomes in your life. But there is a difference in hoping in God for favorable outcomes, and trusting God with the entirety of your life.
Theologian Karl Rahner distinguishes these two hopes as “mundane hopes” on the one hand and “theological hope” on the other. Mundane hopes are not bad in any way. But they must give way to theological hope, a complete trusting in and desire for the Giver not just the gifts.
In one of his sermons Rahner puts it like this:
We have many hopes in our lives that fade, and the question arises whether we also have a hope given by God himself that underpins and embraces everything; a hope that does not perish, but lasts through all our other hopes’ undertakings. We have many hopes: for health, for victory over sickness, for success in life, for love and security, for peace in the world, and thousands of other things to which the life impulse reaches out. They are all good in themselves; we also experience repeatedly the fulfillment of these hopes in part and for a period of time. Finally, all these hopes get disappointed. They fade and pass away, whether they have been fulfilled or not; because we are headed toward death, and along this path our hopes are taken away one after another.
What then?...Is there just despair at the death of every hope…? Or does there occur then the event of the one and only, but all-encompassing, hope? Christians witness the experience that in the death of all hopes hope can surge up and conquer. Then we have no single thing to hold onto; the one unfathomability embracing all, and called by the true name of God, silently receives us. And when we let ourselves be taken and fall, trusting that this unfathomable mystery is the one blessed homeland, then we experience that we do not have to hold on in order to be held, we do not have to struggle to win…
He is himself our hope. God is the one all-encompassing, all-embracing hope that surges up and conquers even in death. The question is whether or not you can let go of your “mundane hopes” and fall into the hope that is God? Can you trust that falling into him is actually the best place to be?
Julian of Norwich, the 14th century English anchoress, led a life filled with suffering. She lived through three sieges of the black plague which killed over half of the population in Norwich. She lived through the assassination of a king and an archbishop. She witnessed the nationwide rioting of the poor in the Peasants’ Rebellion and the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. The world she lived in was, by all accounts, falling apart at the seams. On top of all this she herself almost died from terrible health crisis. And it was in the midst of this sickness that she had 16 visions (or showings) that she later recorded and called Revelations of Divine Love.
In the most famous line in her Revelations Jesus said to her:
"It is true that sin is the cause of [the pain of the whole world],
but all shall be well,
and all shall be well,
and all manner of thing shall be well."
These words were said most tenderly...
"I am able to make everything well, and
I know how to make everything well, and
I wish to make everything well, and
I shall make everything well..."
It seems to me that what happened to Julian in her visions is precisely what Karl Rahner described above. Julian is brought to the brink of death and meets Christ—the one ell-encompassing, all-embracing hope which holds us. She is not told how things shall be well, but only that they shall be well. Her hope is not merely in the Lord, her hope is the Lord.
Julian is not optimistic but she is completely hopeful. She experienced in her bones what the psalmist is saying. All shall be well, not because she thinks she will get what she wants in the end, but because in the end she knows the God who holds her in his hands and she trusts him to be her hope.
That’s hopeful, but it’s not optimistic.
