Optimism and Hope

Hear This Sermon

November 6, 2011

 “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.
It is not the conviction that something will turn out well,
but the certainty that something makes sense,
regardless of how it turns out.”

– Vaclav Havel

 

I don’t know about you, but for me one of the most difficult challenges in life is how to maintain an attitude of hope.  It is awfully tempting, in the face of a world with so much suffering and tragedy, to succumb to pessimism.  I have always been grateful that I was raised in a hope-full religion, one that affirms our human ability to overcome adversity, not with magical or wishful thinking, but by our own efforts and with the help of a loving and supportive community.

I am not, by nature, an optimist.  Nor am I a total pessimist.  I prefer to think of myself as a “realist,” or perhaps you could say that I am a “realistic optimist.”  Like the Czech poet, playwright, and politician Vaclav Havel, I lack the conviction that everything will turn out well, and, just to be on the safe side, I am also usually waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I happen to think that optimism is overrated, and I’m not alone.  In her book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, author Barbara Ehrenreich decries what she calls “the mass delusion of positive thinking.”  Her book is a warning, among other things, against those who claim that upbeat attitudes lead to improved health outcomes.  They don’t, at least not always or even most of the time.  And she blames our current economic woes, in part, on a kind of wishful thinking that infected our financial institutions and obscured the uncertain and irrational realities of a market economy.

Ehrenreich sees positive thinking as a reaction to the Puritan Calvinism of our nation’s original founders.  (I happen to think this is at least partly a misinterpretation of Puritanism, and perhaps even of Calvinism, but that’s a subject for another sermon.)

But Ehrenreich also warns about the kind of neo-puritanism that preaches a so-called “gospel of  prosperity,” certainly a perverse twist on the Protestant Work Ethic and one that doesn’t align at all with John Winthrop’s ideal of “a city upon a hill” where it is the prosperity of the “commonwealth,” and not of the individual, that is ultimately important.

The good news isn’t that God wants you or me to prosper, as some are claiming, but that God wants us all to prosper, which we could do if only we were to make real the ideals of a beloved and truly caring community.

It may seem odd, given what I have said about myself, that I am a great admirer of our Unitarian and Transcendentalist forebear Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of those positive thinkers who reacted so strongly against the pessimism of his day.  It’s true that Emerson was an optimist, but in his case it was a hard-earned optimism, forged in the furnace of loss.  Emerson lost his father at a very young age, experienced poverty and dependency as a youth, lost to early deaths two older brothers who were expected to do far greater things than he, and to whose lost potential he forced himself to live up, suffered the death of his beloved young wife, Ellen, when she was just nineteen, and lost his favorite son Waldo to diphtheria when he was only four.

It is Emerson’s optimism, or perhaps we should more accurately say, his hopefulness in the face of such losses, and of all the evidence to the contrary, that I admire.  Emerson can never be accused of being naïve, as some have sought to do.

One of the books that I most enjoyed reading during my sabbatical was the late Peter Gomes’s The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus. Peter was the minister at Harvard’s Memorial Church for over thirty years, and for a brief time in the early 1980’s, Peter was my academic advisor at Harvard Divinity School.

Peter was a lousy advisor, and a sometime critic of Unitarian Universalism, but that’s another story.  I continued to admire Peter as a great preacher and teacher and as a truly unique human being.  When he came out of the closet as a gay man in the early 1990’s, I admired him for his courage.  The fact that he was a black man in a predominantly white institution, and that no one seemed to notice that obvious fact of his being, was one of the mysteries of the unusual man that Peter was.

Though I didn’t always agree with him—he was politically and theologically conservative whereas I am not, particularly—I have always found his work to be intellectually stimulating, and, in a weird and unexpected sort of way, reassuring.

Such is the case with one of the chapters in Peter’s book which I mentioned before.  It is a chapter on “hope.”  Peter writes in that chapter,

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once warned against cheap grace, and I warn now against cheap hope.  Hope is not merely the optimistic view that everything will turn out all right in the end, if everyone just does as we do.  Hope is the more rugged, the more muscular view that even if things don’t turn out all right and aren’t all right, we endure through and beyond the times that disappoint or threaten to destroy us.

Peter continues by making the old-fashioned, and to me surprisingly comforting, claim that real hope is actually the product of suffering and adversity.  As the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca wrote at the beginning of the Common Era, “The good things that belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.”  This claim that we grow as a result of adversity is, I think, one of those unpleasant and unpopular truths that the trend toward positive thinking has, in recent years, tended to obscure.  Gomes continues,

This kind of hope requires work, effort, and expenditure without the assurance of an easy or ready return.  [St. Paul] . . . reminds us of this: we pass from sufferings that are not avoided to endurance, which is the quality that allows us to keep on when it would be easier to quit.  The process of enduring produces character, that inner quality, not to be confused with image or reputation, that is who we are when no one is looking.  It is from character that hope is produced.  That is where the old aphorism comes from that says, “Show me what you hope for, and I will know who you are.”

Hope, Gomes concludes, is “much more than mere optimism.”  What a relief!

This is the lesson that I would hope that all of you, but especially our young people, would take away from my sermon this morning.  There is so much in this world, economically, environmentally, politically, and even religiously that can easily defeat our optimism.  There is much in our personal lives that can easily defeat our optimism.  But it can never defeat our hope, because our hope is more realistically grounded in the real world where suffering and disappointment are not the exception, but the rule.

“Hope,” as Emily Dickinson once wrote with characteristic truth,

is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.

Hope is not about instant gratification.  It is not the certainty that everything is going to turn out ok.  It is definitely not the mistaken and sometimes harmful belief that I can avoid pain and suffering by simply wishing it away or by having a positive attitude.  Rather, hope is that inner quality that confronts the suffering and tragedy and brokenness of the world and of ourselves, rolls up its sleeves, and gets down to work.  “Hope,” as Havel reminded us, “is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”  “Hope,” as Gomes suggests, “. . . is not the opposite of suffering; suffering is the necessary antecedent of hope.”

It is optimism that leads to despair, not Hope.  For optimism, Gomes says, “. . . seduces us into looking at the bright side at the risk of failing to take reality seriously.”  A hopeful person, on the other hand, is one who looks directly at that reality, and nevertheless keeps on keeping on.  A hopeful person may be hurt and disappointed, but will never despair.  As my colleague Bruce Southworth once said, “We have the power to choose; we have that power to choose between good and evil and to wrestle with the gray areas.”  It is what our religion calls upon us to do.

What I hope that we are teaching our young people here at the First Religious Society is to be hopeful, and not merely optimistic.  What I hope we are doing is helping them to build the strength of character which will carry them through what the late Paul Carnes reminds us are “the many causes of despair that life inevitably brings to us all.”  As the great 19^th century Unitarian minister Minot Savage once wrote, we must “Teach [our children] that they may become part of this great effort of humanity to lift up the world.”  For that great effort is the surest way to overcome despair, and to nourish our hope.

That is my message for this morning, in a nutshell.  You may give up your optimism, but never give up your hope!

In closing, an anonymous prayer for hope:

I am afraid of nearly everything:
of darkness, hunger, war, children mutilated.
But most of all, I am afraid of what I might become:
reconciled to injustice,
resigned to fear and despair,
lulled into a life of apathy.

Unchain my hope,
make me strong.
Stretch me towards the impossible,
that I may work for what ought to be:
the hungry fed,
the enslaved free,
the suffering comforted,
the peace accomplished.

So may it be.  Amen.

– The Rev. Harold E. Babcock