Giving Up Hope (for Lent)

For those of you who have been here before, you might remember that I choose a yearly theme for my life, something I want to work on. My 2022 theme is hope. So why, you might ask, would I give it up for Lent? First, let me start by explaining why I chose hope in the first place.

Originally, I meant it in a personal way. With the pandemic and nearing the end of grad school and my enduring singleness and my health problems, I realized that I did not have much conceptualization of my life after age 30. When my dad gave me a father’s blessing last September, telling me I would be loved by future friends, I wept. I had not thought about the fact that I would continue to make friends into the future, that I would have much of a future at all, and those words gave me hope. 

But I’m finding I also need hope in a global way, maybe even more desperately. There is the terrible, unrelentingly advance of climate change, the war in Ukraine, authoritarianism growing at home and abroad, unethical use of technology, and the ongoing terror of racial and social injustice. Worrying about all of this has left me curled up and sobbing multiple times in the last few months; a friend even suggested I might be suffering from existential depression (read at your own risk of self-diagnosis). There are so many ways the world is breaking down and hurting people, and what do I have but my two outstretched hands?

It was Adam Miller, a theologian in my LDS Christian faith tradition, who got me thinking about giving up hope for Lent. For starters, in a disquieting way, Christianity insists that hope is in Jesus Christ, not in outcomes. Nothing is guaranteed. The ultimate end is not happiness and roses and good things in this life, but life with God, which comes with its own heartaches. But Miller goes a step further. He suggests that disciples are sometimes called to work without hope in the world. He discusses this through the lens of the prophet Mormon (of the eponymous Book of Mormon), someone who witnesses terrifying violence and depravity, and, ultimately, the end of his civilization. Despite all of this, Mormon continues to love the people around him and do what he can to help them. As Miller puts it, “Mormon, living through the end of the world, learns how to love without, in the process, hoping that his love will prevent the world from ending” (Mormon: A Brief Theological Introduction, p. 58). How does he do this? How does he continue to act and to care for a world he cannot save? Mormon himself tells us: “notwithstanding their wickedness I had led them many times to battle, and had loved them, according to the love of God which was in me, with all my heart” (Mormon 3:12). Miller continues, “the pure love of Christ–a love purified of ‘hope’ for gain and success–cannot fail because the work of love is its own justification. The work of love, regardless of what outcomes it generates, is always worth doing for its own sake” (Mormon, p. 58, emphasis mine).

An unnecessarily beefy Mormon as an old man. Artist: Arnold Friberg. Source: churchofjesuschrist.org

So what does it look like to love without hope? To live and work without any grand hopes that everything will work out? As I’ve contemplated this shift in my thinking, I’ve heard echoes of the answer in many places, including from people who do not share my belief in God. From Ta-Nehisi Coates’ incisive masterpiece Between the World and Me on living through and understanding racism in our country: “History is not solely in our hands. And still you are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life.” From Lulu Miller’s science memoir Why Fish Don’t Exist, contemplating how to live in a world of chaos and human ineffectuality: “This small web of people keeping one another afloat….they might not look like much from the outside, but for the people caught inside that web? They might be everything, the very tethers that keep one bound to this planet.” From Robin Wall Kimmerer’s moving book of essays Braiding Sweetgrass, which gave me an entirely new view of the natural world: “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” Honor, community, joy. Responding to a world with integrity and engagement. Not turning away.

There is so much I cannot fix. But I’m grateful for the lesson of this Lenten season, which allowed me to contemplate the descent towards the cross, which surely feels like the death of one kind of hope, even as it ushers in a new one. I’m grateful for Good Friday and Holy Saturday, which gave me space to imagine the abject despair of Jesus’ disciples when they didn’t know what was coming next. I know that despair. It is paralyzing. I’m still not sure I can bear any of this. 

But. I am called to try. And I am grateful to know that, in defiance of my hubris, it does not all fall to me. I can take up a corner of the cross that others are already carrying, to join hands with those who are already doing the good work of loving the world without any assurances, of which there are many. Thank you, for the honor, community, and joy that so many people have given me. I hope to return that to the world with a love that, for me, is rooted in my savior Jesus Christ. I don’t know if anything I am doing matters. But I want to believe Jesus is big enough to cover all of this beauty and terror. So here’s to living with a hopeless hope, with a love that is bigger than what happens next.

Thanks to my roommate Emily for capturing this moment of wonder.