Hope is a gift. A precious gift that was planted in each and every one of us when we were born into the world as imago Dei. We bear God’s image, and that image features essential ingredients of the divine: hope, love, along with the capacity for kindness and humility. They are a fundamental part of all of us, yes, all of us. And as we continue to sort through all the feelings, predictions, and challenges that have surfaced from last week’s election, there are two very different temptations that are emerging that deal with hope.
The first temptation is to claim that hope is absent, if not gone. Many people who are profoundly disappointed and/or deeply disoriented over the results of the election have expressed this. And many claim that God, who is the author of hope, has either disappeared or never existed in the first place. What I have discovered, for me and for many others, is that hope is not gone, but lost. Lost beneath the anger, fear, grief and all the rest. Hope is still there, but may be hidden. We then need to remember moments of hope from the past. and at the same time to draw on the care of those dear to us who remind us of love and beauty, and through that bring us back to hope.
The other temptation is to think that hope is not a gift, but a commodity. Something that we own. This often spills over into an arrogance that can lead people to claim that since they are the owners of hope, they own God as well. Well, maybe not own God, but claim that God is on their side. (The only side God has ever been on is God’s side). Which then means that they can use God to advance their agenda. Which then means that they can impose their version of God on others. We are seeing and hearing this from many who are celebrating the election, claiming that God’s will has been done. And that they have free rein, as adherents of God’s will, to act out God’s will and God’s hope. As history has repeatedly demonstrated, such spiritual arrogance has produced disastrous results.
One of the most disturbing examples of this arrogance was a policy that ran from 1869 until the 1960s, designed by the federal government and implemented by churches, which involved the removing of Indigenous children from their families and communities to off-reservation boarding schools, and which would transform them into “true Americans” by stripping them of their language and culture. A policy designed in arrogant hope, and carried out in debilitating cruelty.
There is a space between the arrogance of imposing hope and not being able to find it; and between reducing God to being a tool for advancing a particular agenda and thinking that God has disappeared, or doesn’t exist at all. It is Emmanuel, Latin for God with us. This takes a lot of spiritual and emotional work to fully embrace this, because of the need we often have to think that we “have God”, which gives us the opportunity to live with a misguided certainty; or the fear that “God has us”, which takes away our agency and denies us our freedom. Embracing Emmanuel requires a lot of reflecting and wrestling – working through our anger and fear, as well as our certainty and arrogance. And to embrace our capacity for kindness and humility so we don’t fall into misguided hopes and arrogant policies. It takes a lot of work.
But worth it. And more than ever in my lifetime, we need to do it.
