Upfront
Inhale
Hope for seemingly hopeless times
by Patrick David Heery
The November/December issue of Presbyterians Today is an issue about hope. We thought our readers might need a pick-me-up after our September/October issue, “Our Hurting World,” whose cover my wife tells me looked like something out of the zombie TV show The Walking Dead. Now, on Thanksgiving and as we approach Advent, we discover again our living hope in a child that promises to remake our world—and us with it.
I’ll be honest, though. I haven’t been feeling very hopeful lately.
When I originally wrote this article for the magazine in October, news of another mass shooting, this time at a community college in Oregon, was sweeping headlines. Since then the headlines have been taken over by horrific attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Bamako, Mali. Meanwhile, millions of Syrians have fled their homes, and by the end of the year, more than 3 million children worldwide will have died from hunger.
At the same time, our own Presbyterian world seems to stand on a precipice. After more than a decade of layoffs, the Presbyterian Mission Agency now faces “tough financial decisions [in order to] take the church forward,” says board chair Marilyn Gamm. The Presbyterian News Service has reported that, in the coming year, people may lose jobs, and valuable ministries may be lost. Many of our congregations face similar financial challenges.
While the world and the church teeter, so too do many of our lives. In the last seven months, my wife, Jenna, and I have experienced two miscarriages, which we continue to grieve, often in lonely silence. We have been poked and prodded until finally diagnosed with medical conditions that are going to make it hard to bring our own child, our hope, into this world. And here comes Advent, when our first child was due to be born. We were so excited to share that journey with Mary. Now we share something else with her: the grief of a parent who has had a child die.
The temptation, I think, in these times, is to throw up our hands in defense and desperately try to hold at bay the fear, grief, and impending loss. Some of us plaster smiles on our faces. Some of us take a different approach, doubling our efforts, creating endless projects and programs, thinking we can “fix” this. We throw ourselves into work, or denial, or oddly comforting cynicism, hoping to build a wall that guards our fragile, increasingly pressed borders. (Though written before the Paris attacks, before governors began to swear to close their borders to refugees, these sentences have since taken on new meaning for me.)
The problem is that those defenses don’t work. Eventually, the wall crumbles, the smile twists, and the projects only tax our already-failing energy.
What would happen, I wonder, if we were to drop our arms and just let the flood hit?
It would, no doubt, hurt. We might drown.
Yet we worship a drowned God—who accepted the wave that carried him to the cross because he knew that this was not the end. We worship a God who is about to enter our world again with a promise that, though these waters may tear our flesh, they will recede and leave in their wake new skin, soft like the Christ child’s.
Hope, it turns out, is not the absence of evil or loss. It is not the expectation that all will go well. Christ, our greatest hope, was born under threat and calamity—his refugee flight to Egypt accompanied by the wail of parents, their children murdered by Herod.
Hope is when the waters rise and we choose not to hold our breath but to inhale, trusting that, even as we sink, Christ’s lips will breathe air into our own.
Thinking about this, I took a stroll the other day, just as the sun was beginning to rise. I took a breath, looking up at a vast sycamore tree, and for a moment, I felt free. I could see beyond the loss.
By breathing in, we do not cease our mourning; in fact, we let in the pain. But as we do so, we let out the fear. We let out all that energy devoted to trying to forestall death or to pretend that everything is OK. Air fills our lungs, and death—no longer feared—is given, in the words of Dylan Thomas, “no dominion.” We turn the moment over to God, letting the waves wash away what we thought life and church were supposed to be, choosing to ride those waves all the way to kingdom come.
Patrick David Heery is the editor of Presbyterians Today.
