Hope Beyond Hopelessness

About 10 months ago when much of the world was still optimistic I was undergoing a biological reaction, known as the Jarisch-Herxheimer Reaction, to some heavy anti-viral and antibiotic medications I had begun taking for my diagnosis of myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME.  The Herxheimer Reaction, or 'herxing' as it is known among the chronically ill, is the profoundly miserable response to having massive cellular and sub-cellular die off. My reaction was strong and lasted a couple of months. Among cancer survivors who have also experienced herxing the consensus is that herxing is comparable to and perhaps worse than chemotherapy treatments.  I am about to undertake a much stronger bout of anti-virals and antibiotics in the coming new year. I expect my herx to be pretty heavy as my most recent blood work looks damn nasty. Happy 2017! Open wide for a couple of months of pure physical misery while you try to resist an overtly racist tyrant-in-waiting in the White House!  
And this is what brings me to my discussion on hope. It was in February of last year that I got up the strength to take a walk and to meditate on hope. Here's what I wrote then: 

Today I am grateful that God has given me the strength to take walks the past few days.  It had been a couple of months, which was starting to really get me down.  

I am doubly grateful today as while walking I believe that I heard and felt God's presence and voice.  God guided me in meditating on true hope v. false confidence and on thinking about the false self we show on the outside v. the true work God is doing within us inwardly.  

I came to this thought about hope which may be helpful or may just be bunk, I think time will tell.  "Hope is living confidently within the sphere of power and authority of one who loves you."  

Grace and peace with all of you. 

Today I return to this thought: "Hope is living confidently within the sphere of power and authority of one who loves you" - but I do so with some context to help explain how I got there. Which is to say, I only came to a thought about hope because all of my previous hopes, hopes I believed I had the strength to grow, nurture and possess within myself, had been over the course of the previous 14 months systematically and utterly destroyed. 

Ask a healthy person, an optimistic person, a person who has yet to have their false hopes destroyed, "What is hope?" and that healthy person - that person I was 30 months ago - will likely think the question is, "What are your hopes?" Ask me in the summer of 2014, "What is hope?" and I would answer concretely with my plans for the future, my hopes. 
 - Hope is the backpacking trips I'll take with my sons on the Pacific Coast Trail in their coming teenage years.
- Hope is the trips I will take to Kenya, to India, to Cambodia as I learn the spiritual process of solidarity with the poor. 

- Hope is the classes I will teach, the conferences I will lead, the workshops I will develop, the books I will write.

- Hope is the better world I will help create. The friends I will visit. The life I will live. 

But what is hope when all this is taken away? In the first few months of my illness - December through March 2014/15 - I was cast into a type of darkness that I can only describe as hell. I could barely speak coherently. My brain ceased to function. I would spend days in a row, weeks in a row, in bed. Light hurt. (The lamps in our kitchen will forever be known as 'the retina burners' because of the time I couldn't figure out how to ask Jewel to turn off the lights when they were hurting me and so I said, instead, "Jewel, could you turn off the... retina burners.") Sounds hurt. I experienced near constant migraines in which it felt as though my forehead were in a vice or someone was drilling holes in the top of my head. I was so exhausted that lying down was more effort than I could muster. My body felt as though it was built from the heaviest matter in the universe.  

What is more, God completely and totally abandoned me. I know theologians and pastors who will tell me that God never abandons anyone, that God's love is more sure than the sunrise each morning, but I know better.  I stand with the Psalmist, with Job and with Jesus all whom cried in one way or another, "Father, why have you abandoned me?"  With this abandonment from God came also an abandonment of what I would call my 'self'.  That is to say, I experienced a complete tearing and transforming detachment from all that I was and all that I hoped to be. I lived without a past and without a future - not merely the existential angst of waking up to a mid-life crisis, but the utter crisis of actual existence. From one moment to the next nothing but agony. No memory. No expectation. Utter darkness. Stripped naked. Hopelessness.  

This hopelessness is what I now call the state of what remains when nothing's left. In hindsight it has been oddly and sometimes refreshingly liberating. Yes, I lament so much of what I have lost. But I have gained something that I am not sure that I could have gained in any other way, namely, the discovery that the hope that I possessed and manufactured from within was not hope at all, but part of the construct of my false self. I cannot possess my own hopes and simultaneously pray, "Your will be done, on earth as it is heaven." I have come to believe that perhaps the discovery of the hopelessness of my hopes is the pearl of great price that Jesus hinted at. 

And so then what does remain when there's nothing left? A voice. My voice. My self. And also my self somehow alive despite the utter rock hard reality that it was not my conscious effort to will myself into being. There is something beyond myself that is incontrovertibly real simply by the fact of my own existence.  And it is this 'beyond myself' that constitutes my being, or as Paul once put it by echoing the Athenian poets, "For in [God] we live and move and have our being." And this is hope - the actual substance and reality of hope.

  

Hope is not my dreams of a preferred future. Hope is not the collectivized dreams of humanity's preferred future as directed by me or some other wise, energetic, clever or powerful person. Hope is the reality of the one who lies beyond our being and constitutes the 'other' that makes being possible.  Hope is constituted by the reality God wills. 

It took the utter withdrawal of God's presence, the visceral experience of complete abandonment for me to realize the fullness of my humility. Not even one cell in my body that dies off as a part of my experience of suffering is actually owned by me. Not the slightest bit of dysfunctional sub-cellular matter in my body that starves my muscles of nutrients and forces my body into a state of partial hibernation actually belongs to me. I did not will them into being. I did not will them to function when I was in health. I cannot will them to return to health. I really am not my own but belong in my body and soul in my living and in my dying to something other than myself. This is what darkness has taught me. This is what hopelessness feels like and where the contours of hope begins. 

So, I took a walk. And on this walk a still small voice, a whisper, silence spoke to me and what the voice of silence said was this, "I love you. Walk in my love. At the edge of darkness, in the place where nothing's left, that's where you will realize the prayer I taught you, 'Not my will, but your will be done.'" This is boundary between despair, hopelessness, utter darkness, and hope. I die to my self. From somewhere beyond my self love speaks to me. I live again. Hope begins. But it is not mine other than to receive as a gift no more under my control than the wind, the flight of hummingbirds, or the advent of the cosmos. I am wounded by the concrete realization of my helplessness and the physical manifestation of darkness. I am wounded, broken, lost in darkness. I know hope. 

Moses with the Burning Bush, 1966 - Marc Chagall

Nativity - The Birth of Peace as Darkness Descends

Over the past year I have returned to the movie 'Of Gods and Men' in my meditations with some regularity. The movie recounts the true story of a group of French monks who were assassinated by Jihadists in Algeria in 1996. As our world edges ever closer to a war of ideologies - apocalyptic and nihilistic Christianism v. apocalyptic and nihilistic Islamism -  I return to the lives of these remarkable, humane, humble men who lived, not perfectly, but sincerely, in the Spirit and way of Jesus as neighbors and friends of Islam. We do not have to be at war. We can determine to live in the Shalom our Creator desires. In this spirit I want to share the farewell letter that their prior, Frere Christian, wrote just before the inevitable eventuality of his martyrdom.

"Should it ever befall me, and it could happen today, to be a victim of the terrorism swallowing up all foreigners here, I would like my community, my church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God and to this country. That the Unique Master of all life was no stranger to this brutal departure. And that my death is the same as so many other violent ones, consigned to the apathy of oblivion. I’ve lived enough to know, I am complicit in the evil that, alas, prevails over the world and the evil that will smite me blindly.

I could never desire such a death. I could never feel gladdened that these people I love be accused randomly of my murder. I know the contempt felt for the people here, indiscriminately. And I know how Islam is distorted by a certain Islamism.

This country, and Islam, for me are something different. They’re a body and a soul.

My death, of course, will quickly vindicate those who call me naïve or idealistic, but they must know that I will be freed of a burning curiosity and, God willing, will immerse my gaze in the Father’s and contemplate with him his children of Islam as he sees them. This thank you which encompasses my entire life includes you, of course, friends of yesterday and today, and you too, friend of last minute, who knew not what you were doing. Yes, to you as well I address this thank you and this farewell which you envisaged. May we meet again, happy thieves in Paradise, if it pleases God the Father of us both. Amen. Insha’Allah."

These words from Frere Christian are a living Spirit-endowed word. My prayer is that this word will fall heavily on my heart today, and that it might fall heavily on the hearts of people of all faiths or of no faith throughout the world. As we struggle in this historical moment of darkness descending may we resist the call to arms, the howls of the dogs of war. Instead may the Prince of Peace reign in our hearts and minds. 

William Congdon - Nativita 1960

The Wind Is Howling

Today's song for meditation is Bob Dylan's 'All Along the Watchtower'.  Bob Dylan once said that every time he performed the song it it felt like a cover of Jimi Hendrix' version, so that's what I'm sharing. As you reflect on the lyrics keep in mind two passages from the Judeo/Christian prophetic tradition (Isaiah 21 and Luke 23) that served as Dylan's frame. Dylan's genius in this song is closing with "...the wind began to howl."  Dylan has framed the conversation between the joker and the thief within the dramatic context of the watchers of Isaiah who announce the collapse of Babylon. But the frame isn't closed. The ending of the song is a doorway that enters our reality, our time, and our frame of reference. Are we watching? Are we alert? Do we know what time it is? And if we do know what time it is have we reckoned with the coming storm?

Isaiah 21:5-9
They set the tables, they spread the rugs, they eat, they drink! Get up, you officers, oil the shields! 

This is what the Lord says to me, "Go, post a lookout and let him report what he sees. When he sees chariots with teams of horses, riders on donkeys or riders on camels, let him be alert, fully alert!"

And the lookout shouted:
"Day after day, my Lord, I stand on the watchtower; every night I stand at my post. Look, here comes a man in a chariot with a team of horses. And he gives back the answer, 'Babylon has fallen! Babylon has fallen! All the images of its gods lie shattered on the ground!"

Luke 23:39-43

One of the criminals (the joker) who hung there hurled insults at him: "Aren't you the messiah? Save yourself and us!" But the other criminal (the thief) rebuked him, "Don't you fear God since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what we deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong." Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." Jesus answered him, "Today you will be with me in paradise. Amen."  

Bob Dylan - All Along the Watchtower

"There must be some way out of here, " said the joker to the thief,

"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited, " the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

Chagall - Isaiah

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis - A Poem

ME

The wounds of so much lost

    Still

Knowing what we clutched
   were trinkets

Cherishing what we took for granted
    what remains
    now is all we have left

Life as a Window

There are so many aspects of a chronic illness that are painful to endure that it's hard to know where to begin when someone genuinely would like to be a listening ear.  I used to go hiking 3-5 miles in the hills around my hometown on a regular basis. This was the backbone of my spiritual life. To walk, pray, and contemplate for 2-3 hours a few times a week was the essence of my being.  Since being struck two years ago this has disappeared almost entirely.  I cannot remember the last time I walked for even 15 minutes - it's been six months or more.

But the point of this post isn't to complain about how my life has changed, but to simply explain why my blog posts will come in fits and starts. There are days, like today, where I am barely functional.  I have a dozen or more ideas for posts percolating.  I have an outline for a book that I am working on. I have books and articles that I would like to read.  But today I have nothing.  Even listening to Bach or Arvo Part for 5 minutes is more than I can do.  I cannot talk or hold a conversation.  Miraculously, I find that I can type thoughts. It's a form of communication that works even when spoken words fail me completely.  I am storing up my energy with the hope that I can be cheerful and encouraging when my boys get home from school. It's all I have to give today.

On days like today I remember that I am not actually, the captain of my own ship.  I am not the master of my own fate.  My mind, body, spirit is too frail for the lie of self-reliance that I used to live even while believing that I was, indeed, on a spiritual path of honest submission.  There is a submission that cannot be learned without outward intervention.  It is a submission that is different than resignation.  It is a humility of limits.  Today I remember I am nobody and nothing. I am an empty vessel. Today my hope is that there is a love beyond reasoning that fills empty vessels. This kind of hope was what I always was trying to teach back when I had health and strength and reckoned that I owned my body and my life - even though I really didn't know what it meant to go through that doorway of submission.  Now I am beginning to know what before I had merely intuited to grasp.  Now I experience life as though looking through a window.  But oddly, the glass is less dark.  It is the letting go brings me closer to being face to face with the love beyond reason. 

The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats