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