A Hope Which Does Not Disappoint
by James L. Travis III, Ph.D.
At the very outset I would like for you to meet "George," for he will be one of our fellow pilgrims in this internet essay.[1]I actually met George's wife before I met him. And I almost did not meet George. "Catherine" was one of several patients' relatives gathered for worship that spring Sunday morning at Duke Hospital. As I met with each of them, introducing myself and inquiring about their situations, it became clear that she was deeply troubled. She asked if a chaplain could come by her husband's room for a visit that day. He was a cancer patient and not at all doing well. I assured her that I would contact the on-call chaplain immediately after the service and make the referral for the visit. She thanked me and settled back for the service. After the worship was concluded I again spoke with each person who had attended. Catherine lingered and further explained that the attending physician was pessimistic about George's condition, a life-threatening infection which followed a series of chemotherapy treatments. George was not expected to recover sufficiently enough to return home. He might only have a few more days to live. Moreover, George had become extremely distressed and anxious about his relationship with God and the church. He had been a good man, supportive of Catherine's strong Christian faith and her faithful participation in the church, but he had never publicly professed faith in Jesus and had never affiliated with a church.
Ordinarily I would have followed through on my original promise to contact the on-call chaplain and refer this situation to him. But there was something about this wife's deep concern which would not release me. She never said that she wanted me to come with her, at least not with her voice: her eyes said it. And I do not believe it was because she thought I could do any different or better than the on-call chaplain. But I was there, and she wanted someone to go right then. When I responded to this by saying that I would change my schedule and, instead of paging the on-call chaplain, I would accompany her to George's room, her eyes filled with relief and she immediately led the way.
George was sitting up in bed, struggling with the aid of oxygen to get his breath. He was a man in his late 50s, showing all the signs of a long and arduous battle with cancer-he was thin, sallow, feverish, and fighting for each breath. He spoke with difficulty and deliberation. Over the next hour it became clear that George's illness, particularly this life-threatening development, had become a window through which he had seen a very different view from what his previous vision of life had been. And this new view had left him feeling spiritually bankrupt and without much substance in his life. Reassurance from family and friends about how good a life he had lived was not effective. He was a man in despair, at risk of being overwhelmed with hopelessness in what he saw looking back at his life. And, from all medical indications, there would be little chance of doing anything to alter that. It seemed he had come to the end of his time and any future for him appeared grim as well as truncated. And so the question forms: is there any hope? Well, let us leave George for a while and see what hope is, where it is found, and how one finds it.
Optimism: A "Hope" That is Seen
For the thirty-five years that I have been in hospital ministry with persons experiencing threats to their physical existence or mental well-being, I have been drawn to the Pauline letter to the church at Rome, particularly the references to hope. There is first of all that litany of life developments which Paul links together with an incredibly absurd conclusion that persons might actually rejoice in their sufferings:[2]
More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us….
Now in a world in which suffering is to be avoided or assuaged at all costs, this Pauline notion seems totally out of place. But Paul not only promotes rejoicing in sufferings—as somehow a source of something very critical for our lives—he also traces sufferings through a sequence which includes endurance and character, and, strange as it may seem, a hope which "does not disappoint." The sense that "disappoint" carries here is that of betrayal or shame, as when one is cheated or deceived.[3] This suggests that if there is a hope which does not disappoint, then there may well be a "hope" which does! But is the latter really hope? A later statement in Romans seems to answer that.For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees. But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
On the face of it a most puzzling statement, Romans 8:24, 25 will only make sense if one concludes that there is hope, which is not seen, and there is something else, which can be seen. This paradoxical contention, namely that if you can "see" hope, then it is not hope, forces us to a terrifying conclusion! Can it be only when we cannot see, when our vision is clouded, when we stumble in darkness-that only then is it even possible to have hope? And that if we can see what awaits us (or at least think we can) then we function with some other dynamic, something that may be upbeat and exciting, something pleasant and satisfying, something like…optimism? So, if we are optimistic what need is there for hope? "For who hopes for what he sees?"Why Optimism is Not Sufficient
While not commenting explicitly on the Romans passage, Christopher Lasch makes a similar distinction between hope and something else, in this case, optimism.[4] Among other things, this work by Lasch is a merciless scrutiny and an unrelenting critique of the assumptions of progressive liberalism, viz., that "scientific knowledge and moral fervor could light the path to peace and justice."[5] According to Lasch, believers in progress who still cling to the wistful hope against hope that things will somehow work out for the best [this he calls "improvidence," a blind faith], operate out of a sense of optimism.[6] This optimism rests on confidence in the future more so than in the past, with a sense that history is slowly but surely moving toward peace and justice. And, "though they like to think of themselves as the party of hope, actually [these believers in progress] have little need for hope…."[7] Maybe that is because , to go back to Paul's words, they can "see" their destiny coming toward them, unmarred by tragedy and suffering. At least they think they can. The truth is, they are in massive denial or ignorance of life's tragic character. And the promises of this optimism are forever being broken or postponed because human life and history do not oblige this kind of hope. So we are talking not only about the pleasant but limited scope of optimism for facing the future, we are also getting an added sense that optimism is fundamentally flawed in that it promises what it cannot deliver. Could this be similar to a certain fig tree which, harmlessly enough, had burst forth into leaf before its season, yet without fruit, only to incur the curse of Jesus who was on a collision course with the powers of darkness in the holy city?[8] Could this be similar to the prevailing health culture in which we live which, as in the case with George, holds out the "hope" that with another round of chemotherapy the disease might be driven out of his body? When I met George that "hope" had vanished, the victim of a ravaging disease which, even when held at bay by powerful drugs, left his body so vulnerable that another invader, an insidious infection, threatened his life. "Now hope that is seen is not hope."
Hope That is Not Seen
But then, as Lasch continues, there are the hopeful, who live with a "deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack [this hope]."[9] This basic trust, so deeply imbedded in one's life that it often is not immediately accessible to one's awareness, is one of several characteristics which Lasch finds in this real hope, a hope resting more on confidence in the past than on the future. There is also a derivative quality to hope, in that it comes from early memories, even with the distortions which seem inevitably to accompany those memories. And in spite of those distortions there is an "experience of order and contentment …so intense that subsequent disillusionments cannot dislodge [the hope]." [10] Further, hopefulness is more of a character trait than a sort of wishful thinking about rosy prospects for the future. Again, although Lasch does not cite Romans 5, there is an echo here of that part of the Roman sequence, "and endurance produces character, and character produces hope…." Finally, hope does not deny nor avoid the matter of disappointments, either in the past or, prospectively, in the future. Of this hope Lasch writes, "Not that it prevents us from expecting the worst. The worst is always what the hopeful are prepared for. Their trust in life would not be worth much if it had not survived disappointments in the past…."[11]
But this is not a nihilistic fatalism or despairing resignation to life's disappointments. It is rather a willingness to relinquish one's control over life (or the illusion of control), and surrender, as Paul Pruyser puts it, "to uncontrollable, transcendent forces, whose power must first be acknowledged and whose benignity is assumed."[12] The classic story from the Hebrew Bible which embodies this attitude is that of the three young Hebrews who were threatened with incineration in a fiery furnace if they did not fall down and worship Nebuchadnezzar's golden image. Faced with this threat they responded, "If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire; and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king. BUT EVEN IF HE DOES NOT, let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up."[13]
That Sunday morning when I entered George's hospital room, he was somewhere near this point in his journey, as his death seemed imminent. Beyond the point of wishing for a return to good health, of clinging to medicine's earlier promise that the chemotherapy would "beat this disease," and yet not giving up, rather relinquishing his control to God, George was intent on declaring his faith and formally claiming and professing his relationship to Jesus Christ. He was in distress of soul as well as body. He could not "see" where his journey was taking him, nor even clearly from whence he had come with regard to a faith in God. But he was borne along by a deep-seated trust which manifested itself in his forthright and candid admission that he believed in God and in Jesus Christ, but had never come to the point of declaring this. He didn't know why this had been the case, nor was he interested in trying to bargain with God for a recovery by "making things right" at this point in his life. He knew how grim his prognosis was. But there was something missing in his life. And he unashamedly asked for help in facing that incompleteness. No optimism, rather, hope. "And hope does not disappoint."
Discovery and Recovery of Hope
Now to the question: "But how does hope happen?" Out of all the literature which addresses, directly or indirectly, the matter of hope, there appear to be at least two foci in the discussions of how hope is discovered, or perhaps recovered. Writers usually will emphasize one more than the other. It seems to me that both need to be considered in this discovery/recovery process. Before I elaborate on these two foci I want to comment on my use of "discovery/recovery" as it relates to the process of hope "happening" in a person's life. I have come to the conclusion that the gift of hope has been given in the development of one's life. [14] But it is as though that gift is given again in one's life journey as a person encounters (stumbles onto, bursts upon, is met by) that sense of trust and "all-rightness" which he or she comes to understand as God's presence and power in his or her life. So the gift is truly not received until or unless that discovery or recovery happens. It may seem more like a first-time discovery of something not experienced before. Or it may have the feel of a revisiting or recovery of something that had been part of one's life and was subsequently lost, buried, or altered so as to render it unrecognizable. Either way there is an empowerment which enables the person to face his or her future with resolve and courage. This is the "But even if He does not…" with which the young Hebrews declared their hope. And here is how it may happen.
Re-biographing the Past
The first of these processes centers in one's past. It involves a revisiting of one's earlier stages of the journey with a view toward discovering or recovering that hope which does not disappoint. This may happen over time in psychotherapy or pastoral counseling. It may also come with more forcefulness and intensity in moments of crisis which become windows opening onto the past, with a powerful realization that one is recipient of a gift of immeasurable value-namely, the capacity to face the "furnace" and not shrink back.[15] This involves more than a recollection and rehearsal of memories. It becomes a matter of revising one's past, at least in the sense of how one's early story is understood and appropriated in the present. Mordecai Rotenberg cites an old Jewish saying, "I hope to have a good past," as a way of introducing the notion of "re-biographing" the past. [16] On the face of it, and particularly to the Western mind, such an idea is absurd. No one can undo or revise what now lies buried in history. But citing the Midrash and texts from the Hebrew Bible, Rotenberg makes a strong case for reading history through a different lens and, without evading the element of destructiveness or denying the need for repentance, in order to "correct the past." The classic Biblical story exemplifying this "biographic rehabilitation" is that of Joseph and his encounter with his brothers who had sold him into slavery years before. Dependent on Joseph for food, and at his mercy in the trumped up case of theft against they youngest brother, Benjamin, the now penitent brothers were certain they were about to meet with revenge for their earlier crime. Instead they were received with forgiveness and provisions and a new home. Joseph's understanding of this heinous crime against him was clearly stated: "you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good…to preserve many people alive."[17] Without glossing over the great sin against him and his father, Joseph was able to see something else in his past, something which no doubt had sustained him in the darkest of times during his stay in Egypt.
Our own narratives may well contain just such agonizing and rich content which we may reframe or "correct" as we re-biography our past by means of our understanding of God's grace in our lives. One such story, now more than half a century old, has only in recent years been "corrected." An image which remained with me from my first grade in school contained much pain and anxiety, and no doubt, well into my middle age, drove my continuing need to prove my competence. As a first grader I would approach the front steps of the school house each day, there to face two students, a brother and sister, whose names are long since forgotten. They seemed always to be waiting on me, with the relentless intent to torment me with threats of physical hurt even as they inflicted verbal pain in the form of ridicule and shaming. I can still see them in my mind's eye. As the shy, older child from a rural setting I had little precedence for dealing with school yard bullies. There was no kindergarten to prepare me for social life or survival in a competitive world. Church school was so controlled that it offered little of the rough-and-tumble of life at the big school house. How I feared and hated those children. They taunted me at school by day and haunted my dreams by night. And long after they had departed from my life, that experience lived on in a sense of powerlessness and shame.
A half century later I found myself in specific theological inquiry as to how I had been able to live with a steady sense of purpose and reassurance even alongside those corrosive self-doubts and anxieties. It was then that the rest of the story unfolded in my memory and the realization of an early vehicle of grace came clear. The unnerving ridicule by the bullies usually left me with little appetite. Being a thin child to begin with, it probably looked as though I would starve to death. And my parents put great store by a hearty appetite. I am sure that my father was driven in part by his anxiety that his older son just might not survive the first grade. At any rate, even during the busy cotton picking season, he would leave the farm each day to drive into town, stop at a little café, buy a sack of doughnuts and a bottle of chocolate milk, and bring that to school for my lunch. It was about the only thing I would eat. Obviously I did survive that ordeal, and, more than mere doughnuts I tasted an assurance that I would not be deserted, abandoned to face alone the deadly combination of school yard bullies and a nervous stomach.
In that early chapter of my theological development, my father lived out, beyond his own awareness, the human counterpart of that covenantal promise of Yahweh to Noah-"neither will I ever again destroy every living creature…." and of Jesus to his disciples-"I am with you always, to the close of the age." And through the next fifty years, often beyond my own awareness, that embodied promise became the "hope that does not disappoint" and the realization that God, as Creator and Redeemer, has always been there for me. God's presence, often experienced with a concomitant sense of shortcoming and shame on my part, meant yet that the creation link was not destroyed. I am part of God's good creation. I came from God and I shall return to God. And in the darkest of times, that is enough.
And this George discovered as well. Although compressed into a brief visit, and thus with more yet to be discovered, George began to express some understanding that God had been there for him all along, even without his awareness, even without public acknowledgement in the church. So as he groped for thoughts and words to form a prayer to God for salvation, he manifested a growing assurance that the moment was but one-however an important one-in his journey on which his Companion had never left him.
Revisioning the Future
The second process looks toward the future, an emphasis in Andrew Lester's, Hope in Pastoral Care and Counseling.[18] While Lester works with story as a frame of reference for hope, his orientation is that of the future story more so than the past story. Although he acknowledges the past as part of humankind's temporality, he clearly is more impressed with the future as determinative "for understanding human experience with hope and despair."[19] While I would not argue with Lester's basic position, I contend that the past is also central in this understanding.
And for the purpose of this paper, I want to focus on that aspect of the future story to which Lester refers in the concept of "spiritual revisioning." [20] We may well come to point in our journey (indeed, we will eventually come to that point) when our future story which characterizes our life will not "go far enough into the future. It only reaches as far as what seems achievable right now."[21] Citing Ernst Bloch, Lester states: "…human beings need to have a hope that imagines possibilities that are not possible now but may be possible in the future." [22] Here Lester has reference to one's "sacred story." And for the Christian the sacred "story posits a future that transcends not only present reality and next year's possibilities but even this life's limitations."[23] Does this suggest movement from something like wishing to hoping, or perhaps a "hope that is not seen," or "where the hoping process can move out of the finite and into the transfinite."[24] One of the goals of the pastoral caregiver is "to help persons gain insight into the transfinite hope provided by their sacred story."[25] Thus "we can enable [persons] to include the hopeful sacred story in their confrontation with the crises, tragedies, problems, and other life circumstances that they face from day to day." [26]
It is this "hopeful sacred story" in its entirety to which two Roman Catholic theologians appeal in addressing a critical issue in end-of-life situations in health care settings. [27] Russell Connors and Martin Smith address emerging recent cases "in which health care teams conclude that continuing life-supporting therapies is inappropriate, perhaps 'medically futile,' while families or patients insist on continuing all aggressive means to prolong life."[28] It is not infrequently that religious themes are appealed to as justification for this. This not only creates major dilemmas for the health care providers, it also likely indicates a truncated version of the Christian faith in which the "God of rescue" is the only image upon which the family members draw. While the image of God as deliverer is threaded throughout the fabric of Biblical narratives, it is only one aspect of God's relationship with humankind. But when this "rescue God" is "connected with rescue medicine in a highly technological culture, [it] creates the expectation that if a technological fix has been unsuccessful, a religious fix will succeed in providing a quick and decisive solution to the problems of human suffering and death." [29] What is called for in this kind of situation, even though it is fraught with difficulties when the lines have been drawn in an end-of-life dilemma, is a "re-imagining" of the faith. That is, the image of God as rescuer is balanced with the equally central image of God as Emmanuel, God-with-us. These two images are joined in the classic dialogue between God and Moses in the book of Exodus.
Then the Lord said, "I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land….Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring forth my people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt." But Moses said to God, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?" He said, "But I will be with you…."[30]
But this kind of re-imagining is much more effective when it occurs as part of ministry in churches and places of worship rather than hospitals and nursing homes. As Connors and Smith remind us:
Nowhere is there greater opportunity for powerful and communal re-imagination than in worship. In the rituals of song, prayer, preaching, and attentive listening to biblical narratives, opportunities abound to address the narrow images of rescue religion and to help widen the lens on the great mysteries of communal connectedness, God, miracles, and life and death.[31]
As George and Catherine and I prayed that Sunday, and George gave voice to his understanding that God loved him and would not abandon him as he approached death, there seemed to remain something not yet complete in this moment of truth and hope. Wistfully, George said that if he did get out of the hospital he surely wished he could go to the congregation of which Catherine was a member and declare his profession of faith in Jesus Christ and be baptized. I nodded in affirmation of that wish. We all seemed to silently accept the likelihood that with George's grave condition, such a possibility may never materialize. After a moment of silence I spoke: "You know, George, we could baptize you right here, right now." He looked up at me incredulously and barely whispered, "You mean…baptize me…right now?" I said, "Certainly, if you so desire it." I mentioned the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. George's eyes glistened with tears. I took a clean emesis basin, filled it with water, and carefully and very deliberately baptized George in the name of the Triune God-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All three of us were tearful. It was a holy moment, one about which I believe we all were very certain would remain as a sacred time in these last hours of George's life. But at the moment the hope of a future story was caught up in the claim of the resurrection story, and the sense that death would not be the end. A burden had been lifted. A hope had been discovered.
"And hope does not disappoint!" Epilogue
I left George's room that Sunday morning with a profound sense of having stood on holy ground. And also there was a great sadness with the prospect that he might not survive the night. But he did. The physicians could not explain it. Moreover, he was able to return home a few days later. But I heard nothing from him for a few weeks. I called one afternoon to check with Catherine, thinking perhaps George had died and she had simply not thought about calling me. To my amazement George answered the telephone. He sounded very short of breath. Then he apologized for being so breathless. He had been mowing the lawn and had to run to answer the phone! He had publicly acknowledged his faith in the local congregation. His peace and joy were so evident.
I spoke with George some months later. He spoke of continuing health problems. His physician had exhausted the standard regimes of chemotherapy for the cancer, so they were exploring the possibility of an investigational drug. Yet there was a reassurance as he talked about this being the last resort, that even if that did not work to halt the progression of the disease, he had his hope to sustain him, even through the valley of the shadow of death. Thanks be to God!
Author:
Dr. James Travis is Clinical Professor of Pastoral Care Duke University Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina.
Notes:
"George" is, of course, not his real name, and enough minor details have been excluded or altered so as to conceal his identity and honor the principle of confidentiality. But as a valued journeyer in this venture, he needs to be identified by more than a number or an initial. The same holds true for his wife, "Catherine."
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Romans 5:3-5 (Revised Standard Version). [ Return to text ]
William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 411.
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Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), pp. 78-81.
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Richard W. Fox, "Lasching Liberalism," The Christian CENTURY, vol. 109, no. 9 (March 11, 1992), p. 280.
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Lasch, op.cit., p. 81. [ Return to text ]
Ibid. [ Return to text ]
Mark 11:12-14; 20-22. [ Return to text ]
Lasch, ibid. [ Return to text ]
Ibid. [ Return to text ]
Ibid. [ Return to text ]
Paul Pruyser, "Hope and Despair," in The Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling, ed. Rodney J. Hunter (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), p. 533.
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Daniel 3:17f (The New American Standard Bible). [ Return to text ]
Donald Capps refers to hope, building on Erik Erikson's work, as the "original human strength." Agents of Hope: A Pastoral Psychology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), pp. 29-33.
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See also Hebrews 10:36-39. The reference is to not "shrinking back" in the face of persecution of early Christians.
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Mordecai Rotenberg, "The 'Midrash' and Biographic Rehabilitation," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 25, no. 1 (March, 1986), pp. 41-55.
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Genesis 50:20. [ Return to text ]
Hope in Pastoral Care and Counseling, (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press), 1995.
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Ibid., p. 5. [ Return to text ]
20. Ibid., p. 148. [ Return to text ]
Ibid. [ Return to text ]
Ibid. [ Return to text ]
Ibid. [ Return to text ]
Ibid., p. 149. [ Return to text ]
Ibid. [ Return to text ]
Ibid. [ Return to text ]
Russell B. Connors, Jr. and Martin L. Smith, "Religious Insistence on Medical Treatment: Christian Theology and Re-Imagination," Hastings Center Report, vol. 26, no. 4 (1996), pp. 23-30.
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Ibid., p. 23. [ Return to text ]
Ibid., p. 28. [ Return to text ]
Exodus 3:7-12. [ Return to text ]
Connors and Smith, p. 29. [ Return to text ]
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- Published: 02 November 1998