Hope Sucks!

Not a sentiment that seems consistent with the biblical reference, but hope can be a dangerous thing. We are taught that hope is a great gift and that it can see you through hard times and guide your journey, physical or spiritual. The truth is hope does more damage than it does good. This past May Laurie Munroe Abkemeier spoke at my daughter's college graduation. Her speech was a nice balance of the cliche, the profound and the funny. For me, the most memorable piece of advice she gave to this extraordinary assembly of young people in a most idyllic setting was simple..."Don't follow your dreams." Such a simple thought and the brief explanation that followed were profound. Dreams like hope can distract us from present...from the here and now, and in clinging to a dream or hoping for the future to be different one can easily miss the opportunity of a life time and taken to the extreme can rob you of your life. I heard a recent radio interview (I wish I could find the reference) where a man spoke of spending a large part of his life hoping his father, a fisherman lost a sea, was still alive and would one day return. That hope crippled his life in ways he was, many years later, just coming to appreciate.

Hope and dreams can inspire and encourage or they can isolate and torture. While I'm busy quoting people, I think John Lennon gets partial credit for the line, "Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans." If you are so focused on those other plans or clinging to a false reality you can miss out on life.

Hope sucks the most when we are at our weakest; when tragedy strikes or misfortune visits we often hope that it isn't true. Wanting something to be different than it IS can lead to dangerous territory. Hope can lead us to distraction and denial; Hope can halt our progress; Hope can forestall our grieving; Hope can suspend our participation in life.

Hope can prolong and intensify our pain; Hope cannot keep us from suffering, but it can add to our misery. We get to choose how we live and hope can be as paralyzing to our emotional and spiritual life as a physical injury can be to our bodily life. We get to choose how we live with the realities of life, and wanting bad things from the past to be different may be a natural desire, but it is not a reasonable and healthy way to live. Hoping for things to be different can suck the life out of you, can rob you of living your life, and can bring more harm. We often call this hopeless, but I don't believe that is a proper characterization. Those who find themselves feeling hopeless or losing hope are in fact those most clinging to the hurtfulness of hope. Hope keeps us from accepting what IS, hope keeps us from living in the present, hope causes pain and suffering.

In short Hope Sucks!