HOPE IS FOR THE DEAD

The great spiritual writer and thinker – and one who certainly lived what he wrote and thought because he truly believed – Thomas Merton: "Hope then is a gift...total, unexpected, incomprehensible, undeserved...but to meet it, we have to descend into nothingness. It is the acceptance of life in the midst of death, not because we have courage, or light, or wisdom to accept, but because by some miracle the God of life himself accepts to live, in us, at the very moment we descend into death."

I don’t know about you, but I never looked at hope like that before. In other words, hope is for the dead, not for the living. While we have life in us, there is no need to hope. We are alive. It is when we are dead that we need to have hope. And because we are dead, because there is no life in us, hope, as Merton says, is a "gift... total, unexpected, incomprehensible and undeserved."

That means we have to reserve the word "hope" to very few occasions in our lives. Hoping to win the lottery, to make an "A" on the exam, to get that job: those are all desires of the living. Most of the work of bringing about those desires is up to us. But when we are dead, it is all up to God. When the doctor says "there is no hope," that's when we begin to find hope, in and through God. It is when God, the God of life, not the God of death, accepts to live in us that we truly find hope. But it is only when we "descend into death."

All of that may seem rather profound, theologically deep. And it is, if you think about it. It is for me now that I have been thinking about it. The word "hope" like the word "love" -- and maybe even like the word "faith” (I'll have to think about that more) -- is bandied about rather blithely without ever really understanding what is being said.

The commitment of love comes from the very depths of our being and demands the very soul of our being. Anything less isn't love. It may approach love, but it isn't love and we dare not call it such. Think of Jesus's death on the cross because of his love for us: that kind of depth (that came in death!). So, too, with hope. It comes from the very depths of our being and demands that we give that being over to God. The reason we dare to hope is that life, this part of our life, is now out of our hands. We can do no more. All we can do is give our life over to God and hope that God will bring new life.

We have all discovered this because we have all died at one time or another. When we gave the moment, the situation, the person, the life over to God because we could do no more, because we were dead, we were totally, unexpectedly, incomprehensibly, undeservedly surprised by the presence of God. But not until then.

We do take God for granted -- until we're dead, dead to whatever has been holding us back from God: pride, doubt, self-sufficiency. And God lets us be that way, maybe the better to surprise us by his grace and love in the midst of our despair, depression and, ultimately, death. Personally, I would rather have hope come more easily. But then, I'm not God.