Hope: creating meaning

Trigger warning: Bible quotation.

....and a sermon will not follow, or perhaps something of a polemic might follow.  You decide.  I have more of interest in thinking about a topic that used to be near and dear to me:  hope.  

Some thoughtful religious people think they have a corner on hope, and that I as a secular humanist don't have hope.  Many unthinking ones assume I possess a "false hope".  In the interchange of human ideas, the minds of humans all have something to think, even if "how" and "why" we have come to think similar ideas are very, very differently arrived at.

I have long wondered at the limitation of words and "shared conceptions".  I wager that there are as many nuances surrounding "hope" as there are humans on the planet, well, thinking articulate humans.  God is another human conception that likely has as many perspectives as there are humans as well.

Humans can and do change their minds on many topics and about many things.  We hope that when better, more convincing evidence is recognized, that a thoughtful human will modify their thinking accordingly.  This may for very good reasons, biological reasons even, be a hard thing.  Changing one's mind happens likely more often than we imagine, and sometimes in imperceptible ways too.

So an idea that used to hold a lot of religious "meaning" to me was this idea:  And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.  1 Corinthians 13:13 NIV

νυνὶ δὲ μένει πίστις, ἐλπὶς, ἀγάπη, τὰ τρία ταῦτα, μείζων δὲ τούτων ἡ ἀγάπη.

David Breeden had this to say:

Of those things that stay, there is a trio —

faith, hope, and selfless love —

and the greatest of these is selfless love.

Honestly I struggled with it then perhaps more than I do now.  Something about it all made no sense to me, and still does not.  Faith is seeing with no good reason to believe what you hope to see.  Human hubris is unequaled. This is Lee's paraphrase.  

Hope?  it's a troublesome English word.  It's more than a name of a woman too.  I feel "hopeless" is what I find my emotional state to indicate when I'm feeling really low, vulnerable, and isolated.  Am I hopeless?

There is that tricky word "love", which in the limitations of translations does not convey what it can convey in the old Koine: "agape" which is a worn out word that anyone with a "Evangelical" background knows way too much about.

It was hard to let go of faith, hope, and "selfless" love was crazy making.

"Wishing" connotes something relating to hoping for something to be different than it actually is.  Research by Gabriele Oettingen shows that we must bring our "wishes" into alignment with reality: "obstacle(s)".  WOOP = Wish/Outcome/Obsticle/Plan  These are some guidepost that make sense to me.  I use the app occasionally, and probably should do so more often. 

In the aloneness of my interior "loneliness" I find great discomfort and disease around these hopeless/helpless feels that come up for me.  I want so desperately for things to be different.  Even this admittance is a "hope" that all will be well once the corner is turned.

There are big issues:  monstrous Russia and vulnerable and brave Ukraine, a pandemic, not to mention environmental issues that have spiraled out of control.  So far the overwhelming rejoicing of the millions of Christians around the globe has not managed to even make the local evening news in Columbus Ohio.  The signs and wonders on earth at this moment are triggering from the standpoint of pre-millennialism's eschatological viewpoint.

Plenty of personal examples:  financial struggles, friends suffering from incurable debilitating diseases, and the human angst, my own and that of others, and where is hope in all of this?  In all my loneliness and in all your loneliness?  Hopelessness is something we "hope" we can avoid, some of us are willing to do so at great expense.

Oettingen has give me "hope".  I have seen the value of really creating meaning from that which makes no sense.  I think in doing my own work on this issue I see several things, that at least for me, help me transcend some of that senseless hopelessness that can result as I do the deep dives of self-introspection.

The punchline:  As I embrace my human frailty, I am more able to be honest about so many things that I cannot change, and at the same time, my big brain comes up with insights into possible creative, perhaps even doable creative acts, that turn the impossible into something more than hoped-for-wishes.  I create.  You create.  We create.  In this creation, stupendous human feats are achieved.  Reviewing just for a moment will make you breathe deeper and more easily. 

Our attitudes are able to expand to hold the realness of our human suffering and space emerges for gratitude over amazing human accomplishments.  We have created so much and will create even more.  We are not alone in our ability to make something from nothing.  When it seems like there is no hope, somewhere, someone is doing something that was thought to be impossible, and our human understanding expands and we are able to take another step toward more freedom and self-autonomy.  

We the creators, have done something remarkable: nothing is impossible, and that which is impossible we will know exactly why it is impossible perhaps at some future point and find ways to make meaning of that too.

I still hold to something resembling a humanistic hope, but it is quite different than my Christian hope of the past.  It is more honest.  I think it is able to acknowledge the difficulties and joys of being human.  Without faith I am stronger to authentically love myself and others.  I can recognize the ideals of human achievement, and also frankly admit that some humans are impossible.  

Some may not not even merit the recognition of their names being spelled out.  We need not fear lunatics: ones armed with sacred texts or ones with nuclear weapons.  The power to create destruction can be powerfully repurposed.  Whether or not we will be able to convince the tyrants that this is in mankind's interest is another topic altogether.  It's a brush with "this is not hopeless".  It's an attempt to get myself to think larger than news flashes.  We are more than "breaking news" headlines, that is if we want to be more than immediacy.

There are likely no simple solutions or quickly implemented solutions.  We may well hope, based on a body of overwhelming evidence that we as humans can make some meaning out of all this.  This is more than a hopeless wish.  And to take action will be the key to long-term healing of all we have come to believe is hopeless.  We may, do, and are evolving.

Whoever wrote those words so long ago had something correct, at the end of the day it's the human behind the ideals that still remains.  Human minds possess the ability to create these ideas of hope, hoping, and hopping around.  Several thousand years later, humans are still here on this planet and I hope we will dance a bit more together.  I think I've done enough hopping around on this topic of hope.