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The film comedian WC Fields was an ill tempered man who hated religion. He hated Christmas day, and ironically, he died on Christmas day in 1946. Several months before his death, he laid bed, overtaken by cirrhosis of the liver and failing kidneys—both a result of many years of alcohol abuse. One day, one of his friends came to visit him as he lay on his deathbed. The friend was shocked. WC Fields was propped up in bed and reading the Bible. The friend said, “Bill, I can’t believe my eyes. You are reading the Bible. Why are you reading the Bible?” To which Fields replied, “I’m looking for loopholes.” When WC Fields was looking for loopholes, he was looking for a shortcut, a reason to be optimistic. An optimist looks on the bright side. An optimist is forever looking for loopholes—“things aren’t as bad as they seem”—or “it could always be worse”.
Being the flip side of pessimism, there are some tests that optimism cannot withstand.
I love Louis Armstrong’s recording, “It’s a wonderful world”, especially that line about the ‘dark sacred night and bright blessed day’. But the world does not always appear as such.
We awake one morning after a some dark sacred night only to feel the earth quaking, hurricanes screaming, or blizzards blowing--and suddenly that wonderful world becomes a hostile environment of chaos and suffering.
The world we are given gives rise to pessimism and optimism. But only the world within us can give us real hope.
As Vaclav Havel put it, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Hope has to do with uncovering our own inner resources.
Hope has to do with uncovering our own inner resources.
Consider the etymology of the word resource. The prefix RE, means to go back, to the Source, and early meaning of source is the place that rises up, that springs up. To have hope is to go back and drink from the inner well spring, the Divine Source—And where is this wellspring of hope? Always within, waiting not only to be discovered but shared.
Optimism takes its cue from external circumstances. Optimism sees only the surface of life. But hope is not swayed by the most recent list of facts. Hope comes from the depths of the Spirit. Hope springs eternal. Optimism and its dark sibling, pessimism are nothing more than reactions to what appears on the surface. Like the surface of the sea, the surface of life is always changing.
Hope wells up from a deeper place than the last thing that happened to us.
Emily Dickinson wrote, “hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul”
True hope is not something we can discover when everything is going along according to our expectations.
Quite the opposite.
True hope is what grows in us when we are sick, when we are in pain, when we experience losses—true hope grows like a seed, in the darkness.
True hope is rooted in the deep intuitive knowledge that when everything around me is falling apart, even when I fall apart—there is something within me that holds me and the world together.
True hope perches in the soul.
For many years, Fanny Krause owned Carolyn Cleaners. Fanny was a holocaust survivor. Practically every time I entered Carolyn Cleaners Fanny would tell me a story about what it was like to be a teenager in Auschwitz.
One day as she recounted her Auschwitz experience she paused. Overcome by the magnitude of what she was saying I blurted out the question I had always wanted to ask her. Fanny, how did you hold onto to hope in that horrific place? How could you keep getting up every day? How did you keep from being overcome with despair?
She answered, “I fasted”.
That was not the response I expected. “You fasted?” Every Tuesday, she said, I took the piece of bread given to me and gave it to keep other people alive.”
Fanny found hope by giving her meager morsel of bread to others that they might live.
Hope is not what we feel but what we do.
There is the story of the small child who was drawing a picture and her teacher said, "That's an interesting picture. Tell me about it." "It's a picture of God", said the little girl. "But", the teacher answered, "nobody knows what God looks like." The little girl looked up and said, "they will when I get done."
Hope is not a panacea but the challenge to never give up.
‘Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul”.
Got hope?
The miracle of hope is this: when we bring it to someone else we see it in ourselves.
Got hope?
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