How hope in the future can reorient us from past failures to the anticipation of future wholeness

Today’s Post

Last week we began our look at the attitudes (the ‘Theological Virtues’) that we can take if we are to live out Teilhard’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’.  We looked at ‘Faith’ and saw how it acquires new relevance if we reorient it from ‘belief in the unbelievable as a condition for being eligible for the afterlife’ to the recognition and trust that the energy of evolution flows through each of us and carries us on to a future state of wholeness.

This week we will continue our look at the Theological Virtues by addressing ‘hope’.

The Traditional Approach to Hope

As seen by the traditional church, hope, like faith, is an attitude based upon the concept of a salvation earned by living a moral (as defined by the church) life.  Hope is deeply intertwined with faith, in that it is the result of believing that pleasing God is necessary for eternal salvation.  It focusses more on the ‘payoff’, than the ‘process’.  As the Catechism says, “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness”.  As such, it is given to us as a guard against despair, to help us keep our eyes on the end goal, the ‘next life’ while we endure the pains and disillusions of this one.

Like the traditional approach to faith, the traditional approach to hope assumes that ‘truth’ is ‘given to man by scripture and the church’, adhered to by ‘faith’ and trusted to result in salvation by ‘hope’.

Reinterpreting Hope

Even though the Church approached hope as rooted in belief in the afterlife, it was Paul himself who identified what can be expected in this life when we take the stance of ‘faith’.  As much of Paul’s writing clearly shows, as the first Christian theologian he took great pains to boil the teachings of Jesus down into specifics, such as we saw in his teaching on the ‘Theological Virtues’.  Another example can be found in his listing of what he referred to as ‘The Fruit of the Spirit’.  This ‘fruit’ consists of the human attributes which are ‘given’ by the Holy Spirit when we cooperate with the presence of God in our lives.  The facets of this ‘fruit’ are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and faithfulness.

Of course, seeing these things through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’, as when we addressed the Trinity, the ‘Holy Spirit’ is one manifestation of the tri-faceted energy of evolution which flows through our lives.   These ‘gifts’, from our perspective of reinterpretation, refer to those human potentialities that can be actualized as we become more aware of, and come to cooperate with, the energy of evolution as it rises in us.
Paul’s ‘Fruit’ describes what can happen in our lives as we live out the ‘articulations of the noosphere’ that we have been describing, that are reflected in the sacraments, values, and morals of our culture.  One does not have to be religious to recognize the quality of life that would accrue to us were we better able to love, have our lives filled with joy rather than foreboding, feel at peace with ourselves and others, resulting in natural (vs forced) kindness, recognizing our innate goodness and being able to trust.

Paul’s facets of ‘fruit’ correlate well with Carl Rogers’ observations of a patient undergoing the process toward healing (excuse the fifties misuse of gender):

– The individual becomes more integrated, more effective

– Fewer of the characteristics are shown which are usually termed neurotic or psychotic, and more of the healthy, well-functioning person

– The perception of himself changes, becoming more realistic in views of self

– He becomes more like the person he wishes to be, and values himself more highly

– He is more self-confident and self-directing

– He has a better understanding of himself, becomes open to his experience, denies or represses less of his experience

– He becomes more accepting in his attitudes towards others, seeing others as more similar to himself

Comparing Hope to Faith

If faith involves trusting in the power of belief itself, that it is possible to find within ourselves the ability to act in the face of the emotion of fear, then hope provides a ‘pull’, in which we can make the decision and muster the energy to act because we can envision the importance, even the enjoyment, of the consequence of such action.   One of Paul’s ‘fruits’ is ‘joy’, and there are few greater joys than the feeling of satisfaction of completion of a difficult and risky task.  We can envision this potential for joy even before we undertake the risk, and as a result the arduousness of the task is therefore lessened by the anticipation of the result.  While faith can be seen in the ‘decision’, hope can be understood as the ‘anticipation’.

An example is Rogers’ insight that the risky choice to ‘be willing to live with ambiguity’ is counterbalanced by the ‘hope’ that, as a result, we will mature into the greater possession of ourselves as articulated in his list above.

Another result of the ability to hope is ‘patience’, another facet of Paul’s ‘fruit’.  Faith may provide us with the insight that we are growing by a principle of universal evolution working within us, but hope is a bulwark against the despair that can set in as we frequently experience failure.  No one gets through life without Shakespeare’s ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, but the burden becomes heavier with impatience.

While faith allows us to reinterpret our past in a positive light, hope allows us to taste a future in which today’s burdens have been overcome.  Faith and hope intersect in a present which we all too frequently experience as ‘dangerous’.  While there are many actions that we can take to mitigate the danger, none is more important than to believe in our ability to endure and that this endurance allows us, as Blondel puts it,

“.. to leave the paralyzing past behind and enter creatively into our destiny”.

The Next Post

This week we focused Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on the attitude of ‘hope’ in our reinterpretation of the ‘Theological Virtues’ as stances that we take when we ‘articulate the noosphere’ in terms of sacraments, values and morals of our culture.

Next week we will continue by looking at the intersection between faith and hope.