In Defense of Hope

Approximately 6 million people visit the Mona Lisa in Paris’ Louvre every year to squint at the tiny frame and revel in its artistry. Roughly 7 million visit Michaelangelo’s Pieta in St. Peter’s Basillica, while another 3 million reportedly see his ‘David.’ I stood in front of St. Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna, Austria when I was 17, and the world I knew shifted and changed beneath my breathless awe. I heard the world famous Vienna philharmonic play Sibelius’ 5th symphony and watched tears fall down faces from around the globe. I saw the Beethoven Frieze in the unfinished basement of Vienna’s Secession building and I reminded myself to breathe during ‘The Prayer’ from Gounod’s Faust. The humanities offer significant insight into the mortality we are all a party to. The thirst for creation—as master, student, or bystander, seems to be insatiable, providing meaning to an otherwise drab landscape of suffering and finality. The extraordinary provides hope for the ordinary and mundane, and we flock to it. It is as though marvelous human creations provide a hope that this whole business of being human isn’t so bad after all, because look at what emotion is evoked and tell me that it doesn’t change us as mortal—and moral—beings. These creations give strength to mankind as a whole and give reason to believe that there is something, some spark of madness, that cannot be quenched and that lifts us as an entity higher through centuries of study. 

Take all of that and then imagine something more powerful than any tangible creation. An idea, this idea: We live and we die, yet we are not alone through the cycles of dust to dust. In the broad continuum of space, we have a place among the stars, a home in the infinite vacuum of incomprehensible grandeur. There is a being in complexity unparalleled to the most advanced mathematical sciences that has engineered the universe and perfectly created an organized splendor that responds to stimuli, builds and rebuilds without compulsion in response to changing weather patterns, naturally creates new life, and  even expands into the chasms of space throughout eons of time. He is not a magician, but instead a scientist so precise that his creations continue according to perfectly balanced principles. The precipitous entropy of the universe—all matter progressing toward chaos—is kept in check by an eternal equilibrium unattainable by any human means. He is not only omnipotent and omniscient, but in fact a Father to mortal children who in all their minuscule endeavors still relate to His perfected magnificence. This “idea” contains the most pervasive and extensive philosophy ever attributed to mankind. It is the most permeating and universal notion throughout every age of time and across social, racial, gender, and economic barriers. It is woven into stories etched on pre-historic caves and painstakingly carved into stone tablets. It has infiltrated every work of man since the beginning of time. It is undoubtedly the most unflinching concept, withstanding both the fiercest criticism and the deepest loyalty. It is an idea that has united millenniums of believers across continents and lent something more precious than the gold and silver which have ruled the world: hope. 

If we as a human entity created God, He is our single greatest creation. And if the great argument against the organized stems from this creation is that religion’s byproduct is merely mass mediocrity, it is only logical to conclude that the original idea of a universal creator does not match the suppositions of mediocrity in devotion to Him. Is it merely uneducated blindness to adhere to such a mystical idea as God? 

Contact, a 1997 drama, tells the story of a brilliant young astronomer who dreams of contacting extra terrestrial life. After a life-changing experience passed in a fraction of a second, her testimony is doubtful. All she has to back her story is her own conviction, and with that conviction she clings to the hope that the continuum of matter in the universe is not just a waste of space. As she testifies in court, she says (begins at 1:22):

I had... an experience.  I can't

prove it.  I can't even explain it.

All I can tell you is that

everything I know as a human being,

everything I am -- tells me that it

was real.

I was given something wonderful.

Something that changed me.  A vision

of the universe that made it

overwhelmingly clear just how tiny

and insignificant -- and at the same

time how rare and precious we all

are.  A vision... that tells us we

belong to something greater than

ourselves... that we're not -- that

none of us -- is alone.

I wish I could share it.  I wish

everyone, if only for a moment --

could feel that sense of awe, and

humility... and hope.  That

continues to be my wish.

All of the intelligence and logic and the world cannot compete with this stubborn hope that propels men and women to continue living, loving, and breaking, though it seems at times that we will bleed to death with the pain of it all. Yet what could be grander and more beautiful, more tragic and humbling than the idea that someone did in fact bleed and die so that we could continue to live and when life is exhausted so that we could die in order to go on living and loving forever. About this man whose sacrifice of death allows life, prophetic writers penned these infinitely powerful words: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him. Specters of mortal life and death laugh in the face of anything but despair facing a finite life, yet this figure who has become the beacon of nations and the foundation of magnificence took the brunt of that humiliation and destroyed it forever. In short, there is no chastisement for peace. There is no longer a hold upon its power. It rushes forth in all the glory and triumph of a thousand unstopped dams, and it is ours to hold with unflinching hands and hearts just broken enough to fill. It is this hope that cannot be explained or riddled through but that expands as the evening sky through any willing and open space. It is this hope that stirs in the hearts of those who seek truth or meaning in anything. It is hope that spills from art and music across centuries. It is hope that tells us that we as humans aren’t worthless and we aren’t forsaken and we have something bigger to cling to. Emotion, that beautiful orb that is so very human and yet so undeniably divine can be painted and sung and carved into stone. It was that fierce emotion of hope that expanded within me as I ran past a BYU soccer camp and caved at the thousands of stories running around the field and never colliding, yet bound in the nearly invisible but iron threads of silvery webs that connect us all. If nothing else makes sense in this mad mad world, that does. That hope is worth living for. 

So when we have received a vision of light, a reason of hope, I think we must cling to it. I see no other way than for us to believe or to die in abject misery. There is no middle ground, only a volatile frenzy of imaginings leading nowhere at all. If we are going to be in, I think we must be all in, or why dabble? I see nothing on the horizon of skepticism and mockery but narcissism and loneliness. If we are going to live, I think we must live deliberately and live with meaning. I see no lasting meaning in anything but that which I desperately hope and willingly believe carries beyond the grave. 

Hope and its byproducts can seem childish and naive. I defend it because I cannot deny that the wings on which it rises have stirred within my heart and granted something to cling to. It’s not merely a product of the imagination. I wish I could share it. I wish everyone, if only for a moment --could feel that sense of awe, and humility... and hope. That continues to be my wish. It is in defense of hope that I live because when I look at the David and listen to Rachmaninoff I cannot concede to mere triviality in the span of a few years. There is more, and through days of tears and days of joy I will hope from the inside out and the outside in and we will all journey on, treading softly or rising quietly on the light of hope.

“I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach” —The Brothers Karamazov