Tag Archives: Wisdom

Bible, Meditations

Hope: Delusion? Strength? Weakness?

In the movie The Matrix: Reloaded (2003), the character dubbed “The Architect” says the following to Neo when it becomes clear that Neo is about to make a seemingly unrealistic choice in hopes of saving the woman he loves, Trinity, from imminent and fatal danger:

“Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.”

My previous post on hope got me thinking more about the wisdom of hope. Proverbs 13:12 casts hope within the framework of wisdom, and proverbs as a genre are very compressed, inviting readers to sit awhile and unpack the meanings and lessons on offer.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13:12 NRSV

Implied in this proverb, it is wise to accept that sometimes hopes go unfulfilled, and sometimes they come to fruition. This is life. It is what it is. There is not necessarily anything wrong with the world just because our own particular hopes get delayed or destroyed, no matter how devastated we may feel in response. It is also wise to welcome our heart-sick responses. Emotional response is not necessarily unwise.

But all of this has to do with how we handle the hopes we already have. If The Architect of The Matrix is right, however, then perhaps we should not let ourselves hope at all. Maybe hope is a delusion. Yes, it gives us uncanny strength, but it might also blind and weaken us, driving us to spend our powers on things for which we cannot guarantee the outcomes. Better to play it safe and conservative, to focus on outcomes we can predict, control, and guarantee.

As an aside — or perhaps not — I am reminded here of the well known “Serenity Prayer”: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” I pray this prayer often.

But might it be wise to hope?

Perhaps it is wise to perceive that the future is open before us — to a certain degree, at least — and that there is no guarantee that bad things are going to happen. Next, our world seems highly contingent. Perhaps, then, it is wise to recall that each action we take may alter the choices that others make, and that therefore one deliberate good act can ripple outward into the future to elicit other good things.

Perhaps it is wise to enact the belief that God is living and active, and that God may choose to be involved in our lives in a way that opens up new possibilities. That is, there might be more than just human players involved in the web of actions that ripple through our world.

Perhaps it is wise to guard one’s emotions from giving the victory to despair and despondency (both of which I have felt over and over again, by the way). Despair and despondency demotivate and de-energize us, and threaten to make us passive and acquiescent, and maybe even slothful. (The biblical proverbs have a thing or two to say about slothfulness.) Some things in our world are not as they should be, and it will take active, non-accepting, and resolved energies to make changes for the better. We just cannot achieve justice without hope.

Perhaps it is wise to see to it that we have friends in our lives who promote hope in us. I tend to be a cynic by nature; if I only welcome my fellow cynics as friends, I might be a fool who engages in confirmation bias. (Might as well only have friends in our lives who are of our political persuasion, right?) It’s easy to feel right when we’re surrounded by “Yes” people: people who share our attitudes and beliefs already. Thus, it is hard to give hope a chance if no one else around us does. (As a corollary, it might be you who is the hope-bringing friend for someone else, so you might be called upon to be the encourager.)

More could be said, no doubt. But I end by returning to The Matrix. As it turned out, Neo acted in hope, and it gave him the strength to save Trinity, despite The Architect’s assurances that Neo would fail. The Architect, whose eloquent vocabulary suggested intelligence and wisdom, wound up being exposed as a fool. Neo took a chance with hope. It was wise that he did.

Bible, Meditations

Hope

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Hope is a concept or attitude with which I’ve struggled for years. As in, I have often found it hard or unnatural for me to take hope as a basic and ready attitude or posture toward the future. Had the Apostle Paul written (in 1 Corinthians 13:13), “Now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is hope,” I’d be screwed as a Christian!

Recently, I have come to wonder if I resist hope so much because I’m trying to protect myself from feelings of disappointment. If I hope for something and it doesn’t come about, then I’ll have to deal with myself feeling sad, empty, rejected, and let down. Maybe a hope unfulfilled will erode my motivation and energy. And so, I think I’ve often enough adopted cynicism as a more fundamental attitude in order to protect me from feeling so many unpleasant things and having to face the future unmotivated.

Now, don’t get me wrong: cynicism can be fun. But, I think my mental health counselor is right: I need to give hope more of a chance.

Hope behind Bars

While in jail a couple of years ago, I got a Bible from the commissary. It was a paperback King James Version. We were during the height of COVID, and my first two weeks had me in a quarantine jail pod, where I spent twenty-three hours a day locked in my cell. I decided to pass some of that time reading through the Bible, starting with the book of Proverbs. Sure, I had read the book often enough, given my background, but it seemed like some of the proverbs were hitting me a little differently in the confines and culture of my jail cell — perhaps none of the proverbs more than this one:

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick:
but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13:12 KJV

For someone who already struggled with hope, this was a time in my life that threatened to invalidate hope even more. And here I was, reading a proverb that expressed my own experience of hope, my own heart sickness. Perhaps I felt some companionship. And maybe that’s what some of the biblical proverbs are trying to do; some of them simply state the way things are, without giving any explicit instruction or guidance on what to do, or whether anything can or should be done at all.

Wisdom about Hope

In addition, maybe there is wisdom in knowing that it is a part of life for hopes to go unfulfilled, and that it is natural and common to feel heartsick when they do. That is, there is nothing foolish about feeling depressing emotions when our hopes fail to come about.

Perhaps there is also wisdom in realizing that we simply do not and cannot control enough factors of our lives to guarantee that our hopes will come about. Our hopes depend inexorably on things outside of us. And so, hope itself has a way of confronting us with our own powerlessness. We simply cannot make trees of life grow at will. We might plant seeds that fail to germinate, or that die or get snatched up. We might water some existent trees that show promise and health, only to face a drought that dries up or a disease that sickens the trees that might have been.

That is, perhaps there is wisdom in acceptance: acceptance of the way things are, of the way hopes can go, and of our heartsick responses. Interestingly enough, I think my tendency toward cynicism has been aiming at this same goal of acceptance, but from a different angle. Cynicism accepts that things often don’t turn out the way we want, but has been expecting this failure all along. Hope pushes us to believe that good things are possible, to act toward the fruition of those good things, to expect good things — and then, yes, to be ready to accept shortcomings or outright failures, and to accept our depressed feelings, knowing that the future continues to come at us, and while we can’t control or guarantee everything, we do have some say, some choice in how we posture ourselves to move into that future.

Perhaps, then, there is wisdom in giving hope a chance.