Acknowledging Hopelessness; Coming to Know Hope: A Paradox
- Jennifer Windham
- Dec 2, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: Dec 30, 2024
In his essay, ”The Care of Souls from the Underside of Hope: A Latinx Perspective,” theologian Miguel A. De La Torre writes of taking a group of primarily Eurochristian American students to an impoverished area in Mexico to learn from the poor and gain an understanding of how our own lives in the United States contribute to their situation. At the end of the day, when debriefing with the group, a young American woman says that despite all the suffering she saw, she still saw hope in the eyes of one little poor girl. Upon hearing this, De La Torre reports having an “epistemological breakdown,” or in normal-folks-speak, a WTF moment. The young girl with “hope in her eyes,” De La Torre knows, has no shot. Her future will likely include either prostitution or a marriage for the sake of surviving “institutionalized classism and sexism.” He goes on to critique the middle-class White American notion of hope, writing, “We do violence whenever we impose our first-world hope upon bodies of color relegated to the margins of empire… Imposing ‘hope’ allows Euroamericans to accept it is all good because God is good and thus will work for good.” This kind of thinking lets us off the hook. Instead, De La Torre invites readers to embrace hopelessness and stop using hope and false optimism to pacify ourselves. By embracing hopelessness, we acknowledge brutal reality.
Hopelessness is a legitimate response to crushing poverty, racism, endless wars, and the cruelty of unjust systems in a world in which so few seem committed to real change. On a personal level, hopelessness is a legitimate response to a terminal diagnosis, a terrible divorce, an addiction that feels impossible to overcome, or the death of a child. But here’s the tricky part of De La Torre’s invitation: he tells readers that even though circumstances seem hopeless, we can’t just wait for the arc of the universe to bend towards justice; we have to join the struggle: “To be hopeless is to realize there is no option but to struggle for justice regardless of the odds. And here is the lesson often lost. We struggle for justice not because we hope to win. We struggle for justice knowing we will lose but do so anyway because it defines our faith—and more importantly—our humanity.”
The theme of hopeless struggle is at the heart of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird, set in 1930’s small-town Alabama. In one part of the story, Jem Finch, a ten-year-old boy, gets into trouble with his father, Atticus, for destroying a cruel neighbor’s camellia bushes. The neighbor, Mrs. Dubose, is routinely hateful to Jem and his sister, Scout, but Atticus instructs Jem to be a gentleman in the face of Mrs. Dubose’s rants. On the occasion that provokes Jem’s destructive act, she viciously disparages their father, Atticus, for defending a Black man in court, leading Jem to snap. As punishment for beheading Mrs. Dubose’s camellias, Atticus has Jem, with his younger sister Scout in tow, go to read to her every afternoon until she dismisses them. While there each day, Mrs. Dubose is harshly critical of Jem until she slips into an unconscious fit, drooling and writhing in bed. Eventually, an alarm rings, and Mrs. Dubose’s maid comes in and tells the children it is time for them to go so Mrs. Dubose can have her medicine. Every day, the alarm is set for a few minutes later. Gradually, Mrs. Dubose’s fits subside, and she remains lucid for the length of the children’s visits. Finally, one day, Jem is released from his reading responsibilities, and soon after, Mrs. Dubose dies. It is then that Atticus reveals to Jem that his time reading to Mrs. Dubose helped her break her morphine addiction. Mrs. Dubose had had no hope of living, but she struggled to die free. Atticus tells Jem, “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. Mrs. Dubose won, all ninety-eight pounds of her. According to her views, she died beholden to nothing and nobody. She was the bravest person I ever knew.”
Atticus also knows he is licked before he begins when he prepares to represent Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of rape. Even after elementary school-aged Scout miraculously manages to chasten a lynch mob into turning away outside the jail by warmly greeting a classmate’s father so that Tom survives to go to trial, Atticus knows he has no chance of winning an acquittal for Tom. He provides a brilliant defense that proves Tom’s innocence even though he knows it is hopeless, even though he knows he will have to face a good measure of grief and danger as a result of serving as Tom’s counsel. Indeed, Atticus does grieve when Tom, a kind and innocent man, dies following his wrongful conviction, allegedly in an attempt to escape from prison. Atticus’ children, Scout and Jem, face both bullying and mortal danger as a result of Atticus’ involvement in the case. Prior to the trial, Atticus tries to explain his involvement to his children: “...maybe you’ll look back on this with some compassion and some feeling that I didn’t let you down. This case, Tom Robinson’s case, is something that goes to the essence of a man’s conscience – Scout, I couldn’t go to church and worship God if I didn’t try to help that man.” It was hopeless, but Atticus’ humanity demanded that he struggle for Tom.
In the wake of Trump’s reelection, I’ve had flashes of nihilistic feeling. I’ve lamented that any action I take will be too small and do little to stem the rising tide of fascism and cruelty. What can I possibly do when billionaires with so much power are determined to cause pain and have said as much? But De La Torre’s invitation to embrace hopelessness and the examples of hopeless struggle in To Kill a Mockingbird urge me to do something in the face of injustice and lost causes. How do we find the strength to persevere in hopeless action when our spirits ache from what we see in the world?
In a letter to the monk, author, and theologian Thomas Merton in 1966, a young activist named Jim Forest seeks Merton’s counsel on how to persevere in his anti-war activism when it doesn’t seem to be making any difference. Forest despairs the killing of innocent people in Vietnam, wondering whether his work has meaning in the face of the war machine and the disinterest of American Christians. Merton responds in part by writing, “And then this: do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, as you yourself mention in passing, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.” As the young activist Jim Forest copes with the hopelessness of trying to stop the killing in Vietnam, Merton identifies that Forest will know hope and his spirit will be refreshed not by the outcome of his struggle, but through personal relationships with the people for whom and with whom he is struggling.
A few years ago I saw a painting on display at Tate Britain that visually represents the paradox of hopelessness and hope. Entitled Hope and painted by the artist George Frederic Watts and his assistants, the label alongside the piece reads:
“George Frederic Watts shows the figure of Hope blindfolded on a globe. She is playing a lyre, of which all the strings are broken except one. Several critics argued that Despair would be a more fitting title. Watts clarified: ‘Hope need not mean expectancy. It suggests here rather the music which can come from the remaining chord.’”
If we acknowledge our hopelessness and act despite it because our humanity depends on it, as De La Torre insists, and if we let go of outcomes and focus on personal relationships, as Merton counsels, the promise is that we will know hope through relationships and through the struggle itself. We may not see results, but we will participate in bending the arc of the universe toward justice, as Harper Lee’s famous novel about Atticus’s hopeless pursuit of justice for Tom Robinson helped to do. Hope means acknowledging our limitations and playing the remaining chord, as Watts suggests in his painting, as the fictional Mrs. Dubose does by conquering morphine addiction on her deathbed. The hope, and the meaning, are in the music made in the struggle itself, in relationships with the people for whom we play.
Bibliography
iStock. “Poverty,” September 13, 2007. https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/poverty-gm97709365-4229657.
Kujawa-Holbrook, Sheryl A., and Karen B. Montagno, eds. Injustice and the Care of Souls, Second Edition: Taking Oppression Seriously in Pastoral Care. 2nd edition. Fortress Press, 2023.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper, 2014.
Tate. “‘Hope‘, George Frederic Watts and Assistants, 1886.” Tate. Accessed December 1, 2024. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/watts-hope-n01640.
“Thomas Merton’s Letter to a Young Activist – Jim and Nancy Forest.” Accessed December 2, 2024. https://jimandnancyforest.com/2014/10/mertons-letter-to-a-young-activist/.
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