Hope is a realization not bound by experience.
If one’s sense of hope arises from something outside our experience, from where does it come? It seems to manifest or dissipate beyond the reach of will or reason. Neither a wish nor an argument of logic, it is a stance towards existence seemingly independent of circumstance.
We’ve all had experiences that stimulate and confirm a sense of hope; and experiences that challenge or threaten to evaporate it. Yet experiences alone don’t give or take it away.
The story of Job, for example, confronts us with a ‘resolution’ (before I thought I knew You; but now I see you face to face) that you either get or you don’t! For some, it’s a tale with a less than satisfying resolution. There is one point of that story, however: whatever hope is, it’s not something you earn. In a way, regardless of its impact, what, if anything, does it have to do with each of us at all?
The Greeks wrestled with hope in their stories of Fate, Chance and the play of the gods. Others place hope in the context of a personal relationship with a source of existence; yet the terms of that relationship vary within all those traditions. Atheists and non-believes also experience hope regardless of circumstance and are not immune from the struggles with its vicissitudes and its source.
Hope, as perhaps faith and love, seem sourced beyond the logic of argument or belief. It is a realization. From whence does it come? Do we have any say over the conditions of its appearance?
If hope comes from nowhere, is it in the allowance of nowhere?
Freud, beneath the noise of his theories, actually came upon the space allowing nowhere:
The therapeutic silence allowing cycles of emergence and dissolution of transference through speech that allows its loss – a mutual suspension of identities within an expectant, content-less silence: a space of pure question with no justification beyond itself – a shared space of silence within and between us.
If we allow spaces between us that keep faith with our question to each other and ourselves, is that perhaps the portal to hope?
***
De Colores
if by chance
should i bump into you
will i assign a name
so not to meet
clinging tightly
to fear of revelation?
if by chance
should you bump into me
will our eyes chance surrender
faultless surprise?
dispelling
luckless dreams
seeing colors
neither knew were there
aspiring something new?
James Donnelly
Explorations
South Garden Press
© 2018 James Donnelly, DSW.LCSW
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South Garden Press, New York
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