"Faith, Hope, and Love: Part 2"

           My words with you this morning are the second-part of a three-part series titled “Faith, Hope, and Love.” Last week, I talked about faith and how we as Unitarian Universalists, as religious liberals, might understand the idea of faith. This week I want to talk about hope and its importance to our lives.

            At first glance, hope is not something that easy to wrap one’s head around. We’ve all felt what it’s like to be hopeful. Some of us have felt what it’s like to be hopeless. But when it comes down to saying exactly what hope is, that’s a more difficult task.

            While Emily Dickinson once said, “Hope is a thing with feathers,” somebody else once said that in our hearts we suspect that hope is everything, but in our minds we fear that it is nothing, nothing but a mirage. Which is it? Everything? Nothing? Something with feathers? Does having hope make a difference in our lives? If so, how does it work?

            This may sound like an obvious thing to say - - but you know, this is what we ministers do…stand up in front of people saying obvious things while trying to make them sound profound - - but the more hopeful we are, the happier we’ll be.

            In general, social scientists tell us the more we practice positive thinking, the happier we’ll be and in fact how we think about our lives is actually far more important to our happiness than what the actual circumstances of our lives may be. But this idea is actually one that predates social science by many centuries. Sidhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, once said, “Our life is the creation of our mind.”            Marucs Aurelius, the Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher, once said, “Life is but what you deem it.” Shakespeare said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

            In general, whether we are happy in life or not, depends on how we think about three things - - ourselves, our current lives, and our future. The motto of unhappy people everywhere is, “I’m no good. My world is bleak. My future is hopeless.” Happy people don’t take

the exact opposite view. Rather happy people tend to say something along the lines of “I’m still a likable and loveable person despite my imperfections. My life isn’t perfect, but it’s good, and I have a lot to be thankful for, and I’m hopeful about my future.” We might say that hope is a specific kind of positive thinking, a positive thinking about the future.

            But where does hope come from, and is it always rational for us to be hopeful?

            Last week, I talked about faith, and suggested that we as religious liberals might understand the word “faith” as being synonymous with the word “trust.” Those things we have faith in, are those things our experiences of life and the experiences of others have taught us about the world but that aren’t always immediately apparent to us at any given time and in any given situation. We can talk about our faith in our own goodness and our own abilities. We can talk about our faith in humanity. We can talk about the faith in the goodness of life itself, our trust that life is ultimately good despite its many limitations. As I suggested last week, our sense of hope, our positive outlook about the future, arises out of this faith, this trust. But let me get a little bit more specific now. I like to think about there being three kinds of hope: optimism, ordinary hope, and ultimate hope.

            What do I mean by these three things?

            By optimism, I mean that feeling we have when we think there’s more than a 50 percent chance of something happening. In other words, it’s when we think that something’s more likely to happen than not happen. “Is there going to be nice weather for the picnic?” somebody asks. “I’m optimistic,” somebody else answers, if the picnic is in August.

            Sometimes when we think things are going well and guess they’re going to continue to go well, but are aware there’s at least a possibility they could tank at any moment, we use the phrase, “cautiously optimistic.” The Mariners are up 10-0, and it’s the beginning of the ninth inning. “Do you think they’ll win?” my wife asks. “I’m cautiously optimistic,” I say.

            Blind optimism is a dangerous thing - - which is why I’ve always liked the saying, “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst,” - - but I think the more we can be optimistic about our lives, the better off we’ll be most of the time.

            By “ordinary hope,” I mean something that’s kind of one-level down from optimism. I mean that feeling we have when we think there’s less than a 50 percent chance of something happening, but there’s still a chance, and despite me calling it “ordinary hope,” I don’t want to suggest it’s now a powerful thing.

            Somebody who has helped me clarify my own understanding of hope is the author and medical doctor Jerome Groopman. Groopman is a professor at Harvard Medical School. His specialty is blood diseases, cancer, and AIDS, and he has spent most of his career trying to figure out the inner workings of these diseases.

             In the years that he spent treating patients with life-threatening illnesses, however, Groopman also became fascinated with something else that seemed to play as an important role in the lives of his patients as the medical care he provided for them, and that something else was hope.

            A man who valued rationality and the rigors of the scientific method, Groopman was interested in discovering an understanding of hope that both satisfied his respect for science and made sense of his observations of the role hope played in his patients’ lives. He tells the stories of many these individuals and the role that hope played in their lives and the story of his own quest to better understand hope in his book The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness.

            I’d like to share one of the stories from that book with you this morning, and this is a story about a man named George Griffin. Griffin was not one of Groopman’s patients, but was a colleague, another professor at Harvard University Medical School. Griffin was the chairman of the Department of Pathology and had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of stomach cancer. Ironically, stomach cancer was the disease that Griffin had spent his career studying. He had traveled the world learning about the disease and perhaps no one else in the world knew more about it than him.

            So when Griffin discovered what type of stomach cancer he had, he knew that less than one percent of patients survived more than a year with that type of cancer. Everyone expected that Griffin would resign himself to the fact that he was dying. After all, nobody knew more about the reality of death than a pathologist.

            What surprised Griffin’s colleagues, including Groopman, was that Griffin chose an extremely aggressive form of treatment for himself: multiple courses of chemotherapy and radiation as well as surgery. He chose this treatment despite the fact that there was no evidence it would make any difference and despite the truly horrendous, sickening side effects.

            Other colleagues suspected Griffin had gone mad and was trying to torture himself to death before his cancer could kill him. Groopman wondered if he was in denial, saying his colleague’s choice of treatment seemed like a “desperate, wrong-headed, ultimately useless effort to resist the inevitable,” that would also rob him of any opportunity to spend his last days in tranquility with family and friends.

            Thirteen years after Griffin’s initial diagnosis, Groopman sat down with his cured colleague and ask him about why he had chosen such aggressive treatment in spite of the odds it wouldn’t work.

            Griffin told Groopman that he had not been mad, nor had he been in denial. He had fully understood his situation. But he had allowed himself to hope, not a lot, but a little. “Even if I didn’t prevail - - and I didn’t expect to - - it was my only chance,” Griffin told Groopman. “I deeply wanted to live,” Griffin said, “so I had to fight. Then I could tell myself that I had tried, that I had done everything possible. There would be no regrets.”

            In his book, Groopman does not tell Griffin’s story in his book to suggest that all patients with a life-threatening illness should always seek the most aggressive form of therapy. That is not his belief, and neither is it mine, and I wouldn’t share the story with you if I thought it was his point.

            Groopman does tell the story to make the point that hope makes a difference. What Groopman knew anecdotally was also confirmed by numerous studies that showed that patients who are hopeful have higher rates of survival and quicker recoveries.

            But how does hope work? Is it possible that the connection between our minds and our bodies is so strong that if someone is hopeful enough, if someone believes strongly enough that they will get better or wants to get better badly enough, that can actually affect one’s body?

            In a quest to the answer this question, Groopman poured through the writings of self-styled scientific gurus who claimed that with desire and determination and positive thinking, the mind could overcome any disease of the body - - that you could laugh away lupus or cure cancer through meditation and visualization. Much of this writing, he says, was “long on claims and short on rigorous scientific data.”

            What Groopman did find was numerous sophisticated studies that showed quite scientifically that hope has the possibility of tempering both pain and fear. When we are hopeful about something, when we believe that something good is possible and when we anticipate it happening, it alters our neurochemistry. In other words, having hope changes our brains, releasing chemicals into our brains that are akin to opiates, our body’s own form of morphine.

            Groopman came to the conclusion that hope cannot cure any life-threatening disease, but that because hope tempers fear and pain and lifts our mood, patients who are hopeful risk treatments they might not otherwise risk and endure more easily the pain caused both by their diseases and the treatment they receive for their diseases. More simply put, hope inspires us to take risks and endure difficulties that we might not otherwise take or endure.

            A cynic might then say, “Well then hope is just a self-fulfilling prophecy,” and he or she would be right, but that doesn’t make hope any less powerful. I also think this understanding of hope helps us to understand why hope is so important not only when we face a life-threatening illness, but in every aspect of our lives - - in our relationships, in our work, in our politics, and in everything else. By tempering the inevitable fear and pain that are part of life, hope allows us to take risks we wouldn’t otherwise take and endure the difficulties that sometimes accompany those risks. Hope allows us to live life as we must - - in the words of Gordon Allport, “half-sure and whole –hearted.”

            But let me now talk about what I like to call “ultimate hope.” If optimism is the belief that there’s more than a 50 percent chance something will happen, and “ordinary hope” is the belief that there’s less than a 50 percent chance something will happen, but there’s still at least a chance, ultimate hope is required when the chances of life turning out like we’d really like it to turn out are slim to none, and closer to none.

            But what can it mean then to have hope in a situation in which the chances of things turning out the way we would like to them to turn out are slim to none?

            I’ve talked before about spirituality and religion being all about our yearning and quest for connection and meaning in our lives. For me, ultimate hope is not about our lives turning out how we’d really like them to turn out, but it’s a belief, or a faith, or a trust, that whatever does happens in our lives, however things turn out, for better or worse, we will still be able to discover connection and meaning.

            There’s a psalm in Hebrew scripture I like, Psalm 139. It says:

 

            Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?

⁸If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

⁹If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

¹⁰even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

¹¹If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,”

¹²even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

           

            Commenting on this psalm, the Unitarian Universalist minister Roy Phillips once wrote, “In theological kindergarten the discussion is about whether there is a giant in the sky, and if so, how big he is or if he is a she. At the intermediate and advanced levels, theological discussion concerns itself with this possibility of transmuting any and every darkness into a servant of creation, transformation, and renewal.”

            For me, ultimate hope is about a trust in that possibility.

            The psychiatrist and author Irvin Yalom tells a story about a woman named Eva, a woman who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in her early fifties. Yalom says that she had lived “an extraordinarily zestful life in which altruistic activities had always provided her with a powerful sense of life purpose.” Yalom says:

 

Almost everyone who came into contact with Eva during the last two years of her life was enriched by her. When she first learned of her cancer and again when she learned of its spread and its fatal prognosis, she was plunged into despair but quickly extricated herself by plunging in to altruistic projects. She did volunteer work on a hospital ward for terminally children. She closely examined a number a charitable organizations in order to make a reasoned decision about how to distribute her estate. Many old friends had avoided close contact with her after she developed cancer. Eva systematically approached each one to tell them that she understood their reason for withdrawal, that she bore no grudge, but that still it might be helpful to them when they faced their own death, to talk about their feelings toward her.

            …She was in a support group for patients with metastatic cancer and found meaning until the end of her life in the fact that her attitude toward her death could be of value to many other patients who might be able to use Eva’s zest for life and courageous stance toward death as a model for their own living and dying.

 

            One of these other patients wrote a poem that was read at Eva’s memorial service:

            Whenever the wind is from the sea

            Salty and strong

            You are here.

 

            Remembering your zest for hilltops

            And the sturdy surf of your laughter

            Gentles my grief at your going

            And tempers the thought of my own.

 

            Eva did not live with the hope that she might get better, but she did live with the hope that even as she grew sicker, she still might discover connection in meaning in her life and not give into despair.

            Let me tell one more story about ultimate hope, a story I heard from my colleague, the Unitarian Universalist minister Jane Rzepka:

 

A one-paragraph newspaper article describes a subway platform during the morning rush hour at Grand Central Terminal. A train pulls in; a well-dressed woman gets off. Before the doors close, the woman realizes that she is holding only one of her leather gloves. She looks back into the train and spots the matching one on the seat. It is obviously too late to dash back in to retrieve it, so with a cavalier shrug, she flings her arm out and, the doors about to close, tosses her glove onto the seat alongside its mate. The doors shut, and the train pulls away.

 

            When I first heard this story, I couldn’t help but wonder. What happened to the gloves? Were they eventually knocked to the floor of the subway, where they were repeatedly trampled and ruin? Were they picked up and turned in at some station and left to rot in some lost and found bin? Or did someone without gloves, perhaps some homeless person trying to make it through another cold winter, pick them up and slip them on her hands?

            So often, I think, the actions of our lives - - and sometimes our entire lives - - are like small stones being dropped into a pond, creating ripples far beyond the point at which the stone fell, and we never quite know what the results of our individual actions or our lives may be, and yet in my experience, at least once in a while, what may seem like an event without any redeeming value in our own lives may turn out to touch another life in a deep and profound way. In some ways, ultimate hope  is related to a humility about our ability to understand and predict Life’s creative and serendipitous  ways.

            In our reading this morning, we read words by Ralph Helverson, “We have religion when we have done all that we can, and then in confidence entrust ourselves to the life that is larger than ourselves.” My friends, when we can, may we do our best to be optimistic. When optimism is too much to ask, may we be hopeful. And when even ordinary hope seems too much to ask, may we  do all we can and then in confidence entrust ourselves to the life that is larger than ourselves.

            So may it be. Amen.