A Seasonal Reflection on Hope
Sister Marianne Watts, OP
Most of us grew up with fairy tales and found them faithful companions through our own dark forests. I was disappointed many years later to hear a prominent educator criticize fairy tales for misleading children with happy endings that for many will never come. I wondered how she could focus on endings and completely skip over the journeys of challenge, suffering, and change that are an essential part of the fairy tale. And as for happiness, no fairy tale that I can think of includes fulfillment within the story. Why? Because the story ends. What we are left with is the promise, not the reality, of "Happily-ever-after." "After" means just that. It doesn't mean "Now," a detail that often eludes adults. For children, the promise is enough. Hope is enough.
Some years ago, the Stephen Sondheim musical fable "Into
the Woods" investigated what might happen to various fairy
tale characters if they achieved happily-ever-after status right
away. The results were disastrous. Freedom became restraint and
boredom moved into the castle. The message? For one reason or
another, people are not ready for the happiness that comes ever
after. Maybe they are too tied to the now. Maybe they have too
small a capacity for hope.
The song, "Is That All There Is?" is the lament of
someone who attains what she wants, over and over again, and
finds it not enough. Is that hollow feeling the fault of the
attainment or of the quality of hoping? Our society is often
criticized for wanting too much, but what if we want too little,
hope for too little? What if our spirits are too small right
now to contain the glory of ever after?
It seems to me that the one constant
in our lives that establishes a hierarchy of what is important
is loss. How often has it been said that we only recognize the
value of something when it is taken away? If we find what is
lost, the quality of our happiness is of an entirely different
character than before the loss. Jesus' parables of loss bear
this out: the lost sheep, the lost money, and the lost (or prodigal)
son. The first two stories speak of the vast rejoicing in heaven
over one repentant sinner, much more than over 99 of the virtuous,
"who have no need of repentance," an ironic commentary
on those who are content to want too little.
In the final parable, the father explains to his elder son, "you
are with me always and all I have is yours. But it was only right
we should celebrate and rejoice, because your brother here was
dead and has come to life; he was lost and is found." The
elder son is righteous, certainly, but he lacks his brother's
special quality of happiness (and the father's largeness of heart)
precisely because the younger brother "was lost and is found."
Loss can become, over time, the fertile ground of new growth.
It is as if, through the various losses that are so essential
a part of being human, we travel through a difficult land in
order to be changed into a purer version of ourselves. We might
call it a journey of purgation or challenge, or trial, or hope.
Lent is the season of loss and the season of finding. In Jesus'
time, the days leading to the Crucifixion were filled with misunderstanding,
accusation, betrayal by friends, intense emotional, spiritual,
and physical suffering: a journey through a nightmare landscape
that would change merely everything because of the promise of
Easter. What I do with Lent is up to me. It can be only a remembrance
of something past or a vibrant re-grounding of hope through the
acceptance of what is. It can be a time of sacrificing non-essentials
or a seedbed in which the spirit grows through my daily encounters.
It can be a series of pious exercises or a consecration to the
sacrament of the present moment, to seeing with new eyes and
hearing with new ears.
I have to wonder why, when Jesus
told the disciples that he would be captured, mocked, beaten,
killed and would rise again on the third day, they did not make
some effort to come to grips with this message. And then I have
to wonder what I am doing with the same message.
No one can go around the dark forests. We all have to go through
them, grow and be changed by what we meet there, and move surely
into the promise. I think this is the message of Lent—hope's
season.