Among the many things I appreciate about the apostle Paul is his
elucidation of what Christian tradition came to call the theological virtues of
faith, hope and love. Although he did this most famously in I Corinthians 13,
it recurs in (I think) all of his letters.
Let us reflect on hope.
The movie Patch Adams has a young doctor treating his patients with humor. In
one scene, Patch mourns the loss of the woman he loves. He argues with God and
turns away, but suddenly, a butterfly appears on his medical bag and flits over
to his chest. It flies away. A sign of hope arrived at just the right time.
George Bernanos reminds us that we
must lose hope in the things that deceive in order to free ourselves to hope in
the things that do not deceive.
Today, we often think of positive or negative thinking, or the thinking
of the optimist or pessimist. I think Vaclav Havel is quite helpful when he
separates optimism from hope.
Hope
is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that
something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense,
regardless of how it turns out. (Disturbing the Peace (1986), Chapter 5)
Many people would view themselves as pessimistic and as cynics. Yet,
they get up each morning, and get on with their lives. I wonder if underneath
the overt negativity is not some buried optimism that this day might contain a
surprise. In fact, some research suggests that evolution has hardwired human
beings for hope.
In a study published in the October
2011 issue of Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for
Neuroimaging at University College London present evidence that optimistic
people learn only from information that reinforces that rosy outlook. Now,
think of that in light of this passage. Paul categorized all those troubles into
the category of a "slight momentary
affliction" that "is
preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure" (v.
17). The end was so bright that Paul could disregard his present troubles as
indicating nothing about the future. Was Paul simply incurably optimistic? If
so, the people at Wellcome Trust Centre would have loved to have had him as a
subject.
The study actually suggests that
many of us are hardwired for optimism. What this means is that in many of us,
our brains do not make pessimistic updates to what we think. Some reporters
call this a “brain defect.” If so, people seem to need the defect in order to
make personal progress. The defect allows us to imagine better realities.
Imagine our distant ancestors living in caves. They might still be there,
dreaming of light and heat, if it were not for their ability to be optimistic
and imagine a better future. Of course, individual exceptions are always there.
Some of us may be among them. Yet, as a human race, this study suggests, we
tilt toward optimism because, on balance, positive expectations increase our
odds for survival. Here is a comment
from one of the researchers, Tali Sharot,
"Without
optimism, our ancestors might never have ventured far from their tribes and we
might all be cave dwellers, still huddled together and dreaming of light and
heat." ("The optimism bias." TIME, June 6, 2011, 38-46)
We may have some
hard wiring, so to speak, that helps us take risks and imagine a better future.
Yet, the hope we find in the New Testament has a different basis, even
if it may meet a quite human need.
The hope of which Paul could write and by which he lived had its basis
in what he believed God had done and said in Jesus, whom God raised from the
dead. Because of that, the afflictions he described in II Corinthians 4:7-12
became in verse 17 his slight momentary
affliction gained a different perspective. In fact, they prepare for him an eternal weight of glory beyond all
measure. He looks to what he cannot see, for what he can see is temporary,
but what he cannot see is eternal. His hope extends to facing death, for the earthly tend we live in may die,
but, we have a building from God, a house
not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
As C. S. Lewis perceptively observed,
"The sense that in this
universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet
with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is
part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the
promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep
desire. For glory means good rapport with God, acceptance by God, response,
acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have
been knocking all our lives will open at last ... [and reveal] ... a weight or
burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain."[1]
[1] ("The Weight of
Glory," in C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses [New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1975; First Touchstone Edition, 1996], 34-36.)
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