In this episode, we explore how to break of the debilitating gloom and despondency that surrounds us everywhere now.
Looking around in this world of ours, well, yeah, it does seem a bit apocalyptic at present. War, famine, fire, floods, drought, pandemics, climate-change hitting hard enough for people to actually notice at last, and, oh boy, an absolutely rampant, rabid plague of paediarchy - ‘rule by, for and on behalf of the most childish’. Just to name a few of the issues right now.
Yet before we fall into the fatalistic doom-and-gloom and all that, it’s worthwhile remembering that whatever we may be facing, there’s always hope.
Hope isn’t just sitting around waiting for someone else to fix it all - hope is active, a literal ‘response-ability’. It’s often small, delicate, quiet - about finding the blossoms that become the flowers that become the seeds for new growth.
Hope is about finding the joy - often in the small things and small changes. Finding those little hints and glints of light and lightheartedness amidst all the otherwise-overwhelming gloom. And in sharing those moments of lightness with others, too, to help everyone lighten up.
Hope is about finding the possible - about making that possible possible. It’s about noticing those brief moments where change can take place - and then setting in motion to help that change happen.
In short, our greatest hope is in hope itself.
Hope connects with faith, in that the latter reminds us that the world is much greater than we are, and that there are always new possibilities out there.
Faith reminds us that to reach those possibilities, we need to rely on the discipline of trust - hence ‘trust the universe’ and all that. It does work, if we let it work: the catch is to let it work in its own way, rather than trying to force it to work in the way we expect or want.
And again, faith is active, not passive. Faith is not an idle cargo-cult-style ‘God will provide’, because whatever god is involved, it usually won’t provide in that effort-free way anyway. Instead it’s more like ‘Trust to Allah, but tie the camel first’: faith requires work in order to be able to trust the faith.
For faith to work, we need to have faith in how faith works.
Hope and faith both connect with charity. Which is not just about throwing money at people and expecting them to do the work, but is more about caritas - literally, caring - for and about ourselves and everyone else. We’re all in this together: sure, the covert crybabies may be functionally incapable of caring about anything other than themselves, but for the rest of us, caring and being cared-for do matter.
And caring is again active, not passive. It’s a lot more than just ‘thoughts and prayers’, it’s about finding what we can do to make things work, how to make things better, ultimately for everyone, and for our world as well
For caring to work, we need to care about caring, for everyone, including ourselves.
Hope rescues us from gloom and futility; faith opens up our view of the world and its possibilities; caring brings us to intention and action. They all connect together, and work together, as a unified whole.
That old phrase about “Faith, hope, charity, and the greatest of these is…” - well, if it was up to me, I’d recommend to start with hope.