I often vow not to hope, and always break that vow.
And the next thing I’m supposed to say is that finally my hopes are realized, my desires achieved and all my wildest dreams come true.
But this is not what’s happening just now. Just now I break that vow and I don’t get what I want. I hope, and my hopes are dashed against the rocks like the first time we hear that song, where his hopes are gone, and so his hope is gone, and so he is gone. And we experience that hope vicariously, and the hope of what we, listening to his story, want. And he doesn’t get that and we don’t get that.
Sometimes our hopes are dashed against the rocks like that, or like the babies’ brains.
This is very hard.
This in my memory isn’t talked about much in the circles wherein I have moved. Maybe not in any, and it seems strange to imagine because I can’t see that I’m unique here. Either I’m not seeing it, or we don’t do it, and if it’s the former, OK, there’s a lot I don’t see, but if it’s the latter, what are we talking about, if not this?
Clearly, specifically, no embellishment, I mean why don’t we talk about these times where all we want, all we ask, all we dream and hope, is crushed like a newborn’s soft skull against jagged granite by men who …
Well they do not hate those babies, actually.
They hardly consider them at all, I imagine.
They just love bursting their skulls on rocks.
One reason we don’t hear about this is possibly that nothing can be said. That nothing can approach what happens at these times when absolutely everything seems gone (it isn’t if we can still talk to God in them, but it feels that way). It can’t be said; it can only be done, and not by someone else saying it, unless we’re talking about that person’s dashed hopes.
And then we’re talking not them, about theirs not ours, which is really the same thing in another direction.
I suppose we could say, look, no one gets by.
We could try to exhort, you must pass by the dragon.
They might tell us, it’s going to get bad for you, I can’t even say.
It wouldn’t matter. If we didn’t believe, it would fall empty. If we did, we still wouldn’t know. If we put it in the box on the shelf that so much of what we’re told goes into, wouldn’t it be a waste? We shouldn’t do it, really, is all, except we can’t help it. We have to hope.
But this only usually makes the problem worse, because what is happening in those times is a training to, among other things, hope in nothing else but Him. And if we think we can get something by telling other people the story, it may mean we’re not done with the lesson yet, no matter how much we hope we might be.
So.
I cannot write much about this, and don’t want to. But I cannot help writing something, because it’s what I do. Which is also hope. For if one can preach on it, or I can still write about it, or if you can tell another about it, we’re not bereft.
Which, just now, given my recent record in hope isn’t encouraging.
Which, then, of course, thinking on the lesson, and the Teacher, is.