Hope for Hope's Sake

liminal thresholds of hope © Renée Eli

The present is not a time for desperation but for hopeful activity.
~Thomas Berry, The Great Work.

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Dear Friends and Family,

I did not intend to begin this segment on solitude on a sensitive topic, but then the sky exploded into the wee hours on a night with a bare sliver of moon in celebration of a certain kind of hope scribed on what some say is illusion, and I lay in bed flat on my back with arms outstretched listening from the unprotected underbelly of me to every boom that was not war but made me imagine what war would be like, and I knew I could not imagine what war would be like, even as I looked into my memory at all the images I have seen of all the people living—barely, if that’s what you call living—through war today and all the people who will die in war between now and the end of this sentence and the thousands more who will die or be maimed between the end of this sentence and the day you read this letter. It’s more than any human can bear.

. . .

between explosions, silence

in silence, wordless whispers of hope

resuscitations of hope

for hope’s sake and nothing more—

not to placate but doing the work of hope

. . .

And when, before the dawn of a new day, the birds broke the still smoke-filled sky with song in the way birds do day after day after day after the-sun-still-rises day, and I was awed and hushed all the same, it came to me to say to you in this letter that hope is not in tomorrow unless hope is in today. Our eyes on the horizon, every day is a prayer, every prayer is nothing less and nothing more than a yes to being, and in every yes to being, the agonies and the joys.

eagle, perennial symbol of hope © Renée Eli

We get caught up in hope for something. We get caught in a wish—if you wish upon a star. But we don’t find hope in a wish. We find hope emanating from the star. It is, already. Hope is the light-force. We come to hope in the act of abiding in a primordial light-ness, a goodness that, moment by moment, brings you and me into being.

We sense hope in a bird’s nest. We hold it in a seed. Hope is in a child’s first breath. It is the spiritual (unseen) companion to the biological (seen) continuation of being. It is a light-force in life itself—élan vital.¹ Ours is the task of inner orienting to this force as vital participants at this uniquely uncertain time. We abide in hope not because we believe our hope will make what we hope be so but because we know that without hope it cannot be so.

In the words of the late esotericist and Christian Hermeticist, Valentin Tomberg,

The light-force which emanates from the star—constituted through the marriage of contemplation and activity, and which is the antithesis of the thesis that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ is hope.

It proclaims to the world: ‘What has been is that which prepares what will be, and what has been done is that which prepares what will be done; there is only that which is new under the sun. Each day is a unique event. . . .²

History does not repeat itself. Patterns of being reinstate patterns of being, which looks like history repeating itself and can be just as potent if not more so. Hope is the arduous work of preparing the soil for something new under the sun, for shifting patterns of being. Hope happens in the implicate order of potentia.  

The late quantum visionary, David Bohm, whom some say was the most influential theoretical physicist of the twentieth century, said that all existence is woven upon an unseen un(and so all)dimensional fabric of quivering potentia. This unseen, the implicate order of things, spans not time, not space, but the ever-present Origin³ always and everywhere blooming into the explicate—infinite particles collapsing out of and returning to infinite unseen waves, the unique unfolding of life day-by-day.⁴ Hope effectuates what blooms.

Hope effectuates what blooms not because hope abides in the human will but because it does not. Hope is not to be found in New Age mantras of manifestation, which serve the wants of ‘I’. Active hope is active surrender to the emanating star.

We could read Tomberg’s passage and in our hope for something new under the sun, we could slip right by a vital phrase. If we bypass it, we’re bound to bypass the depths of hope beseeching us. The light-force of hope which emanates from the star is constituted through the marriage of contemplation and activity. For there to be hopeful activity, there must be contemplation of equal intensity.

It is on behalf of hopeful activity and contemplation that we turn to solitude not so much as the act of being alone nor even of being comfortable being alone. We can be alone and not be in solitude. Just watch every twitch to pick up the phone as soon as you sit down with yourself. Notice how quick the impulse to open your laptop to check emails. Even paying bills would do. Then listen to all the justifications for every task suddenly so pressing. Now you begin to touch solitude.

In solitude, we awaken to interiority—what it is like to be you and me in this moment and this one, each of us of our agonies, loneliness, anxiety, boredom, and so, too, our joys. We come to the inescapable truth of our existence and how we respond to it. And we catch a glimpse of every conniving impulse to escape. If we stay with the interiority and self-inquiry, the tender recognitions of the fleetingness of being, and that we yearn, we come to the wild depths of soul—not only this soul touched with the fragrance of ‘I’ but the God-soul that just kissed the breath of insight and so, too, was kissed.

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Final Week of Tithe Appeal

Thank you so, you who have generously offered your financial support during this appeal.

And to you who have commented and emailed about the spirit of a tithe, thank you for your heartful reflections.

Thank you, all of you, for reading these letters, commenting when the impulse moves you, and offering a show of hand from time to time with the ❤️ at the bottom of your email to say, “I’m here.” Most of all, thank you for your devotion to the inner life of this sacred human unfolding.

With love,

Renée

1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1913).

2. Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. Robert Powell (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1985), p. 421.

3. This phrase from Jean Gebser, often cited here from his book Ever-Present Origin, trans. by Noel Barstad and Algis McKunas (Ohio University Press, 1984).

4. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). I have taken significant imagistic liberties in offering such an abbreviated glimpse at Bohm’s extraordinary contributions to our understanding of Reality.