Can we have hope without faith? I have always believed not. Both are spiritual concepts to me, but love, which comes in that package has been romanticized and turned into a hallmarked, trivial, and humanized idea, so why not hope?
When my faith lost its order, structure, and community, hope went with it. Where it went I don’t know. I feel like they are near, but I can’t grasp them. Perhaps they are still with me just languishing from a lack of being fed like monsters or a pet?
I’m really at a loss. It feels like there’s no room inside me for faith and hope when I’m so full of anger and despair, some resentments, lots of melancholy, and bits of sloth. Retirement does not suit me. My internal garden has run wild.
Rather, I should pray for intelligent holiness, as Flannery O’Connor penned. Does longing for count as prayer?
To describe my broken faith is difficult for me, raised as I was a missionary kid. I can tell you that no one has asked about my faith in all these years since Holly’s murder. I need to talk about it but everyone is silent.
Everyone has their presumptions.
My faith has always been a shaking, spindle-legged thing, mainly because I couldn’t sever the connection to my human father from God the father. To know me is to know that.
When Holly was murdered I shattered into pieces like her mirror punctured by the bullets that pierced through her. And when I pulled myself back together faith was missing in the puzzle of my soul. Just gone. Inaccessible.
I never made a conscious decision. It simply wasn’t there anymore. And faith and hope being so closely associated for me meant I couldn’t find hope.
Perhaps they are nearby waiting for me to turn on the light. For now all I have to hold on to is love.
But with only love, I despair of the world. With my love I see the suffering around us all, the devastated, the hungry, the freezing, the fearful, all this is loud for me. Love gives me empathy and compassion, but without faith and hope, I have no strength to help, and the world continues full of misery.
What can we make of this? The Christian understanding of hope is rooted in faith in God through Jesus Christ, representing a confident assurance that God is faithful. In contrast, Nietzsche believed that hope is detrimental, as it prolongs the “torments of man.” I can relate to this perspective—love and hope that lack faith can be painful.
I don’t know maybe these are just words, stupid and ignorant words.
Because for faith, I do believe one needs the Holy Spirit and I’ve never been able to conjure her. That’s the truth.
Hope is the worst. Unattached to faith and love.
Prompt: #theisolationjournals to write a manifesto of hope. What would you like to make come alive and why?
Logic & Imagination 