Living Under Hope’s Roof

 “The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
―Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams 

I got the word “hope” tattooed on my wrist when I was 20 or so, a reminder of someone I loved. One summer around that same time I worked on a farm, and when I sowed my first handful of seeds I had the mind-boggling realization that I did not believe a single one would grow. In spite of the evidence of my own eyes, I had no hope that the seeds I put in the dirt would do the thing they were made to do. Things ought to work, I knew that somewhere deep down in my gut; but I also believed that, mostly, things didn’t.

It has taken me ten years to realize I reached that place, not because I had no hope at all, but because I continuously, fruitlessly, placed my hope in the wrong thing.  

The wrong hope: that things will get easier

When you wake up and check the news and it’s a gut-punch kind of morning, what do you find yourself hoping for? World peace? Reconciliation? “Come, Lord Jesus”?

I had a breakthrough when I realized my main reaction to this broken world was to hope that it would all just… stop being so hard. So complicated to navigate, to find truth in, to find kindred spirits in, to understand and thrive in and discern the right path through. Things that seemed like they ought to work tended to fall apart, everything felt too grim and big and overwhelming for me to have any chance of making a difference, and in the face of such odds, it just didn’t feel worth the effort overall. 

When I wished for “things to get easier,” what I really meant was I would have been perfectly happy if it all just vanished. I longed for silence, the peace of nothingness. Just me in a comfy chair with some tiramisu. No cacophony of voices shrieking their conflicting, unshakeable truths about reality and what is good and right, no wars or child malnourishment to disturb my sleep, no need to wrestle guiltily and unwillingly with the ethics and intricacies of the political topics of the day. My hope had nothing to do with God’s beloved world itself, its sweetness and tragedies—only its effect on me and my fragile sense of inner peace and how I felt it all ought to work: effortlessly.  

We humans as a whole have a similar tendency to place our collective hope in “things getting easier.” Simpler. Calmer. Less of a headache. More convenient and achievable.

As a society, we strive for progress. We want to believe that we are steadily marching forward, improving from century to century, getting better. Reaching toward a Star Trek Federation-style utopia with a universal translator, a grand central philosophy held in common, and something resembling harmony stretching far and wide. Sometimes, what we really mean by that is: we hope things will get easier… especially for us. 

This misplaced hope thrives in a society that invests heavily in innovative, nonessential technology—aimed at creating convenience and ease, accessible to only a privileged few—without ever sparing a thought for our neighbors across the ocean (or just across the interstate) who still lack access to clean drinking water. An entirely secular and materialistic dream of “a better future” has been used throughout history to justify the rich getting richer. And a study of history indicates that for all our concrete progress, we aren’t actually any “better” today than humans have been at any other time. 

Maria Skobtsova was a countercultural Russian nun (now canonized as Saint Maria of Paris by the Orthodox Church) who lived in Paris during the German occupation. She moved through a highly complex and troubled time, through atheism and revolution and mourning and rebellion and martyrdom, with a unique combination of sharp-tongued wit and self-effacing compassion. Here’s what she had to say about the Church’s connection to our human tendency to place our hope in personal ease and comfort: 

Our God-given freedom calls us to activity and struggle. And it would be a great lie to tell searching souls: “Go to church, because there you will find peace.” The opposite is true. She tells those who are at peace and asleep: “Go to church, because there you will feel real alarm about your sins, about your perdition, about the world’s sins and perdition. There you will feel an unappeasable hunger for Christ’s truth. There instead of lukewarm you will become ardent, instead of pacified you will become alarmed, instead of learning the wisdom of this world you will become foolish in Christ (Mother Maria Skobtsova: Essential Writings, 115). 

Hope is love, projected forward

Examining the theological virtues in What Are We Doing Here? Essays, Marilynne Robinson reflects on the hope shown by the prodigal son’s father as he watches from a long way off for the runaway’s return. The father’s hope is not founded in any indication from his son that he will repent and come home; in fact, it’s based on nothing at all but his own anxious, generous love for the scoundrel. In this way, God Himself models a version of hope to us that flies in the face of all logic. Robinson writes:

If love is greater than hope, as Paul says it is, this may be true in part because love is prior to a hope, a condition of it, and is fulfilled when hope falls away, fulfilled, if in fact it is ever fulfilled… Love never ends, the apostle tells us. Projected forward it is hope (226).

Living in God’s hope is founded on our choice to love and esteem and respect our neighbors—deeply, truly, and even against all reason. Not exactly an easy task.

Outside of escaping to a hermitage (and maybe not even then) we can never dwell in a place of effortlessness, a comfortable place free of conflict and noise, because people will never, ever be easy. People will never, ever be simple. And people will never, ever be anything but broken, outside of God’s grace. “Love your neighbor” may be the most complex and challenging and urgent command in all of human history. As Mother Maria writes, “I find it impossible to construct anything greater than these three words, ‘Love one another‘ —only, to the end, and without exceptions: then all is justified and life is illumined, whereas otherwise it is an abomination and a burden” (Mother Maria Skobtsova: Essential Writings, p. 19).

Living under hope’s roof together

Our experience as humans is at its poorest when we stand back from others, hoping in a distant, impersonal way that their anger or pain or difference from us will somehow be smoothed away without our needing to struggle to understand it or even look directly at it. When we hope for things to be easy and people to “just be better” for the sake of our own comfort, what we are really hoping for is the annihilation of the “other” from our sphere, of anyone who disagrees with us or disturbs our peace. That is a poor hope to live by. The “other,” as the passage of the sheep and the goats reminds us, is Christ himself. Everything changed for me the day I asked myself: In my quest for peace and comfort, would I choose to erase even the disconcerting, commanding love of Christ?

Our experience as humans is at its richest when lived lovingly and in community, that inconveniently complicated web of relationships and inevitable conflict. Difficult as it may sometimes be, only through loving and hoping together can we act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly in Jesus’ call.

True hope blooms out of a hunger and thirst for compassion and justice and righteousness, out of our love for others, for this broken world, for our God who is Love. When it does, it becomes a tough and vigorous sort of hope. It springs up and grapples with the daily hardships and the greater ones. It meets the troubling, troubled souls around us with eager respect and the recognition that we, too, may be troubling and troubled in their eyes, or at least in the ever-loving and unfathomable eyes of the God who stands waiting and watching, hoping against hope for our repentance and return. 

Things (and people) will not get easier, and there’s not much use in hoping they will. So what if, instead, we take a great, wild leap into the very hardest work of all: the toil of love? Only then will we live, together, under the roof of Christ’s own hope.