Why Hope? A Reflection for New Year’s

This Christmas my daughters gave me a book of Norse mythology edited, translated, and complied by H. A. Guerber.  For them it was an impulse buy, a last-minute gift from the sale classics section of Barnes and Noble.  For me it was a thread of connection to the mind of C. S. Lewis, who’s discovery of this same book sparked a longing which ultimately led to his conversion to Christianity.  Lewis named this longing, ‘joy,’ but I’ve always experienced it as hope.  

Lewis’ insight was not about our ability to be delighted, but to experience within delight, “an unsatisfied desire, which is itself more desirable than any satisfaction.”[1]  The holidays are a perfect time to reflect on this dynamic.  We delight in the connection with relatives and friends, rich food, or gifts, and at the same moment wish an estranged or past relative were there to experience it.  We marvel in the delight of children unwrapping little treasures and wish we could hold onto that unguarded wonder.  We, if we are fortunate enough to have home and loved ones, count our blessings with an awareness that around the corner and around the world is poverty, hunger, disease, and violence.  In each of these moments we experience the longing for the delight that doesn’t end, the table that’s always full, the community that’s forever unbroken.   Perhaps that’s why I experience this phenomena as hope.  

On the surface, New Year’s Day seems to trade in hope.  The most secular and irreligious among us use this window to reflect on the year that is ending and project a new set of priorities into the future.  We enter into an almost religious contemplation leading us to resolve that this will be the year we lose that extra fifteen pounds, make the career transition that will finally make us happy, surround ourselves with relationships that will exclusively delight and encourage us, and accomplish our financial goals.  

We do this knowing, in the words of an iconic U2 song, “Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.”  We struggle to believe that this year will really be very different.  A change of presidential administration didn’t heal a polarizing nation, bring an end to the COVID pandemic, or create an end to the environmental, refugee, racial, or geopolitical crises plaguing our world.  We knew they wouldn’t.  

Despite our realism we still cling to hope.  Something within us seems hardwired to believe that against all odds, and most of the evidence, this year will bring something new.  It seems to me that our species needs hope almost as much as we need oxygen.  Where Lewis’ described joy as desire, I’d describe hope as a need.  It is not simply that our experience of delight pulls us toward an unfulfilled longing we delight in more, it is that without hope we die.  Seers, artists, poets, and cynics may chime, “vanity of vanities…all is vanity… and a chasing after wind,”[2] but few of us can actually live that way.  We hunger for hope.  

In my church tradition, January 1st is the celebration of Feast of the Holy Name.  It celebrates the day, eight days after the birth of Jesus, where he received circumcision and was officially named.  The circumcision Jesus received marked him as a Jew, a member of that community who’s core story centers around deliverance from slavery and constitution as the people of G-d.  The name he received, literally means “G-d is deliverance.”  Holding these ideas together trains us to hope differently.  

Hope in the Christian tradition is not centered, like the myths of the Northmen, on glorious deeds of valor in a doomed world.  Christian hope is not centered, like our modern mythologies, on progress, personal mastery, economic independence, or expressive individualism.  It is anchored in an ancient story, around a man whose life and teaching grew out of the conviction that G-d would deliver his people, through his person. 

We’ve got to do something with this hunger for hope.  This year, I’m encouraged not because of vaccines, green initiatives, economics, or political cooperation, (as important as all these things are) but because the singular life and teaching of Jesus still stands out as compelling, inspiring, and trustworthy.  His life is the unfulfilled desire that expels other hopes.  

What gives you hope this New Year’s?  

[1] C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955; repr., New York: Mariner, 2012), 18.

[2] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. 1989. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.