Hope comes when we have lost hope.  “Loss” is the beginning of life, as in the teaching of Jesus…to paraphrase, “Find your life only in losing it.”  And that brings immediately to my mind the almost inscrutable Jacques Lacan who noted that nothing of any significance in life takes place without the experience of loss.  And the consummate summation of this wisdom is the words of Jesus on the cross, “Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

It is really hard to lose.  It is hard to lose even in a simple game of checkers, or chess, or a football game with our “local sports team” but even more so in an existential crisis when our soul and spirit are on the line, especially when our “soul and spirit” are infused with the immaturity of ego.  In those moments our ego demands that we “dig in” and cling to our self-deceptions, our “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness” (Conrad Aiken).

The loss I am presenting here is the gateway to humility, that which T.S. Eliot described as, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  This is particularly challenging for those of us who are “spiritually” inclined for it often involves realizing just how “the flesh” has dominated our spirituality which we then realize was intrinsically ersatz.  And, therein, I must plead, “Mea culpa.”

The anguish of this realization is here captured in a couple of quotations from George Eliot:

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”  And elsewhere she noted, “There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.”