Tag Archives: hopelessness

Vaclav Havel on Hope

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Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands for a chance to succeed. (Vaclav Havel)

“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world” and I would add, “a ‘mind’ working in harmony with a heart.”  This hope is grounded in the Spiritual, a Divinely inspired, intuitive understanding that is not based in what is so often an ersatz “joy” of the common-sense reality that most of us call home.  “Joy” is very wonderful but we often fall victim to a common-sense definition of that word which is but a quest for what C.S. Lewis called, ”a quest for immediate gratification over a believed-in pattern of glory.” Hope is most real when we face the grim dirge of hopelessness when circumstances seem beyond the pale of any rational hope.

Here is one of my favorite poetic approaches to this hope/hopelessness continuum from the pen of T. S. Eliot in “East Coker,” one of “The Four Quartets”:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

(AFTERTHOUGHT—Havel was the last president of Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech Republic, serving from 1989-2003.  He was an author, a playwright, and memoroist whose literary skills were used to criticize the totalitarian Communist regime that oppressed Eastern Europe.)

“Rage, Rage, Against That Good Night”

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Poet Dylan Thomas suggest rage had its place. Shakespeare, in King Lear said, “Blunt not the heart, enrage it.” Sometimes anger does have a place in unleashing the dormant passions of unlived life. The following poem is by Lynn Emanuel in the pages of a recent copy of the New York Review of Books:

hello to the unimaginative and dim ways of my kin, hello
to the bad lot we are, to the women mean and plucked, and to the men

on the broken steps who beat down the roses with their hosings,
to the nights that rose black as an inked plate, into which an acid bit stars—

puckered, tight, hard, pale as a surgeon’s scars,
hello to all that vast, unconditional bad luck, to the sensible, the stuffy,

the ugly couture of the thrifty, to the limp of bad goods, of old
furniture, the repeated wince of the creaky rocker, and to the grandmothers

dying in its clutch, and hello to rage which like an axis can move the world.

Watch the Republicans Continue To “Guzzle the Kool-aid”

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With Trump’s 2nd Impeachment trial before us, we are going to see a real time playing out of the prophetic skit by Saturday Night Live in 2013, “Mr Belvedere’s Fan Club,” starring Tom Hanks. I have blogged in the past about a reverie of someone lost in the lunacy of a man who believes the moon is made out of cheese. In that reverie, I make the point that anyone who believes anything….regardless of how crazy it is…if he believes it fully, as in “beyond the pale”, there is no getting through to him. I dealt with this in my clinical practice in a psychiatric hospital and we diagnosed these patients, “psychotic.” For psychosis is the term for one who is cut off from any external reference, being wholly intoxicated with his private field of reference. Put an individual like that in a group of like-minded souls, and one will find a political party led by people like Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Jim Jordan, Matthew Gaetz, and technically led even yet, Donald J. Trump.

I grew up in a mind-set like this. Oh, in fairness to those good souls, metastasis had not set in. It took a Trump to bring that poison to fruition. But there was a smugness that I grew up in, a smugness which is simply an essential dimension of tribal coherence. The smugness rarely metastasize to the point we are witnessing in my country, a process the analysis of which is beyond the pale of this exploration. “Smugness” even has a place but it ever finds a Trump, “Katy, bar the door!!

Tomorrow we will witness well-educated men and women passionately oppose conviction of Trump in this trial. To argue with them about their enthrallment would be a foolish endeavor. They have “drank the kool-aid” which is a grim image to remind us of what can ensue when one gives into unquestioned unconscious biases, to override the brain’s capacity for metacognition. It is kind of like some of my past clinical patients who were in the grip of suicidal ideation; these patients had lost hope and were relentlessly driven by the the “only” hope they could imagine, jumping over the cliff. It was the greatest challenge of my clinical practice, trying to offer hope to those in the grip of hopelessness.

Obama’s, “Clinging to Guns and Religion.”

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In 2008 Barack Obama was overheard dismissively speaking of people who, “cling to their guns and religion” which immediately provided fodder for the base of the Republican Party who didn’t really understand what he was saying.  Sure, it was impolitic for him to say that where it might be misunderstood but it was a valid and important observation about the ideologically-oriented base of the Republican Party who “cling” to ideas rather than have a complicated and subtle interior life so that ideas are not taken to be the “thing in itself.”

Guns are fine.  The problem arises when the “clinging” function of the ego gets involved as an innocent device is given an inordinate investment of energy so that “guns plus the emotional energy” becomes another matter all together.  The “guns + emotional valence” takes on a life of its own, becoming a core identity issue to the point where it is no longer about “guns” but is about the individual’s grasp of who he is, of his definition of, “who I am.”  The more tenuous is the grasp of one’s, “who I am” the more desperate will he cling to some idea or group of ideas that he has invested in to keep him from being devoured by an existential anxiety that lies at the root of all cultures.  This abyss of meaningless will destroy one if his spirituality has not equipped him with the ego-integrity to address this spirit of negativity which is an intrinsic dimension of human experience and needs to be acknowledged, not denied.  This “ego integrity” is a spiritual capacity which allows confronting the hidden depths of one’s heart and integrating them into conscious experience and finding empowerment as a result.  Without this acknowledgement and integration, the energy that could be available for deliberate, focused, conscious attention outside of oneself will be turned inward to keep those “demons at bay.”  This is a “divided heart” or the “divided house” which Abraham Lincoln famously noted cannot stand.

But this hopelessness does not have to destroy one if he finds the courage to slowly, gradually, patiently, and humbly confront it and in so doing discover that he can find increasingly an indomitable core beneath this hopelessness…if he is willing to give up the contrivance that his ego has tricked him into relying upon, whatever that contrivance/s might be. The spiritual impoverishment of our culture is now egregiously before us.  Beneath the various contrivances it offers us, guns being but one of them, lurks the abyss of hopelessness which can be addressed if we are willing to acknowledge our “willful ignorance”, an ego driven self-deception who has convinced us that a life of illusion is preferable to a life in which we live as a fully functioning, integrated human being.

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Here is a list of my blogs.  I invite you to check out the other two sometime.

https://anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com/

https://literarylew.wordpress.com/

https://theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com/