My position on the importance of simple, fundamental hope I think is clear and consistent.
For me, one of the strongest channels through which that lifeline parts thickening clouds of despair is music.
Three songs about hope come to mind to which I cling with the most passion, and as I think of those songs what each seem to have in common is that the journey will ultimately end well.
Beyond things “working out,” you won’t find guarantees on the details.
And perhaps that’s why I like those three songs.
Where I go with this is the conviction that, with a very broad and wide-angle perspective, we religious people damage our faiths the more loose ends we try and tie up.
One of the tunes I had in mind from above, the John Mayer bootleg “This Will All Make Perfect Sense Someday,” seems to bring this into clearest focus. The title basically tells you everything the song covers, and it still remains one of my very favorite Mayer tunes period.
But no answer anyone could drop on me for why Dad died this past summer will make that loss “make sense.”
That one’s just a dead end, a stump.
The relationship I had in college that broke my heart and shattered my faith, how the 9/11 attacks managed to succeed as well as they did, your Aunt Gertrude’s fatal breast cancer-
I suspect that the sorts of “here’s why that happened…” answers that bubble up to surfaces work for a while-or even an entire lifetime, for plenty of people-but for me, how much my faith can bear seems to have shurnk a little more in the aftermath of one of those answers splintering under an overload of reality.
Something I’ve learned from studying folks’ reactions to full on crisis has been that the one trying to help really has to stay on top of not overpromising, i.e., “We can definitely get your job back,” “The doctors are totally going to pull your son through this one,” “There’s no chance the cops won’t catch this guy,” etc.
Because not only do even freaking out people have some capacity for spotting bullshit when they see it, they also tend to remember such things after the fact.
And their hope proves misplaced.
And they end up a little less able to hope the next time around.
So I will argue for the importance of the same guiding principle for people of faith who’ve found themselves in a vulnerable place, being forced to take gingerly glances at the Mom’s Fine China innards that undergird the fundamental beliefs they hold about God and the world.
Don’t commit God to things you just assume He’ll cover, and don’t assume your tidy fiats can outlast organic, unpredictable doubt.
Instead, sow your peace in things not making perfect sense someday.
What everyone’s saying