Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (14 page)

Clearly, hopelessness has at least as much to do with what we bring to life as it does with what life brings to us.
Great pain does not dampen hope and great opportunity does not ensure it. Humdrum hopelessness, the garden-variety kind of ennui or disinterest or self-doubt, comes out of our inability to take the world in hand. However small it may be. However great it may look. Hopelessness is a spiritual doldrum. It is life becalmed, without energy, without edge. It is life lived without a sense of responsibility to the rest of the world, let alone to ourselves.

What breeds hopelessness is the failure to pursue the possible in the imperfect. It is exactly those negative spirits that keep us awake at night, until we confront what we lack the courage to do, to be, to think. In Paraguay, a music teacher taught children to make musical instruments out of the glass and tin and steel in a landfill and life changed for those children. In Harlem, hope came out of playing basketball on street corners. In life in general, hope lies in taking what we have—money for the bored wealthy, education for the bored poor—and using every heartbeat within us to turn it into something worthwhile. We are required to recognize the nature of the life which we are called to live, and determine what it will take in us to accept it.

The challenge of hopelessness is the challenge to reenter the human race, to take our part in it knowing that it is as much our responsibility to shape life as it is for life to shape us. It requires us to understand that misfortune is not failure. It is at most simply a digression through life intended to make us reassess our course, our goals, our aspirations.

The paradox of hopelessness is that in it lies the invitation to get up and go on. Despite difficulties, despite the
implacability of the exercise, despite the windless intervals of life, hopelessness calls us to try again, try something different, if necessary, but at least try. Hopelessness prods us to go beyond what we ourselves estimate to be our chance of succeeding. After all, who doesn’t know intuitively that if we don’t try, we can’t possibly fail?

Most important of all, perhaps, is the possibility that hopelessness may be a sign that we have gotten ourselves into some situation far too difficult or far too foreign to our personalities or far too unrelated to who we know ourselves to really be to ever succeed at it. It’s in moments like these that hopelessness calls us back to the fullness of the self and away from heights we are not meant to climb.

At the same time, hopelessness may be more about a lack of commitment than it is a lack of ability. It calls us back to our dreams and our determination to make them real. In which case, it is a call to move on, not to stay and suffer death by boredom. Albert Einstein didn’t like his job at the patent office either. That didn’t make him incapable of it. He simply stayed where he was but filled the remainder of his days doing what he had been born to do. On the side. In addition to. After hours. Whenever he could.

Hopelessness calls us beyond quitting what we cannot quit, to learn how to do what we have been born to do. Even if that means doing one thing while wanting to do another: math problems like Einstein, maybe; Little League athletics like everybody’s favorite coaching uncle. It means going somewhere else if necessary but always to some situation where what I am able to do needs to be done. It’s not a call to a job. It’s a call to a life spent doing
what I do best—wherever that may be, during work or after it. Einstein, after all, did most of his early groundbreaking work during the years when he could not find a university position. So he got whatever job he could, and at the same time, went on doing the math problems he loved. And that compensated for everything he couldn’t do. He was happy.

When we align being able to do what we want while we do what we must, the fog of hopelessness will lift. Then we can live with the greatest degree of energy and the greatest measure of joy, however limited our resources, however many the comforts that do not content us. Then the spirits of darkness and doom lift, the feelings of hopelessness disappear. Then real life begins.

“Bloom where you are planted,” the poster reads. But the poster does not tell the whole story. “Plant yourself where you know you can bloom” may well be the poster we all need to see. Or better yet, “Work the arid soil however long it takes until something that fulfills the rest of you finally makes the desert in you bloom.”

It’s years later but I still remember the scene: He was tall and lanky, his guns slapped at his sides as he walked alone down the middle of the dusty street, his eyes fixed and cold. It was high noon. There was nowhere to hide now. The only option was to confront the enemy face-to-face and destroy him. The whole scene was the very apotheosis of righteous anger and courage, the icon of the tough, the invincible American hero.

That model has become the staple of the society. It is Mighty Mouse in action, Superman unleashed, the Terminator unbound. It is, we are to believe, the measure of manhood, the description of real maleness, the caliber of those who prefer to die rather than to give in to opposition, to the malice, to the inferior ones.

And many would call it brave. But there is another kind of courage that another equally stalwart people, both men
and women, embody despite the fact that films and television programs and newspapers seldom valorize it. “It is curious,” Mark Twain wrote, “that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”

This is the courage that refuses to become what it hates and at the same time refuses to be passive in the face of evil.

The differences between physical courage and moral courage bring the heart to a full stop. The fact is that there aren’t any differences. Not really. It’s just that the two differ in terms of how to achieve what they each want. Actually the two distinct postures are the same but the modern world calls one bravery and the other cowardice. The distinctions call all of us not to question courage but to discover what it really is. One type of courage is life-denying; the second type is life-giving.

The characteristics of life-denying courage as we know it are clear.

First: Whatever the cost to itself, macho courage confronts the enemy—personal or national—head-on. Let there be no doubt that this is a showdown. In this struggle, domination is the goal, superiority is the weapon of choice. This is force unlimited. We will prevail.

Second: This is a take-no-prisoners strategy. Lines are drawn and the surrender must be unconditional. There will be no space given for compromise, for dallying.

Third: The superman opponent simply refuses to enter into any kind of discussion on the merits of any other way of thinking, any other needs, any other possibilities.

This is the kind of force applied on children who have
nothing to say about the plans being made for them, nothing to say about the process of carrying them out, nothing to say about the effects those plans may have on their own dignity or degrees of life satisfaction, as well as how they may actually jeopardize it.

It is a child-beating, wife-beating, death-by-drones strategy of people with the power to work their will. It destroys the destroyable and calls that peace.

On the other hand, the characteristics of life-giving courage deal with situations where people in conflict have no desire to humiliate or vitiate others. This kind of courage does not seek to destroy opponents but to make of them comrades in righteousness.

First: Whatever the cost to itself, life-giving courage confronts enemies—personal or national—head-on. In this struggle, spiritual as well as physical survival is the goal, and integrity is the weapon of choice. So important is any issue to the people who oppose it that they will defy it to the end.

Second: However major the issue, life-giving courage resists to the end but not without attempting to negotiate the situation. There is no desire for division. Nevertheless, the resistance is total until the issues at the base of the disagreement have been resolved.

Third: Life-giving courage has no desire either to humiliate or destroy the opponent. The life-giving opponent attempts to enter into the discussion with a heart for the merits of others’ perspective in mind and care for the needs of others as well as their own. This is the kind of courage that seeks to make a friend of a potential enemy.

This kind of courage is not an attempt to apply force; it is an attempt to broaden the views of those whose vision is limited.

It is the force of a boy in Tiananmen Square who faced a tank to make the point that the government would need to be willing to run down everyone in the square to end the resistance. It exposed the character of the government it confronted.

It is a win-win situation. It uses any and all means available to achieve an end that is good for everyone concerned.

It is a child-caring, person-loving, resurrection moment designed to make the powers that be responsible and responsive to everyone whose lives they affect. It is the work of people dedicated to evolution rather than revolution. Those who practice life-giving courage threaten no one but themselves with injury or death, so that those with the power to work their will can make the great life-and-death choices with integrity, with brave humility, and with common care for all the people concerned.

Both kinds of courage risk death. But life-giving resistance, as total and spiritually naked as it is, simply refuses to become what it hates.

The icons of this kind of courage are burned into our mind at least as deeply as those of gun wielders in
High Noon
.

They are Gandhi facing down the British Army on the salt march that changed Indian economic slavery.

It is women being force-fed in a Washington, D.C., jail on behalf of woman suffrage.

It is the young people in Cairo’s Tahrir Square forcing
down a dictator and then forcing his successor to amend his autocracy.

They are African-American young people being beaten at a lunch counter and refusing to move, hosed in the streets and refusing to go away, chased by dogs and refusing to be cowed until desegregation came to the United States of America.

The United States saw moral character in action in African Americans who—jeered by redneck crowds, attacked by water hoses, nipped by guard dogs and threatened by armed policemen—refused to retaliate in kind. And that kind of soulfulness changed the country. It called upon the character of the white community to be just as strong and just as nonviolent. And, eventually, we became the best of ourselves because of it.

This is the courage of the Jesus who faced down the authority figures of the time over and over again, inspired by a greater law and a living God as a model to us of what it means to choose courage over cowardice.

As Hemingway writes: “Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.”

The question is an obvious one: When you think of all those things at night, when you find yourself struggling to decide which models of strength you yourself will practice, which looks most courageous, most brave to you?

An ancient monastic story tells of a ravaging warlord
who razed every village as he went across the land. Just the word of his coming was enough to send entire populations into the hills to live in caves until his troops passed by.

As he entered a small hamlet one day, he sneered as he said to his second-in-command, “I presume all the people have fled by this time?”

“Well, all but one old monk who refused to flee,” the adjutant answered.

The commander was furious. “Bring him to me immediately,” he barked.

When they dragged the old monk to the square before him, the commander screamed at him, “Do you not know who I am? I am he who can run you through with a sword and never even bat an eye.”

And the old monk looked up and said, “And do you not know who I am? I am he who can let you run me through with a sword and never bat an eye.”

Certitude is a very tricky thing. It is so often wrong. And so often loud about it. It can be tolerated only if it comes with large doses of humility. As in, “As far as I know …” or “It seems to me …” or “Do you agree?” or a simple “I think so, but I’m not sure …”

Once upon a time, we were certain about the shape of the world and so allowed that belief to shape the way we dealt with the world for centuries. We thought that the world was flat, for instance, so the Greeks would not sail through the Hellespont for fear they would fall off the edge of it. Western civilization missed the existence of the East for centuries. As a result of that kind of certitude, mapmaking has always been a work in progress, always sincere and often incorrect.

We’ve been relentlessly certain about the inferiority of one race to another and wound up diminishing the moral
quality of our own. Our Caucasian experts told us that the distance between a black man’s eyes was a sure sign of his lower IQ and, after years of objective research, left the world with nothing more than the surety of how feeble their own intelligence had been.

We’ve been more than certain about the secondary value and the lesser intelligence of women to men and so denied ourselves the insights and talents of half the human race. But the
Irish Times
reported on its front page recently that girls were far outranking male students on their leaving cert exams there by almost fifteen points, even in subjects traditionally reserved for males.
*

And on the practical level we’ve accepted as fact, among other things, that bloodletting was curative, that humans could not fly, that the deaf were also dumb, that cigarettes were benign and that cloning was simply beyond imagination.