At Sunday service today there was a reading/teaching about Faith and Fear. While the author had some good points about having an attitude of faith rather than fear (which I’ll explore in more detail), it was also presented that hope demonstrated this faith and in a way was the path to this faith. I completely disagree!
Hope is generally used to sugarcoat fear. “I hope there is no traffic on the trip” is simply the positive spin on “I fear we might hit traffic on the trip”. It is the “head” rather than the “tail” of the same coin and that coin is fear. Fear of some undesirable outcome sugar-coated becomes hope for some desired outcome. A clever spin that somehow we are not only willing to state and embrace as a good way to approach life’s challenges, but we are ready to encourage others to hope for the best. This is not an effective strategy for life.
The enemy of great is good; it is kind to frame hope as even a good approach to life. Fear and hope are ways for us to distance ourselves from the reality of our current circumstances. Underlying this is a basic unwillingness to accept what is in the present moment. We are afraid something bad might happen so we embrace hope that something good will happen. Ultimately, we desire an outcome that essentially has us living in the future rather than the present. Hope takes us away from now.
So where does this leave us? Am I advocating hopelessness? Not at all. In contrast to hope, faith is not only a good alternative, it is a great approach. However, faith has different meanings and applications. Here, I am not talking about faith as belief in something for which proof is absent. I am not talking about faith in terms of accepting some doctrinal beliefs. The sort of faith I am referring to is better described as trust. When Jesus walked on water, over the stormy Sea of Galilee, he enjoined Peter to step out and do the same. After a few steps, Peter becomes afraid and falls into the sea. Jesus admonishes him by saying, “Ye of little faith…” This is what I call trust. There is no room for fear when you are rooted in trust. Trust is what you bring to the present moment and while ultimately it may relate to a future outcome, trust is present-centered, not future-centered. When we support another who is experiencing difficulty by stating, “Have faith…” this represents an effective strategy for dealing with life’s challenges and is something we need to embrace fully. There simply is no place for fear or hope when we approach life with trust.
There is another aspect to hope which also relates to despair. In the Prayer of St. Francis, we pray to replace despair with hope. This is the same despair Dante writes about upon the entrance to hell, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.” You can just as well say embrace despair—utter hopelessness. This is the sort of despair that precludes any other possibility, a complete and utter giving up. While we can hope for some shred of possibility, this pales in comparison to trust. St. Francis also prays to replace doubt with faith. Here I read trust.
Hope is insufficient. Hope is full of doubt. While it is better than abject despair, it is at best a bridge to trust. Hope is still fear. To be fearless, we must embrace trust.
Thanks, Byron! I wrote this quite a few years ago and the importance of trust has never been clearer to me. It was an excellent discussion today as we delved into this. I appreciate you!
Thanks for writing this Victor, and (to Dennis) for posting it so quickly. Great discussion today at The Friendship Bench around this topic. It elicits a number of things for me, one of which is the dismissal of reality that ‘hoping’ has the potential for. Two examples: In the military, we often heard, “hope is not a strategy.” Also, as our mentor says, “the universe is perfect.” What he means by that is this. Everything that happens has a reason, and a long trail of events leading up to it. Nothing happens without the chain of events that led to it, thus hope will not prevent what happens. When I gave aviation safety lectures in my past life I used this very example. Referencing aircraft crashes, I told my pilot & crew attendees, “there are no accidents. Every one of these crashes can be traced backward to some point. All of them started an hour, a day, a week before.” This concept, too, dismisses hope as a causative or contributing factor. No pilot ever said (aloud) “I hope I don’t crash today.”
Thanks again, and keep writing!