“…I don’t mind you saying I’ll die soon, even in the sound of the word soon I hear the word, you which begins every sentence of joy…Ah, you’re a thief the judge said, ‘let’s see your hands. I showed him my callous hand in court. My sentence is a thousand years of joy.”
Robert Bly
Hope is the big brother to happiness who can bully the joy right out of us. Hope is the religious hole that was dug for many of us even before birth. “I hope it is a boy.” “I hope it is a girl.” We all hope whatever the gender that the baby is healthy. Then on heartbreak occasion that the baby is not healthy, still born, where does the hope go? I fell into the hope well, as did my former wife with each successive miscarriage—four to be exact. Way before that I hoped my dad would stop drinking a million years ago now. I hoped I’d marry Phyllis Bacon. I hoped and hoped and splashed around until I almost drowned in the world’s darkest wishing well.
Hope is a well-set bear trap that we set for others almost daily. The poet Rumi says, “I shoot an arrow to the left, it lands right. I go after a deer and get chased by a wart hog. I did a pit to trap others. I should be suspicious of what I want.” We provide even the people we love with just enough false hope or encouragement on towards the impossible outcome. Hope like happiness is a turtle trying to catch and pass the hare of our desires. Hope is always in pursuit of something being some other way than the way it is.
The Indian poet Kabir said it this way:
“I talk to my inner lover and say, ‘why such a rush…the truth is you turned away yourself and decided to go into the dark alone and now you are tangled up in others and forgotten what you once knew and that is why everything you do has some weird failure in it.”
So we hope instead of have faith and wonder why love is so elusive in our lives and why “love” fails so often. One out of two marriages will end in divorce. Again the culprit is the searching, the scanning the crowds, looking for the lover out there hoping they are looking for us. Rumi say, “The minute I heard my first love story I went looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere; they’ve been in each other all along.”
Hope is what keeps me from grieving what I once had hoping it will come back. Hope puts what we never had in a small box, wrapped and placed on the mantle above my fireplace. But it is this very grief work that “sorrow sweeps clean the house so joy may move in,” says the Persian poet.
Now put your hope in the wish for your prince to come and if he or she does then you’ll be happy. But when the mailman brings you the certified letter from the Prince saying “he is unavoidably detained and will not make it this lifetime” you’re right back in dark woods of despair. Burn the letter and the envelope it came in and let Faith turn all our heavy lead hearts through the alchemical fire into the pure gold of love.