Name It and Claim It

“Hope: The Heart’s Great Quest”

By David Aikman

Servant

220 pp.; $9.99, paper

About 500 pages into “The True and Only Heaven,” his expansive book about the life and death of optimism, Christopher Lasch wondered about the possibility for a rebirth, not of optimism, but of hope. Optimism’s confidence in unending and universal progress, he had observed, lived on evidence that things were going well and were likely to go on getting better. With such a flimsy basis, optimism could not survive the persistent experience of tragedies that have so cruelly walloped the human family. Now the question is, can we find a hope to replace our lost optimism? What we need, Lasch mused, is “a more vigorous form of hope which trusts life without denying its tragic character.” Is there such a hope?

Though he does not include Lasch’s book in his impressive list of sources, David Aikman has written his own answer to Lasch’s question. There is indeed the sort of vigorous hope that Lasch looked for. There is a hope that is based in God’s promise rather than evidence of human progress. The promise is a new creation rather than gradual improvement on the old one. Thus, Christian faith offers a life beyond the “tragic character” of this world to hope for and Someone above our tragedy-prone existence to trust our hope in. It is, therefore, a hope that will survive adversity and tragedy. And, since our spirits need hope as much as our lungs need oxygen, I can only applaud Aikman’s passion to show that Christian hope is the one and only true hope.

To support his purpose, Aikman, for many years a foreign correspondent for “Time” magazine, succinctly surveys the faith of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam in 21 pages and then–in 47 fast-turning pages–neatly reviews the major thinkers from the Age of Enlightenment to the New Age to show that other religious faiths offer no hope at all and that any hope that secular thought offers is a false one. This done, he reviews what the Bible along with selected theologians teach us about Christian hope. All this is done with the sprightly style and easy-to-open packaging that we would expect from a seasoned reporter.

Aikman shows quite splendidly that what Christians are given to hope for is a life of bodiless blessedness after we die and a good world for us all to live in later on. But just as important as what we may hope for is who we put our hope in–not ourselves nor signs of progress, but the Maker of the universe who is now Christ the Lord.

But granted the greater importance of what we hope for and in, it is also interesting to think about the sort of experience that hope is. Aikman tries out a few definitions and quickly rejects them; hope, he cautions, is not a desire or a wish. Nor is it a disposition. It is, as the Bible suggests, more like an eager expectation–which is close enough, I suppose–except that eagerness is, after all, a lively desire, and we often expect things we certainly do not hope for (“Expect the worst and hope for the best.”).

But not to quibble about definitions of so slippery a thing as what actual hoping is. Aikman senses the difficulty, so he offers a few vivid metaphors, like this one: “Hope is like the lion in the forest, triumphant over all the animals, patient, never hurried, always king of his domain.” Taste in metaphors, as in all else, is indisputable, so enjoy this one if it illumines what you do when you hope.

What motivates Aikman, in any case, is the effect of Christian hoping on daily living. Christian hope provides its own evidence in the miraculous manifestations of its power in the life of people who have it. It is fitting, then, that Aikman should save to the last chapter a review of how Christian hope for the next world “revolutionizes” the “way ordinary people live their lives” in the present one.

It is probably true that most Christian people do not spend much time “eagerly expecting” life in heaven or in the new earth. What most of us consciously worry about and hope for is fixed on the same worldly things that everybody else hopes for. We hope for the good things we eagerly desire for our families and friends and for ourselves, things we believe are possible, things none of us can be sure of. We hope for our children’s safety, happiness, and success. We hope for our own comfortable retirements. We hope for the healing of our spouses’ diseases. And the like. (Saint Paul says that we are most miserable if we have hope only for this life, but it is equally true that we are also pretty miserable if we have no hope for this life.)

So it seems natural that we should want to know how our Christian hoping for life in God’s future affects our chances of getting what we most hope for in our present. Is there any connection? Aikman is eager to prove there is. And, as a triumphant climax to his objective research, he offers us several personal examples of “The Fruits of Hope.” The fruits are harvested from some ordinary people’s extraordinary experiences of the power of hope. He tells their stories, quickly, without commentary, on the run, like those nifty little paragraphs at the front of “Time” that tell us what we really need to know about the week that was.

A man on his way to a golf game gets a message that his daughter was seriously hurt in a car crash. He bolts for the hospital. On his way, he prays with just “a flicker of hope that someone was listening.” There was. The man’s daughter survived and is, besides, now happily married.

A woman whose marriage is on the skids is sailing off Hawaii and sees a double rainbow over the island and reads it as a sign of hope.

A young lady plagued by an ugly skin disease goes to a Billy Graham rally with hope for a cure. She got what she hoped for and is now a professional model, high on the power of high hopes.

Aikman’s own marriage had broken down before he got it into his head to write a book about hope. While he researched and thought about hope, he and his wife were reconciled and now have a new hope for their family.

These are the sort of “fruits” that Aikman offers to show how Christian hope affects–in a “revolutionary” way–how “ordinary people live their lives.”

What can I say? Aikman’s “fruits” baffle me. Does he mean to say that putting our hope in Jesus Christ for the other world gives our hopes for life in this world a better chance of coming true? But where is the connection? Maybe he means that God rewards us for hoping for eternal life by giving us what we hope for in this one. Or maybe he means that Christian hoping emits such a potent psychosomatic energy into our lives that we make our own hopes come true. Then again, it may be that Aikman has no idea of how hope does it and wants only to celebrate the fact that it does.

Geriatric hopers like me will permit themselves some skepticism. We just have too many crushed hopes under our belts to be easily persuaded that our Christian hoping improves–in any predictable sense–the odds that our human hopes will come true. Our hunch is that Aikman’s zeal for a nifty evangelical finish ran ahead of the sounder journalistic instincts he demonstrated along the way.

And yet, I do not wish to discount Aikman’s message. Certainly, when we keep hope alive for a victorious ending to a long struggle, we are encouraged to fight on and on until justice wins. Martin Luther King taught us that. And certainly a vivid hope for God’s kingdom rooted in Christ’s resurrection keeps the hope for victory alive. Bishop Tutu gives a resounding witness.

Certainly there is a therapeutic link between hopefulness and healing–both physical and psychological. It is being celebrated in the best of medical circles these days. And Victor Frankl has moved many of us to awe with his story of how the power of hope for what was obviously impossible–escape from the death camp–made the doomed life of prisoners who hoped to escape it infinitely richer than those who gave up hope.

It must be wonderfully true that nothing is ever accomplished, no poem written, no painting painted, no wall constructed, no enterprise begun, no family kept together, and no life reborn unless somebody hoped it could be done. But these are different sorts of links between hope and life than Aikman hints at with his amazing fruits. And besides, as Rabbi Maurice Lamm’s lovely book “The Power of Hope” (1995) assumes, the energy that links hoping to the getting of what we hope for is as powerful in the lives of people in general who have a hopeful disposition about this present life as it is in the lives of Christians in particular who hope for the promises about life to come. And besides, is there not a wee irony in celebrating the possibility that Christian hope of going to heaven improves our chances of putting off the trip? (“Everybody,” I have heard, “wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”)

I wonder whether the author’s fantastic “fruits of hope” would have persuaded Christopher Lasch that he had found the “more vigorous form of hope which trusts life without denying its tragic character.” I fear not. They seem instead to hint that Christian hope offers an escape from tragedy. And to that extent, it denies that life need have a tragic character. Perhaps Aikman’s evangelical enthusiasm for immediate and transparent results may have obscured his apologetic purpose. But I do not want to carp. He set out to demonstrate that the gospel offers a well-founded hope for a happy ending to our tragic history, and he succeeded, for which he deserves a good deal of praise for a lot of work well done. His book, in spite of my cautions about the ending, will give any reader a fine overview of all that has been thought and said about the gift of hope, for which nothing is more essential to the life of the human spirit.

May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 23

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