Skip to main content

"The Lifesaving Virtue of Hopelessness"

Hopelessness as a virtue? Wait, wait, Universalism is "The Larger Hope," and we (wrongly attributed to John Murray) exhort people to "Give them, not Hell, but hope and courage," and we sing about bringing hope, when hope is hard to find.

Hopelessness can be a virtue?

Yes.

In Necessary Endings, Henry Cloud writes:
If you are looking for the formula that can get you motivated and fearless, here it is: you must finally see reality for what it is—in other words, that what is not working is not going to magically begin working. If something isn’t working , you must admit that what you are doing to get it to work is hopeless. This chapter is about the lifesaving virtue of hopelessness. The awareness of hopelessness is what finally brings people to the reality of the pruning moment. It is the moment when they wake up, realize that an ending must occur, and finally feel energized to do it. Nothing mobilizes us like a firm dose of reality. Whether it is finally getting an addict to hit bottom and end a destructive pattern or getting a CEO in front of a bankruptcy judge to force the restructuring that he has been avoiding, only reality gets us to do difficult things.1
I have to admit that when I read this, this summer, it was like a big ole smack upside the head. Yes! First step in making a big change, whether it's personal or organizational, is losing hope. Losing hope can be exactly what we need!

And yet, how often are we the well-meaning friend who does, indeed, bring hope when hope is hard to find? Because hopelessness doesn't feel good. At best, it's uncomfortable. More likely, it's downright painful. And so here we come, with a rose in the wintertime and a beautiful basket of hope, all tied up with a bow. We don't stop to consider that maybe this isn't the season for roses, and hmm, there might be some denial mixed in with all that hope.

Wow, you are such a downer, Rev. Jo!

But what if we actually see hopelessness for what it is -- a necessary step, a tool, a motivator -- for getting us where we need to go?

In that same book, Cloud tells about Julie Shimer, CEO of Welch Allyn, a medical device company. That company is doing very well indeed, because she was able to lose hope that the way they operated would continue to work. To quote Cloud, "she lost hope in the old way, even when it was succeeding."2

She had learned that lesson through watching the mistake of her previous employer, Motorola. In the mid-nineties, they were the market leader in analog phones. AT&T came to them and asked them to make a digital phone. Nah, they said. Not good quality, and besides, they were the leader. Why change? So AT&T went to Nokia. And the world changed. And Motorola was no longer the leader. Because they hadn't lost their hope that things would continue just as they had been.

Hopelessness may just be an opportunity. Perhaps we should consider carefully before we run from it ... or block it from others.




1 Cloud, Henry (2011-01-18). Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward (p. 74). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.↩ 
2 Ibid., 78.↩

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 11, 2014 at 8:42 AM

    I like the idea behind this, but I am also aware that there are different kinds of hope. There is the realistic view, and then there is the opposite of despair. I think this advocating not being a pie-in-the-sky optimist, which I am totally down with. But despair means losing hope that something can even change to make it better, and that makes most people curl up into a ball.

    So I will still take hope, but a real, grounded one. And yes, roses are good, too!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Me and My Collar

You may run into me on a Friday, in my neighborhood, so it's time I let you know what you might see. When I was doing my required unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), my supervisor suggested that any of us who came from traditions where a clerical collar was an option, take one "collar week," to see how we were treated, as opposed to wearing regular professional clothes. After a couple of days, I joked to the Catholic priest, "How do you manage the power?" In regular clothes, I would walk into a patient's room, and it would take about 5 or so minutes of introductions and pleasantries before we could really get down to talking about their feelings, their fears, the deep stuff. With most people, as soon as that clerical collar walked in the room, with me attached, they began pouring out all the heavy stuff they were carrying. I was riding the bus back and forth every day, and though not quite so dramatic, the collar effect was alive there, to
10 comments
Read more

Beloved Community: The Now and Not Yet

Rev. Christine Robinson has a great little post up about the phrase "beloved community" and why it's problematic to use that to describe a church. Like her mom, I can get cranky about the whole thing, but my crankiness lies in the misuse of what is, to me, such a breathtaking and profound concept. Martin Luther King, Jr., someone whose words I study in great detail, is the one we often think of as originating the term, but he learned about it through the writings of Josiah Royce. Josiah Royce (right) with close friend William James.  Royce was a philosopher, studying Kant, Hegel. I imagine he would have enjoyed Koestler's theory of the holon , because he saw humanity as being both individuals and part of a greater "organism" that was community. As King's belief about Beloved Community would be rooted in agape , Royce's philosophy stemmed from what he called loyalty, and by that he meant, "the practically devoted love of an individual f
6 comments
Read more

We've Reached the "Tom Hanks Eating Raw Fish" Phase of the Pandemic

Last May, as it became apparent the covid-19 pandemic was not going to be a temporary affair, I wrote about the benefits of imagining you were shipwrecked on a deserted island.  Now, a year after we began hearing about the "novel coronovirus," I suspect that many of us have now entered the "Tom Hanks Eating Raw Fish" stage of the pandemic.  We've made the best of things. Rearranged home offices and homeschool desks. Got through the holidays, mustering as much joy as we could. There's a permanent hook or basket at the front door for our masks.  Most of us by now either know someone who died of covid, or are, at most, 2 degrees away. Our co-worker's husband's mother. Our friend's aunt. Or closer. We've grieved.  And now...we're just numb. We keep putting one foot in front of the other, because that's what we have to do. We eat, we drink, we sleep. We get our work done. We nag our kids to do school work.  But our affect is flat. Like Ha
1 comment
Read more