Sunday Service: Irrational Hope - Sunday December 7th, 2014

Irrational Hope

Reverend Tom Capo

Preached Sunday December 7th, 2014

I offer this poem by Vineet Bansal for your reflection:

What hope means

Hope is bright shining light which keeps darkness at bay

Hope is gentle cold breeze on a hot summer day

Hope is to remain positive when going gets tough

Hope is seeking more when others think you had enough

What hope means

Hope is dreaming of tomorrow

Hope is simmering under sorrow

Hope is sparkles when tears are in our eyes

Hope is a beautiful thing & beautiful things never die

What hope means

Hope is as light as a feather

Hope keeps all of us together

Hope is ubiquitous and free of cost

Hope is the last thing ever lost..... 

David McRaney in his book You are not so smart wrote:

    “The misconception: If you are in a bad situation, you will do whatever you can to escape it.  The truth: If you feel like you aren’t in control of your destiny, you will give up and accept whatever situation you are in.

    In 1965, a psychologist named Martin Seligman started shocking dogs.  He was trying to expand on the research of Pavlov—the guy who could make dogs salivate when they heard a bell ring.  Seligman wanted to head in the other direction, and when he rang his bell, instead of providing food, he zapped the dogs with electricity.  To keep them still, he restrained them in a harness during the experiment.  After they were conditioned, he put these dogs in a big box with a little fence dividing it into two halves.  He figured if [he] rang the bell, [the dog] would hop over the fence to escape, but it didn’t.  It just sat there and braced itself.  They decided to try shocking the dog after the bell.  The dog still sat there and took it.  When they put a dog in the box that had never been shocked before, or had previously been allowed to escape, and tried to zap it—it jumped the fence.  [McRaney asserts:]      You are just like these dogs…The leading theory as to how such a strange behavior would evolve is that it often springs from all organisms’ desire to conserve resources.  If you can’t escape a source of stress, it leads to more stress, and this positive feedback loop eventually triggers an autonomic shutdown.  At its most extreme, you think if you keep struggling you might die.  If you stop [struggling], there is a chance the bad thing will go away.”  

    Based on this research, we should all just give up, let go of hope whenever things get too hard.  Hope is just irrational.  So what about Victor Frankl, who in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, wrote that the way he stayed alive in a Nazi prison camp was to cling onto… “my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.”  What about the Nicaraguan women fighting both against the Somoza government and against their culture, for a free and fair democracy, and to "abolish the detestable discrimination that [Nicaraguan] women have suffered with regard to men and establish economic, political and cultural equality”? They did so because they believed that change could happen.  They continued the fight for years despite the lack of any discernible change in the Sandinista government and despite the entrenched machismo culture of their country.    And what about Martin Luther King, Jr.?  His family was shot at, his fellow African Americans were harassed and some of them murdered, yet he continued his fight for equal rights because he believed “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige and even his life for the welfare of others.”

    Victor Frankl concluded, "It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future.”       So, what about hope in the face of tragedy, disaster, pain, failure, or suffering?  Some might call this irrational hope; Victor Frankl referred to this as “tragic optimism.”   What is it that causes some people to embrace irrational hope?

    Does “tragic optimism” have a place in Unitarian Universalism?  “We live, we die, we laugh, we cry.”  Each of us will experience tragedy, disaster, pain, failure, or suffering.  If you haven’t yet, trust me, your time is coming.  What is your theology about suffering, tragedy, and failure?  Do you try to remain detached, holding the belief that suffering is just part of the natural cycle of life?  Or do you think that there is a reason for suffering and failure? What is it? Is suffering fertilizer for new personal growth?  Do you believe that suffering and failure are random? Meaningless?  Just things to be coped with and endured?  What about suffering, tragedy, and failure as relationship builders?  As community glue?  

  Frankl reflected: “In the concentration camps…one morning, at five, [several men] refused to get up and go to work and instead stayed in the hut, on the straw wet with urine and feces. Nothing—neither warnings nor threats—could induce them to change their minds. And then something typical occurred: they took out a cigarette from deep down in a pocket where they had hidden it and started smoking. At that moment we knew that for the next forty-eight hours or so we would watch them dying. [Life’s] meaning… had subsided, and consequently the seeking of immediate pleasure had taken over.”  These men had succumbed to immediate gratification—smoking—because there was nothing else to hold on to…nothing else between them and feeling hopeless.  

What about we rational Unitarian Universalists?  We pride ourselves on our rationality as a denomination.  Does this concept of irrational hope, of “tragic optimism” have a place in Unitarian Universalist theology?  I think of our denomination’s ceaseless, decades long work for justice and equity, and of the work of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee all over the world in the face of so many humanitarian crises and environmental injustices, and I have to say “yes.”  But what about on a personal level? 

    Years ago I talked with a nurse at the burn unit at the University of Texas Medical Center in Galveston Texas.  When a person comes in with third degree burns, a process ensues which entails extremely painful scraping of the burn tissue to allow new healthy tissue to form.  This debriding occurs daily, and sometimes multiple times daily.  Some of the adults on the unit were so frightened of this process that they would tense up for hours in fear of the inevitable excruciating pain.  With their muscles rigidly tense for hours on end, the skin tissue healed with less flexibility, and the patients ended up with limited mobility after their treatment.  These adults seemed to have learned helplessness very much like the dogs in Martin Seligman’s experiments.  If they could just be still enough, long enough, maybe the pain would stop, and maybe they would survive.  

    David McRaney, remember him, if we stop struggling, may the problem will go away, does observe some hopeful coping strategies for the stress-related positive feedback loop that can lead to learned helplessness: “Every day you feel like you can’t control the forces affecting your fate—your job, the government, your addiction, your depression, your money.  So you stage micro-revolts.  You customize your ring tone, you paint your room, you collect stamps.  You choose.  

Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness, but you can’t stop there.  You must fight back … and learn to fail with pride.  Failing often is the only way to ever get the things you want out of life.  Besides death, your destiny is not inescapable.  You are not so smart, but you are smarter than dogs and rats.  Don’t give in yet.”

    McRaney, like Vitktor Frankl, affirms these micro-revolts.  Choices, even small choices, like Frankl clinging to his wife’s image, which became more present to him than the rising sun.  Was his hope, based on his ability to imagine his wife’s presence, irrational?  Perhaps, but Frankl survived in part due to his choice to embrace tragic optimism.

    Most of us have at least flirted with the idea of accepting helplessness in one area of our lives or another.  For instance in my life, I flirted with helplessness and hopelessness when I was failing advanced chemistry in High School.  I was young, and as many of you have probably experienced when you were young, everything feels so very important, like your life depended on each and every decision that you make.  So when I barely scraped by with a “C” the first semester, and was failing up until the final, I felt my life was over.  I would never go to college; I was destined to spend the rest of my working life at McDonald’s.  I could easily have given up.  I could have skipped the exam and accepted my fate.  Why put myself through the stress of studying information that I didn’t seem to grasp?  Why take an exam which I knew I would fail?  Why do anything?  I could just stay in bed, in my jammies, binging on donuts and chocolate milk.  But instead I clung to the image of a “D” on my final exam, with an uncanny acuteness.   Real or not, that D was then more luminous than the sunrise. Yes, I know I wasn’t shooting very high.  But clinging to that image, I staged my own mini revolts, I studied; I got myself out of bed the morning of the test; I ate breakfast; I went to school; I took the test.  And, yes, I did survive high school.  

    We each face situations, they’re not generally not as severe as a concentration camp or as dangerous as a dictator, but these situations still feel life and death to us.  And we cannot judge what feels like life or death to another person; what cause feeling hopelessness to another, whether the cause is failing a tests, getting burns scraped, or the loss of someone dearly loved.  Whatever those experiences may be that cause you to flirt with hopelessness or helplessness, there are ways to fight back; there are, as McRaney say, “Choices, even small ones, can hold back the crushing weight of helplessness, but you can’t stop there.  You must fight back … and learn to fail with pride.”  

    And what is “learning to fail with pride?”  I think it is essentially different than “being proud that you did your best” or “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”  I think it speaks to those times we attempt something believing we have no hope of succeeding.  I think of the women of Nicaragua, fighting systemic oppression for equality.  Every day they woke up—if they were lucky, if they had survived to wake up—knowing today, they would fail, just like they failed yesterday, just like they would fail tomorrow.  Day after day, month after month, year after year, they failed with pride.  1,000s died, failing with pride, knowing that some day, some how, the granddaughters of their granddaughters might someday gain the equality they had failed to win for themselves.  And they were proud.

    Frankl wrote:  “tragic optimism … an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which at its best always allows for: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action…It must be kept in mind, however, that optimism is not anything to be commanded or ordered. One cannot even force oneself to be optimistic indiscriminately, against all odds, against all hope.”  Frankl believes that finding meaning in life, or in specific areas of one’s life, is how one can hold onto hope.  One example of this was found by the Researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine.  They wrote "[we] have been impressed by the number of prisoners of war of the Vietnam war who explicitly claimed that although their captivity was extraordinarily stressful—filled with torture, disease, malnutrition, and solitary confinement—they nevertheless . . . benefited from the captivity experience, seeing it as a growth experience.”  Seeing torture as a growth experience!  Some of us might find that irrational.  But sometimes it is the irrational that can save us, can get us up when there is no rational reason to do so, can transform us when we are on the verge of hopelessness.  

    American theologian Reinhold Neibuhr wrote: “nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we are saved by hope.  Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith.  Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”  Faith, hope, and love.  This is an irrational trinity Unitarian Universalists can embrace.  This is an irrational trinity “more luminous than the sun beginning to rise.”  

    I invite us Unitarian Universalists to hope for a better tomorrow, whether that hope seems rational or irrational.  For “Hope is simmering under sorrow.  Hope is sparkles when tears are in your eyes.  Hope is a beautiful thing, and beautiful things never die.”