Hope Floats

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was an extraordinary person. In the face of race riots, government scrutiny, continuing oppression from Jim Crow, systemic persecution from a system that already showed signs of failing and setbacks to his mission, he was still able to offer hope to the world. In spite of church bombings, the calculated murders of people connected with his cause and vicious smear campaigns against his character, he continued to dream. Even having a sure premonition of his own impending assassination did not keep him from the fight. One of the questions we have to ask ourselves is how? How did he manage to do that? Unfortunately, we can't ask him in person but I do have some ideas (please try to act shocked).

Hope is a pretty loose concept in our world. Don't believe me? Google quotes about hope. Notice something about most of the results? The word hope isn't actually in many of them. Even the definition is kind of vague: the feeling that events will turn out for the best. The best for whom? And what if I'm hoping that things will turn out terribly for you (which may or may not be the best for me)? Does hope spring eternal? Does it actually float (and if so, does it float more like a cloud or a red balloon)?

The word hope occurs 163 times in the NIV bible, 20% of those times in the Psalms alone. There is hope for a wide variety of things: deliverance from one's enemy's, that the cries of the poor and afflicted will be heard, that your children will turn out all right, for strength, for wisdom and for the righteous to prevail. Hope is almost exclusively found in the Lord and His promises for a brighter future.  We are told to guard against letting our hope wither and encouraged to hold on to our hope no matter the circumstances. God is the hope of Israel and Jesus is the hope of the world.

But how do we generate hope, even if we've slipped up and lost it? Like so many other things, I think feeling hopeful relies on relationships. Not with things but with people. I give you the last of my foundational acronyms (at least for now; I can't make any promises for the future, no matter how much you might hope I'll stop):

Help Other People Endlessly

I have developed an unshakeable conviction that the more we help others, the more we will lean into love, the less we will be invested in the ways of the world and the more we will believe that everything will turn indeed turn out all right. The very act of helping someone else not only lifts them up, it is going to give you a boost as well. Provided, of course, that you aren't expecting anything in return. The moment that helping others becomes transactional, you can kiss hope goodbye.

What do I mean by transactional? That is how seemingly every relationship has become here in late stage capitalism. It has, in fact, been the basic modus operandi of capitalism from the beginning. I give the cashier at McDonald's (an average of) $9.29 and they hand me a tray with a Big Mac, some fries and a cup for a beverage. A merchant offers a good or service for a certain amount of a commodity. If I agree to said amount, we exchange the appropriate commodity for said good or service and the relationship is over. It can be more complex than that. The merchant could strive to make you happy enough to engage in future transactions or you could become dissatisfied with your purchase and reopen the transaction for some kind of compensation, but that is essentially the scenario.

Other relationships can easily become transactional as well. If you've ever said to someone "you owe me one," you've been in a transactional relationship. The old adage "never lend a friend money" exists because it implies that the relationship with your friend will become transactional and the friendship will be ruined (spoiler alert: it probably will). If you feel like you need to do a certain number of chores around the house before your spouse will grant you relations in the bedroom, guess what, your marriage has become transactional (and is likely in trouble). Needless to say (but I will anyways), it is really hard to hold on to hope and continue to help others when all your interactions become quid pro quo.

This was actually the first acronym I came up with when I started to think about the philosophy of the Chaotic Good Party. It sprang into my mind wholly formed but with one exception. Originally I had the letter E represented by the word Epically. Because who doesn't want to be epic on a regular basis. The more I thought about that though, the less it rang true to me. Opportunities to perform epic feats of goodwill are actually kind of rare. Most acts of kindness and help are small gestures. And they are infinitely repeatable. And helping, like all of the other actions in this series of TED Talks I've been giving, becomes easier to do as you move along and the goal here is to make it a natural part of your daily life. Will we occasionally make big, bold, epic, attention grabbing acts of helping others? Yes. Will most of our help be small (but no less radically chaotic), possibly go completely unheralded or even fall short of our intentions and veer into the realm of disappointment? I infinitely hope so.