The End of Hope (Part 5)

The End of Hope (part 5)

So in the end the end is joy. Joy encompasses everything: the pleasure of attaining a personal goal or dream, the experience of great community and culture, and the mystery of the zeitgeist, knowing is good right now.

Joy is capable of withholding immediate knowledge, a skill very important to the joyful. There will be many occasions where the rationale for certain things won’t be there. At this level, things are self-justified, or beyond justification. They just are.

And the authority for doing such things is self-evident. It comes from within, ultimately from God if you can swallow that. No man can bestow it upon another. It is completely independent. Joy in this sense is for the brave individual.

But courageous individuals in this experience can share it with others. That is the real beauty. Our joy must be found within us, but can be shared and amplified outside of us. There is a rich tapestry of share joy, which ultimately becomes hope.

**But it must start within us. And unfortunately evidence of the gift is usually found in restlessness and passion. It is the consistent feeling of being off balance, without the comfort of a home. It is a necessary restlessness.

This is the dying to oneself that must be first. This is the dedication to the process. This is the allegiance to the end. At the time it does not feel good. It does not have a sense of hope and ultimate purpose. It feels rather horrible and hopeless actually.

There is a grieving process. We must lose our “right” to getting something “out” of the process. We are simply committing our whole selves to it. We have no idea at the time what that means. There is no master plan or career path highlighted.

It is simply death to oneself and commitment to one’s gift, to the thing that was implanted in us without us. It is a surrender to the process of growing this fledgling seed into whatever it is to become, which we can at best vaguely intuit.

***That may sound like a deterministic sort of will power. “I will do this come what may.” It sounds like a fierce sort of discipline. But for the creative the journey through death into life is not a matter of mere will power. There is much else going on.

First of all there is the obvious call into the process. Where does “it” come from? “It” is not some idea we conjure up. Though some may try to take credit for “it.” The truth is we do not create the invitation. “It” comes from another.

And not everyone hears “it.” No matter how hard we try to explain to someone who has never heard this call we come up short. It is very similar to the attempt to explain a vivid dream. No matter how soon after we wake up, the brain can’t piece it all together.

Even if we can, it sounds ridiculous. The other person may politely listen but there is absolutely no way they can feel the intensity of the thing we just experienced. That’s how the call to create comes. It overwhelms us then sneaks away.

The End of Hope (Part 3)

The End of Hope (Part 3)

Is there a reward for hope? Is there a practical reason to continue hoping? Is success in some form or another a part of cultivating hope within us? In other words, do we believe that what we seek is better than where we are at?

Some will try to philosophically contend that hope somehow is an end in itself, that it is sort of a state of mind or attitude. While not all wrong, there does seem to necessarily be more for the conditions of what we call hope to blossom. In other words there is an object to our hope. And somewhere innate in that object is not just its creation (or bringing forth into reality), but also its blossoming (what may in our time be connected to “selling”). In other words, success.

Do we pursue some creative endeavor only in the prospects of its possible success? Or is there something innate to the calling that is deeply part of us regardless of success? Yes. But somehow our job is to get the thing inside us out. Some at this point will bring out exceptions of course. People who did what they were called to do but faced only failure. Some may mention Jeremiah the prophet - called to failure. Perhaps. But then how do we know his name today?

We think for a prophet success is people listening to the words spoken and changing. Not so. Success for the prophet is getting his word out. Period. Did Jeremiah do a good job in getting the word out from his heart to the public? Yes.

That’s what we don’t realize. How did Jeremiah get the attention of the royal courts? How did his word make such a big impact so as to be considered a threat to the royal way of life? He must have done something to get the popular vote. Or did he? Even they didn’t like what he was saying. In that sense, he was universally annoying. But he didn’t stop. And people didn’t stop hearing his words from God. He did exactly what he needed to do. Isn‘t that the kind of success we mean?

Success isn’t albums sold or price per painting, but it may include that. We really get to determine what success looks like for us. We get to tell our creative endeavors what the goals are. No one else can tell us what the goals are.

Obviously viability will likely be one. We are not free to determine what viability means (in other words, it comes down to a certain number of sales, etc.). But we are free to determine the values and vision of our particular company.

We have the creative freedom to dream it up, to fight it out, to discover what it looks like for us. That is the beauty of it all. Too often we get hamstrung on the initial viability needs, to the point where that becomes the only goal.

The goal is the what. We define the “what’ whereby we judge ourselves successful or not. What are your goals? You decide them. You must figure out what those really are. What is it you want to do? Only you can decide that question. 

The End of Hope (Part 2)

The End of Hope (Part 2)

Hope refuses to be boxed in. Hope stretches what we conceive of as reality. Though many learn to accept limitations (and there is definite merit to such), hope pushes at those boundaries, redefines them, renegotiates their finitude.

The reality is that humans settle. We have been “settling” America for the past two hundred and almost 40-some years. Of course we still pioneer but mostly in engineering better ways to enjoy comfort or to increase our security.

Settling puts walls up, fences up, security gates, locks, etc. It solidifies the fortress so the inhabitants are “safe.” The problem we never suspected, perhaps, is that safe is not so great. Safe has a whole new set of problems it comes with.

The more “secure” things are, the less in many ways people appreciate or understand that security. There are millions of benefits, of course (like the freedom to write in this journal), but we must be honest about the challenges of being safe.

Also dangerous, of course, is the weight of continually pushing. It is not our “job” to constantly push at boundaries. It is our “job” to BE. As we truly grow in grace the knowledge of BEing, our capacity naturally expands.

This mission of sledgehamming self-induced walls is not something outside us, it is not a duty we grudgingly commit to. Though certainly there are aspects of it that require sacrifice and discipline, those things result from something inside, namely hope.

Getting to hope is really the work we are about. It is largely an inner work. This inner work itself pushes and pulls us beyond the walls of safety, walls we emotionally put up to ensure our “happiness,” the other great enemy of the Spirit. Hope knows the absolute silliness of being happy, or striving for happiness. Hope knows happiness is an elusive mistress, ultimately illusion. Happiness by definition is a by-product, a result of temporarily satisfying some need now.

Hope takes the longview of happiness. It is not the immediate gratification of some need. Hope by nature is deferred gratification, or intentionally postponed gratification of some need, whether by choice or even at times by circumstance.

Hope creates a set of priorities that do not reflect our immediate wants. Hope differentiates between what is needed and what we are simply used to. Hope challenges us to boldly disappoint those expecting from us.

Hope welcomes sacrifice in the near term. It understands the process for which goals are achieved. It knows there are no shortcuts, but that life gives enough rewards along the way to sustain us. It is not about being a martyr, it is about waiting.

Hope is waiting with patience for the rest of life to catch up with our inner vision. In other words, we see something, we have a vision, we know the potential of something, but we are alone in that at first. We do not know the outcome, yet.