Finding Hope in the Hopelessness

This post is about my personal struggle for hope in my context. It illustrates wilderness/exile spirituality in the US now, and why despair is an industry. Yet, God is here. I'm learning to let God find me.

I was on my porch drinking my morning coffee.  I’d been meditating for nearly 30 minutes.  I had one question on my mind.  How can I get back to that relationship with God I once had? 

My question had some pressure in it.  I’ve held these positions – pastor, campus minister, seminary professor, and Dean of the Seminary.  I’ve written theology for the church.  You’d think God and I are tight.  And now, I’m called an Apostle, a special witness of Jesus.  Talk about pressure.  So why do I feel so adrift from God? 

Am I a fraud? I didn’t actually feel like a fraud. More afraid I am. I couldn’t help but wonder.

I glanced down. This time, I didn’t look past it. I saw the tattoo of Luke 15 on my forearm.  All those parables are about being lost.

A light came on.  I realized the feeling I was having was the same feeling so many were having across my culture and its Christianity.  Especially in Community of Christ, I can see it. I hear it. The question can haunt silently all the hope and strategic planning we do. How do we get back to that relationship with God we felt we once had?  All the questions about what will happen to our congregations.  Even as we ride the wave of energy we felt from World Conference and a summer focused on Hope.  Hope for what? Hope to get back to that relationship with God we feel we once had?

Reflecting a minute, it became obvious to me that this feeling of loss of a familiar relationship with God is legitimate. 

For centuries, God was synonymous with omniscience, power, and authority.

Evidence is everywhere that nearly every form of authority – sacred and secular – is under attack or losing legitimacy in my culture. Religious authority is in the hands of individuals as consumers.  Politics has become a nearly uncontrollable circus of destructive policies and propaganda, and violence against vulnerable people. Political authority, for its own sake, is all that matters anymore.

The authority of science is being attacked by pseudoscience, government, and corporations in the name of freedom, wealth, and health.  Institutional authority wanes as structures choke on their own need for resources. Cultural authority has gone viral and simultaneously become anarchist. Influencers are everywhere. Social media harnesses our attention for profit-making influencers, a multi-million dollar industry.

Most obvious to me - defiance, resistance, rebellion against authority – all of which once served the interests of freedom fighters and criminals all the same – has become a way we hammer out identity and way of life. Amazon and Walmart sell us t-shirts that proclaim WTF, You Be You, “Resist,” and “Don’t Tread on me.” Everyone and everything is raging against the machine, sometimes for good reason. 

Yet, we’re the machine.  Or, at least, we can’t escape the machine.

The social platforms we use to find voice, the messaging we do to get people on our side or believe like us, the authorities we scapegoat and blame – often strawmen – to declare our independence and fake a feeling of freedom, they are all part of the machine. You have to use the machine to fight against it. 

Sociology calls this hegemony.

The spirituality of the machine is more important than analyzing it. But analysis can paint a picture of what we’re dealing with. I give a nod to Naomi Klein and her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine. The shock doctrine refers to our state of things.  It’s when wealth – meaning corporations, financial interests, and venture capitalists – grow economic power and interests while citizens are disadvantaged, divided, and disenfranchised because we’re too distracted and overwhelmed to respond effectively. Klein called it disaster capitalism. The powerful take advantage of opportunities in crises: natural disasters, political instability, in some countries, even social collapse and economic failure. Wealthy interests, business, and powerful corporations can profit from it.

And if crisis and insecurity create economic opportunity, the US is also experiencing it. We’re in a phase where anxiety, polarization, and even apocalyptic expectations are openly marketed to us and are now the norm. It creates social movement – economic movement. How, you ask? Nothing creates demand, motivates, simplifies decisions, and creates a feeling of unity like a crisis. And, much it is clearly self-inflicted.

In the US, division, defiance, and distrust have become more politically and economically important than trust, integrity, true community, and right relationships.  Resistance, on all sides, has become part of the machine. There’s constant demand for distractions and reactions, blame, revolt, and self-righteousness. Christianity plays a big part in it.

The danger, of course, is that fear and prophecies of disaster tend to be self-fulfilling.  Why? Because crises manufacture their own authority. 

Looking at my phone, following the news, or just trying to survive changing tides, we all can get lost in the machine – its relentless efforts to keep us and itself running. It can distract us from real community, real relationships, higher goods – the common good. 

This isn’t the first time I’ve been on my porch feeling lost, a bit numb, and searching for the truth that lies right around me and within me.

Photo: Anne Bonnefin

I’m waking up to the spiritual truth that God invited me – perhaps, invites us – into the wilderness for an adventure. Not unlike Israel’s long journey in the wilderness of freedom or loss in exile.  I and many other Christians are learning how to find God and see Jesus in a world where authority, truth, and trust seem absent. It’s a demanding spirituality of uncertainty, undoing, and deep longing. But, it’s also full of opportunities for faith, an adventure to see find God is always already everywhere.

I’m beginning by learning to let God find me.  That’s the hard part. But God does.  When the screens are off, my mind stills, the distractions stop, I feel my body and listen to my heart’s voice, there I am.  I’m not alone. God is always already there.

And hope is everywhere.