An As Yet Undefined Hope

There is a wonderful phrase in Paul’s writings. It really doesn’t matter who said it, it is nonetheless a beautiful thought which I believe to be God’s words. Here it is, “hope does not disappoint.” That’s true. Hope cannot disappoint because it is not yet realized. Only that which is done can disappoint.

Faith differs from hope in that it is a felt reality. Faith resides or departs from the moment. We don’t have faith in the past, nor in the future; faith is, by its essence, a matter of the moment in which we find ourselves. It is not clear to me if faith feeds hope or hope gives birth to faith.

My first encounter with a serious Christian writer was Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith. I read it a week after my conversion. While looking for a book to school my nascent belief, the name Paul Tillich caught my attention because I remembered that it appears on a plaque on the Roofless Church in New Harmony, Indiana, where two utopian communities once resided. Tillich died there while dedicating the Roofless Church, which was a testimony to religious syncretism. While in my late teens, this place became my thinking zone. I took away from his book on faith, something I still believe to be true; that doubt is not the enemy of faith but its countervailing element which gives the heart a dynamic between two polarities: Faith and doubt, hope and despair.

Eric Ericson developed a pattern of human develop that covers an entire life span. Each of his seven stages has two polarities. According to Mr. Ericson’s theory, I am positioned at the end of stage six called Generativity vs. Stagnation and stage seven which he says to be Ego Integrity vs. Despair. I would assume every stage has it cusp or point of intersection where one is poised between two stages. I am, and have been for a while, at such an interlude. I am either a six plus or seven minus.

I think in terms of my faith development the answer to despair is hope. The food of hope is faith. Faith is, however, not self generated. It is a gift from a wise and caring God who dispenses various measures of faith based on his own sovereign purposes. For a while, God seems to have, in correspondence to this cusp, cast a shadow on my faith. It seems that I am at the edge of the shadow and about to step back into the full light of hope.

I am left with the practical and existential question: what am I to become in my old age?

 

I oldest daughter offered her troubled father this passage to contemplate. I did and it fed my soul.

 

Isaiah 46:3-4 (RSV)

³ "Hearken to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been borne by me from your birth, carried from the womb; ⁴ even to your old age I am He, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.