Tisk, tisk on me. I could write more, but I ought to spare my reader more details. At least I have a “plan”, and that's God's plan also. It goes something like this: to embody the manifestation of human existence in its fullest form. Or you may say grow in Christ. Or to realize Buddha nature. And then what?!
Well, the what can't just be the bring more hope in this world. I look around and get more pessimistic by the day. And yet, I see the absurdity in it all too which brings some degree of joy and laughter. As the Aphorist said: With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored.
I am definitely not bored, despite the seeking mind keeps me more busy that I should allow. And I am always open to embracing what is unexpected and ironic about the ride. I recently spent over 3 weeks in Kenya, and I found most of the people there quite delightful. Despite their dire circumstances in many aspects of life, they embody a gentle humored lightness about it all. They intuitively understand that hope can't be limited by a life, but needs to reach into some nether region or what's the point.
The problem with the western elites and their indoctrinated sycophants is that they keep trying to get us to reach for something in the corrupting system they've embraced. Should I get my kicks over the technocratic future of AI infused transhumanism, or perhaps the globalist regulated panopticon that keeps us safe and comfortable, and then there's the micro-dosed happy zombie world where suffering and struggle is defeated (or just avoided)? None of the above.
This explains something of the strange barbarity of so much of modernity. Despite its sophistication, its gilded rhetoric and high hopes for good things, it has a destructive core. It promises a social and personal paradise, but saddled with a false understanding of humanity and its ills and thinking that the desired utopia will arrive as a matter of course once the requisite restraints have been demolished, it too often leaves behind not a lush garden but a howling wasteland. (—from Christendom to Apostolic Mission.)
The wasteland of a fragmented modernity obscured by radical nominalism, now fully formed as postmodernity, has done secular hope in. It has led to senseless activism, false idols, or dead-end despair. I don't think there is much we can do in the way of this world that will inspire great hope. It's not that we shouldn't do anything. I would prefer that we could do things again that are sensible (note: common sense is needed), workable (in a concrete way, not so abstractly), moral (yes, objective right and wrong exists), and decent (requires standards and judgement which are a bit out of fashion). Moreover, this sort of quality to life would ultimately require us to love God again firstly.
Perhaps that is why hope is one of the theological virtues; not just a cardinal virtue—according to Catholicism. It is not a subjective disposition that falls into a worldly optimism. That sort of hope can easily turn into hopelessness once you've been beaten up by the futility of it all. How many times do we need to see our idols or passions fall from grace or fashion to get the message?
Instead, the bar needs to be raised to see hope as vividly NOW and substantively ETERNAL.
Hope is not a human accomplishment in the making—it is a gift given as grace. It perfects nature. It places us beyond the source and the end of action and offers a proof of things not seen.
We are not anticipating the kingdom, but instead infused with it. It is regenerative and renews us with a substantive hope of the direct reality of God and the friendly cosmos that He has manifested for us to discover and co-create with Him.
We don't know how things may turn out, but it does not so much matter. As St. Paisios of Mount Athos said, “What I see around me would drive me insane if I did not know that no matter what happens, God will have the last word.”
If there is a point to life, if there is a point even beyond this life, suffering can be understood as mystery and not simply as a problem, to use the terms of Gabriel Marcel. Problems are to be solved, and the problem disappears in its solution. Not so a mystery, because we are caught up into the issue, perhaps even are the issue. Once the test is finished, I relax and move on to the next task or to rest. But I can never move on from myself, for I am a mystery to myself and my attempts to wrestle with myself involve me as my own opponent, and there is no obvious way of putting the challenge to rest. The mystery of suffering is not resolvable, for even if we were able to end all pain from this day forward, the unpalatable fact of past suffering remains a challenge to our vision of the world and God as good. Suffering cannot simply be solved; it must, somehow, be redeemed, incorporated into meaning, into purpose. Suffering can be resolved, ultimately, only if all things, even the shattering and awful, are incorporated or recapitulated into goodness. (—from R.J. Snell's terrific book, Lost in the Chaos.)