Illusions of Hope

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist trims his sails (old sailor’s proverb).

I have been absent from the blog for a few days. Last week, my wife and I went camping up in the Cotentin (the little “arm” of the north of France that points towards the south of England) for a couple of days. There were a couple of excellent choral concerts, and we were able to admire the lovely seascapes to the east of the great port of Cherbourg. The only thing I sorely missed was my boat!

Today, I share with you some of my deepest thoughts, which I think can be helpful to many of our readers. The most insidious enemy we Christians face is illusion, a twisting or perversion of reality or spiritual health. Illusions prevent us from being what we really are and introduce the kind of negativity that dogs us. And one day, we will face death with only disappointment and regrets to take with us. The illusions we face, whether they come from evil spirits or from ourselves, tend to revolve around not being capable of being satisfied, comparing ourselves with unattainable standards to validate our beliefs, striving, struggling, resisting, focusing on the past and future rather than the present and trying to control what we cannot master. Our happiness seems to depend on rearranging the world to fit our whims.

The two most devastating illusions are hope and certainty. In the illusion of certainty, the need to know an outcome keeps you from acting, making authentic decisions, and doing what we can do. Everything depends on the ordinariates, or the Pope, or Cardinal Levada, or the TAC bishops, or whatever. This illusion can also create the desire to destroy what cannot be attained (ever or within a “reasonable” time) – that’s where the nastiness of the trolls comes from. They write their caustic stuff in the hope that everything can be brought down and rearranged, rather like people who think wars do good! The illusion of hope consists of waiting for other people or events to solve our uneasiness of who we are. We wait and suspend all the things we could be doing right now.

Live without hope or goals? That seems so bleak and boring. It all depends on how we look at the glass with half of its volume consisting of water and the other half of air. Is it half full or half-empty? The hope of Christianity has always been utopian, the heaven of the blessed and devout, or some kind of renewed heaven and earth after the events of the Parousia. Of course, Apocalypse means Revelation – of something more to be known about God and his plan (if there is one). Roughly in Church history, there is an alternation between the Christianity of the Martyrs and holy monks, on one hand, and populations of “cultural” Christians living in political systems more or less supportive of Christianity for centuries on end, but as mediocre believers served (or dominated) by a clerical caste. That is something constant, except for now – in a time when we have neither Christian Civilisation nor an end-orientated faith, discredited as it has been by fundamentalist preachers and pseudo-prophets. That also happened before in the early fourteenth century with the various cults vaguely inspired by St Francis of Assisi and Joachim of Flore.

Hope is certainly the worst motivation of a refugee seeking asylum in another country where he will never be accepted into the population. So it is of the convert to Catholicism, Orthodoxy or Islam! I have the impression that the only kind of Christianity that can survive into the future is one that is able to dispense with hope, knowledge, any measure of understanding, reason or control. The Christian of the future will be a hero, superhuman, and the church he will belong to will be an elite of the best – perhaps a pure society to which very few of us will be able to relate. The cultural Christians and the mediocre will lose what remains of their faith and will be gone – most already have walked away. This is perhaps what I fear most as the remnants of Christian Civilisation leave only empty churches and abandoned monuments behind. The bleakness is so heart-rending that we look back with nostalgia for the past. It is the desert, Moses and the forty-year exodus from Egypt!

How long will it be before our own optimism and hope are shattered? Can we say with men of the Renaissance that something beautiful and new lies just round the corner, is history at an end, or have we to adapt to another philosophy of human happiness and hope? Wherever we turn, the “open door” or “divine sign” is nowhere to be seen. The Gospel words come into my mind – No sign will be given but the sign of Jonas. For the modern world, Christianity is dead.

We are constantly told we have to have hope, that we will not be accepted until we are in communion with Rome, like the car manufacturer will tell you that you have to have their product to be happy and acceptable. The compulsive gambler plays on and on, and pushes himself further and further down into debt – as he desperately hopes for that win that will save his house or his car. Optimism and hope are so entrenched into our culture that no one questions it. Christian teachings are full of it. When all is lost, keep hope – they say. We all hope for better days, to get a better and more fulfilling job, meet Mr or Miss Right, win the lottery and become stinking rich – or whatever. Hope is an addiction!

When you really look at the situation the TAC now seems to face, it is pretty grotty as I see it. It all started with a splendid vision of Church unity, but then it struck the reality of the Church of the early twenty-first century and the protective instincts of the status quo in place. We have to face it – it is not our Church. Part of our motivation is that we were refugees from the Anglican Communion, and we find that our alphabet soup churches are not historically viable. We face our own mortality and the consequences of our own illusions. We go ahead and we lose our freedom by joining someone else’s Church. We pull back and we will be laughed at. It is not pretty. It could have been avoided, but wasn’t. There is just nothing to discuss.

It is harmful to continue with this discussion on this blog. I am as guilty as anyone else. They are the concerns of our bishops. Of course, any of us can “get off the bus” and go and join the local Catholic parish or traditionalist group (if that is our cup of tea). Some have done so. Some have found happiness. Some return to the old fleshpots, and also have consequences to face. What is at issue is not to abolish hope, because the alternative is nihilism – life as an empty void, looking down into hell from a black jagged rock. It is hope without responsibility, or rather putting the onus on things, persons or agencies outside ourselves that leads us to the fatal addiction. The devil is in that kind of hope that keeps us from doing the thing we can do and holds the present hostage.

I never look at the masses as my responsibility; I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time – just one, one one. So you begin. I began – I picked up one person. Maybe if I didn’t pick up that one person, I wouldn’t have picked up forty-two THOUSAND . . . Just begin – one, one, one (Mother Teresa).

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