Hope In Adversity
Hope is the necessary companion of humans during adversity. When faced with extreme prejudice, violence, and pain, hope makes the difference between those who survive and those who perish. Viktor Frankl observed the impact of Nazi concentration camps on human life and the role of hope, in Man’s Search For Meaning (1959). The concentration camp experience emphasized an awareness of suffering as part of the human condition. Frankl observed the reactions of himself and his peers to this extreme reality. He noted which people were ultimately able to survive, and at what price. Ultimately, the survivors were people who accepted their circumstances as a challenge to inner freedom, as a challenge to one's ability to remain true to deeply held values and faith. Each action and each thought which was recognized as originating in free will and dignity provided encouragement. The single most influential factor in rising to meet such a challenge, in Frankl's view, was faith in the future. He related several stories about fellow prisoners who were sustained by hope but died immediately upon relinquishing it.
Even the (Nazi) camp doctor associated a sharply increased death rate following Christmas, 1944, with the prisoners' abandonment of a naive hope that the holiday would bring liberation. Close reading of Frankl's account reveals that he is pointing to existential hope, in agree¬ment with Marcel's criteria in The Existential Background Of Human Dignity (1944). Mere optimism did not suffice in the concentration camp: “Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to minimize or alleviate the camp's tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs” (Frankl, 1959).
The “hoping” that Frankl describes is a fundamental orientation toward life based on confident acceptance: “We had to learn ourselves, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” This perspective implies that the hoping person bears trust in his ability to accommodate life's demands, to rise to the challenge. That, in itself, is inspiring to hope.
African Americans (particularly women) have also learned to utilize hope and spirituality to overcome adversity. In her essay, “My Hope Is In The Lord” (1997), Diana Hayes quotes St. Augustine: “Hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to work to make things other than they are.” Hayes goes on to explain the wisdom of African American women, who live with hope on a daily basis, and “as the bearers of many burdens, have also been, most importantly, the bearers of culture. It is as the givers of life and the teachers of the future that they have suckled their children with the passionate anger and courage which sustained the hope that always dwelled within them, despite and through it all.” Hayes credits the church community with providing the support to hope and role-models from “a long line of strong Black women who lived what it means to be womanist—to be bold, daring, audacious, and outrageous… it is these women who have nurtured and sustain the Black community through all of its ups and downs…” Augustine’s anger and courage of hope provides the impetus for activism, and these activists find that through their very actions, they are again provided with the energy-sustaining hope.
In
his book, Joining Hands: Politics And Religion Together For Social Change
(2002), Roger Gottlieb describes the power of politics as, “not
simply a way of understanding how society controls our lives, or of the
mass structures of injustice, or even of large-scale movements of change.
It is a way of coming to terms with loss, moving beyond the self, and
finding meaning in the midst of a difficult fate.” The link between
spirituality and activism provided the catalyst for hope, for, “without
spiritual resources, we will not be able to endure the pain that openness
[to the world] produces. Without politics, our spiritual lives will be
escapist and superficial… The message is simple: to remake the world
we need simultaneously to remake ourselves, and we stand little chance
at remaking our selves without at least the attempt to remake the world.
The spiritual journey beyond the confines of the individual ego, the political
journey toward fundamental social change- either one undertaken without
knowledge of the necessity of the other has scant chance of success.”
While this can be an overwhelming process, Gottlieb assures us that all
we need to do is start, anywhere. By actively improving our own small
worlds, we gain the hope that the larger world can similarly be improved,
which in turn gives us the energy to live our lives in accordance with
our hopes.