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Yet God tells us that in Christ, all our deepest desires can be realized at last. But our discontent is so great because our desires are deeper than we can even imagine. We struggle with hope, Timothy Keller says, because we so often find ourselves discontent. Tiny fingers still wrinkled from birth hand us the answers to our deepest longings.īecause at the heart of hope lie our deepest desires. The swaddled King brings God-love to man. Advent hope comes.īecause even in the dark night, with shepherds bowing to fear as much as to majesty, the baby in the manger brings more to the absurdity than rebellion of logic and suspension of reason. Our Deepest LongingsĪdvent hope doesn’t try to escape. It’s true that false hope-Sisyphus hope, blind optimism-looks around desperately for something never to be found: “It has to get better.” That hope looks for the ripcord, the trap door, the control-Z that will erase the errors of suffering. 'Is it not rather a form of moral cowardice that allows us to escape from reality and prolong human suffering?' Yet “is hope always such a wonderful thing?” contemporary philosopher Simon Critchly asked recently in his New York Times Opinionator piece. The embrace of hope and the refusal of suicide constitute the rock that the mythical Sisyphus, standing in for you and me, must endlessly push to the top of the mountain of existence, knowing that as he reaches the summit-as despair fades and hope nears triumph-the rock will tumble punishingly to the bottom, forcing him to an absurd renewal of his commitment to life and hope.” “But he proceeds to assert that we must rebel against that logic and happily embrace the absurdity of life. “Camus, like Russell, asserts that despair and-going beyond Russell-even suicide are the logical response to the human condition,” Miles writes. Why? How? French philosopher Albert Camus found an explanation. Russell’s paradigm of despair represents a string of philosophers who find meaningless to be the only logical responses to the difficulties of life. Especially this time of year, when the holiday season seems more about Christmas parties and twinkle lights and gifts in shiny wrapping and not enough about a young Jewish couple a cold, dark stable and steam rising from dung. As the suffering mounts around me, my own hope, my own belief that better days will come, grows cynical. I understand, sometimes, this “burden of hope,” the pain of trying to shine a small light in enormously dark places.

“Throw that master switch and feel the relief spread through your mind and body, feel the burden of hope lift from your shoulders, feel the freedom of no longer needing to make anything happen for anybody, including yourself” (emphasis mine). “Here was the habitation that my soul had been seeking!” he wrote.

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“Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair … can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built,” Russell wrote in his essay “A Free Man’s Worship.” In his December 2014 Atlantic Monthly article “ Why God Will Not Die,” author Jack Miles remembers his early encounter with the writings of philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose response to the intense suffering of the human condition led to only one conclusion. How do I hope-how do they hope-when it seems all hope is lost. “All my friends are facing the worst possible scenarios,” I tell my husband. Others face injustice, infertility, insanity. I’ve listened to laments of marriage hurts that just won’t heal, unexplained seizures that keep shaking limbs and unsettling lives, rebellion that refuses to soften, diseases that resist all curing. In the past several months, many of my closest friends have found themselves in the darkest of circumstances, hopeless situations not only missing easy answers but void of answers altogether.

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Learning From the Psalms How to Pray Through Your Work.Beyond Rank and Power: What Philemon Tells Us About Leadership.Evangelism - Sharing the Gospel at Work.10 Key Points About Work in the Bible Every Christian Should Know.

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