Notes from a Sojourn
March 19, 2020
Hope
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Vaclav Havel, playwright and President of the Czech Republic, 1993 – 2003
I first encountered this quotation in the Spring of 2018, shortly after I had begun a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education at The Ottawa Hospital. I was assigned to offer spiritual care on a geriatric medicine unit and, over the course of three months, entered daily into the “in betweenness” of many peoples’ lives: the time between lives lived with physical strength, mobility, and stable friendships to lives of rapidly increasing weakness, disability, and strangeness. Sometimes, in between life and death itself.
Being perceptive as she is, my mother – a recently retired RN – had loaned me her copy of "In the Midst of Life," a beautifully written memoir by nurse Jennifer Worth (of Call the Midwife fame). At the conclusion of one chapter partway through her book was this carefully placed quotation by Havel. Reading it was, for me, a moment of insight. A gift. A grace. It gave to me the understanding I needed to accompany many women and men through those “in between“ times at the hospital.
I think Havel’s words honestly express the texture of Christian hope needed for our present moment. Hope is the certainty that some things make sense regardless of “how it turns out.” Love continues to make sense. Prayer makes sense. Compassion, forgiveness, friendship, silence, stillness…all these things continue to make sense regardless of how things turn out. I imagine this is the kind of hope that strengthened and sustained Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem – not a conviction that everything would turn out well, but that God’s love for his life – and for us – was certain, regardless of how it turned out.
Colin+
