That is a tall order for us. It requires a hope that balances humility and harshness. We have to be kind to ourselves and to one another, and yet brutally honest at the same time. Perhaps we will have to go beyond harsh to become ruthless in our hope. I want to quote from one of the Western world’s most well-known philosophers and social critics, who saw this at an early age. In a letter to a friend, a 25-year-old Karl Marx wrote:

“[T]here can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with the powers that be.”

It is not unusual for radicals to exhort us to confront power. More interesting is the other part of Marx’s statement: We must not shrink from our own discoveries. This is the need for deeper analysis of which I have been speaking. The need to shake off dogma, to refuse to hide in the assumptions that provide some comfort in this broken world. The need to be ruthlessly honest about the systems and institutions in which we live. If we are to have hope, honestly, there is no other choice. 

What are those discoveries? I think the most important ones concern the nature of the systems and institutions in which we live. It is tempting to want to blame our problems on individuals. That would be a fatal error at this point. In other words: 

* The problem is not simply George W. Bush and the gang of thugs who gave us the Afghanistan and Iraq debacles. The problem is the brutality of empire.

* The problem is not simply Ken Lay and the bad boys of Enron, but the inhuman nature of corporate capitalism.

* The problem is not simply sex and violence on television, but the fact that television is on, always on, in so many homes.

* The problem is not simply the overt racism of the Ku Klux Klan but the polite ways in which we nice liberal white folks can so easily avoid the realties of how white supremacy is deeply woven into the fabric of this society.

* The problem is not simply the men who rape but the men who let them rape without consequence.

* The problem is not simply the greed and stupidity of Donald Trump but the greed and stupidity of us all. 

Being lovingly ruthless is not easy. For the past decade, I have been slowly trying to come to terms with my own discoveries, and this is hard. They are discoveries of the extent to which this world is broken, why it is broken, and how it has broken me. 

I have discovered, as have many others, that this is a world in which from the global to the personal, virtually no one is really safe. It is a world in which powerful nations unleash a grotesque yet sanitized violence that supposedly is for the benefit of those whose homes will be destroyed. It is a world in which men invade the most intimate spaces of women, and then demand that women remain silence about that violence. It is a world in which the affluent step over the homeless on their way to the mall. It is a world in which white people continue to demand that non-white people bear the burden of our inability to confront our own white pathology. And, most frightening of all, it is a world in which we are drawing down the ecological capital of the planet in a fashion that is unsustainable, not just over the long term but now even in a much shorter calculus. 

This is the simple discovery we must confront: We were given a place in creation, with a beauty beyond the telling, and we have failed to care for it. And as our collective contempt for the non-human world has intensified, so has our contempt for each other. We have failed to care for each other.

Those are our failures, and we must step up to our responsibility for them. But we must also be clear that these failures are not just ours as individuals, but are the failures of the systems in which we live. The answer is not simply to make ourselves better individuals. We could transform ourselves individually into saints, but as long as those systems and institutions endure, we will be coping with the inevitable failures that are part of their nature. Capitalism produces inequality. Nation-states make war. A high-energy/high-technology society destroys the basis for sustained life. 

As hard as it is for any one of us to become a better person, it would be comforting to think that such a personal transformation would be enough. But it isn’t, and it never will be. It is hard for us to confront ourselves and change. But it is immeasurably more difficult to become part of a long struggle to change that which is outside of us. But that is exactly what hope demands of us in this broken world.

But that is not the most difficult thing that hope demands. Perhaps the hardest discovery from which we must not shrink is related to that first point, about the limits of our knowledge. As we intensify our commitment to analyze and act, we have to abandon any certainty about that analysis and action. We must cope with a fundamental uncertainty that will dog us as we must take up our place in the struggle, and that is hardest of all. I believe that to claim to know “for sure” is to mark oneself a coward. It is to say, “I have looked into the face of the crisis, but I cannot bear it, and I have retreated to certainty.” 

I see conservative Christians do this. I see agnostic sectarian leftists do it. I see my academic colleagues do it, endlessly. I see my political allies do it. And every day I battle it in myself.

These are radically uncertain times. No one has the answer. There is no “the answer.” There is a rapidly deepening crisis that we first must struggle to understand before we can begin to imagine answers. As Wes Jackson puts it, we have to pose questions that go beyond the available answers.

Can we hold onto our uncertainty and our convictions at the same time? Can we identify values which we will not surrender and also understand that the path to living those values may be unclear at any given moment? I don’t think we have a choice. If we cannot do this, we cannot honestly claim hope, and if that is our fate then I believe creation will be forever lost to us.

To borrow from a poem by Wendell Berry, it is time to face “the real work.”
 

*  *  *  *  * 

The Real Work 
Wendell Berry  

It may be that when we no longer know what to do 
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go 
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
 

*  *  *  *  *  
I do not pretend to know where we’re heading if we follow the singing stream. I do not know where this journey will lead us. To quote a 90-year-old radical activist friend, Abe Osheroff, “There’s no destination for the train I’m on. No destination, just a direction.” (http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html)

Okay, Abe, easy for you to say. Abe is 90, and he knows his time is limited. I find the lack of a destination more troubling. At this point, since we’re in a church, I am going to do what preachers do when they aren’t sure about the answer: Quote the Bible, mumble a bit, and hope nobody notices I haven’t a clue. 

Brothers and sisters, let us turn to Psalm 42:5, which says, “Hope in God.” 

Okay, so I went for something simple, but cut me some slack here. It’s not like I went to seminary. I barely made it through confirmation class at the First Presbyterian Church of Fargo, ND.

Hope in God. For the sake of discussion here, I’ll buy that. But whatever one thinks about theology and scripture and competing interpretations, in the end we all have to acknowledge that God is, and always will be, mystery. If that’s true, then the command really is “Hope in mystery.”