The illusion of hope....from a psychological perspective

 This is Easter Sunday, 2023, the day on the calendar when Christians celebrate the Risen Christ. It is the day on the liturgical calendar that, even more than the birthday of Christmas, symbolizes hope, new life, promise after a very day Good Friday and the Crucifixion.

We all speak, think and imagine hope in “light” as opposed to darkness; in melodic tunes and harmonies, rather than minor keys and dissonance; in impressionistic water pools surrounded by a surfeit of flowers, not in midnight alleys, with crawling felines and piercing sirens. In our private and personal lives, too, we attempt to keep a ‘stiff upper lip’ as a sign that we are walking on the cushion of hope, that things are ‘on the up-and-up’ and that those who signal otherwise are not merely sad and depressed, but they are also to be avoided, or at least encountered minimally. “A smile is the kindest gift you can offer to another,” reads a calligraphic poster in the dentist’s office, where it has both a literal and a metaphoric appropriateness.

Smile as a symbol of kindness, implies, however, that ‘frown’ is a symbol of unkindness, or at least unhappiness, that ‘being down’ is a condition ameliorated at least momentarily on this bright, crisp and Spring-embodiment of a Sunday morning. We have a gallery of names and faces of men and women in our lives who have been ‘smiling’ with, at, near or among us. We have good memories of those moments, and the face and name that we associate with those moments is printed in ‘India ink’ in our memory, never to be erased.

Nevertheless, for all we know, and for all we have shown the world, there are many times when they and we ‘smiled’ when we and they felt no more like smiling that we/they felt like catapulting across the Hoover Dam, from a sling-shot ‘bungy-cord’. We knew, however, that the smile is/was/and will be the signal we were expected to project in order to attract others who might ‘like and respect’ us. Whether we were meeting a new teacher, or professor, a new doctor, dentist, neighbour or friend, ‘first impressions’ are both singular and lasting. The cliché, among human resource professionals is that ‘we have only thirty seconds to make a positive first impression” and that first impression was the indelible imprint that we leave on the new person.

Naturally, we all want to ‘fit in’ with the conventional language, attitude, behaviour and reciprocity of the social and political culture in which we live. And while it may be an early and inescapable, as well as incontrovertible, axiom that ‘smiling’ is the ‘first foot’ to put forward in all of our personal encounters. However, there is another side to this ‘smiling’ cultural meme and expectation.

Linked intimately and inimitably to the smile, is the image of strength, confidence, balance, maturity and a comfort ‘within one’s own skin’ that the culture finds both pleasing and emboldening. Anything that detracts from this ‘smile’ (and it must not be exaggerated, as if in a former ‘Pepsodent’ commercial, lest  it convey the impression of inauthenticy) is noted as at best a question-mark in the mind’s eye of many people. Being nice, pleasant, easy to be with, and uncomplicated are all social goals and aspirations in the public arena. Indeed, many would consider them the sine qua non, (without not which, therefore the absolute essentials) for personal and professional success.

While some would undoubtedly push back on a notion I read recently, for the first time, in a work by James Hillman, in Revisioning Psychology, in which he espouses this perspective:

“The ‘rage to live’ is the one-sided affection for life that one often sees in tandem with symptoms.” Never before have reflected on the notion that one (anyone, including this scribe) might have a ‘rage to live,’ I had to step back, take a deep breath, and reflect if, in all of the many ‘encounters’ with others I have had, in which I was by far the more ‘enthusiastic’ and the more ‘committed’ and the more ‘singularly minded’ and the more ‘focused’ and the more ‘determined’ to execute whatever project or purpose that was at hand, among the several others who were also engaged in the endeavour, I was embodying a ‘rage to live’ as my way of masking my determination to demonstrate, indeed to prove, my worth and value. In some instances, that ‘enthusiasm’ was deemed to be an asset and therefore merited acceptance and even encouragement, depending on the specifics of the situation for which it was being considered. In others, however, it was considered a distinct, obvious and thereby an easy path for the other to resort to dismissal of my petition. Among adolescents, for twenty-five years, it never seemed excessive, given that the students’ exploding hormones and developing intellect and bodies were dominating their consciousness. Among adults, however, the enthusiasm was interpreted sometimes as obsequiousness to the hierarchy, or as a kind of escapism, (from what no one, including this scribe, really knew) or as a demonstration of impatience. This is and was especially evident in a bureaucratic culture where change involving multiple constituents, including the seeding of information, and the ‘schmoozing’ of key leadership personnel, and the nurturing of both the comprehension of new information and the sustainability of new colleagues was not only necessary it comprised the totality of the success of the projected changes.

Excess energy, to this scribe, however, was never deemed to be ‘excess;’ what I was experiencing seemed eminently ‘natural’ as this ‘state’ of hyperactivity (as others saw it) was a ‘condition’ that had/has been both familiar and comfortable for eight decades-plus. Even at eighteen, while sitting on a beach on Sloup Island in Georgian Bay, I commented, “I never expect to live until the age of forty, given that I expect to ‘burn out’ before I reach that age!”

It seems preposterous to me now, these sixty-three years later, that I might have had such a ‘premonition’ without knowing anything more than the raw flame of the intuition. Nevertheless, neither the flame nor the accompanying energy/enthusiasm nor the consciousness of it as illusion was unavailable until recently.

When attempting to make serious decisions, I sought counsel, while, holding back on actually making those difficult decisions. Something within was asking, over and over and over, if the decision I was contemplating was both necessary and ‘doable’, not from a pragmatic and fiscal and every-day responsibility perspective, but from an ‘inner’ psychic, and almost a bodily perspective. I did not realize then, at least three-plus decades ago, that some of the bloom on the ‘flower’ of both energy and ambition was wilting. For, that energy that I was incarnating was the expression of something very deep and “siamezed” to and with ambition. A cliché such as ‘I cannot survive with only sixteen-year-olds as my human and social fabric’ return now, in memory, uttered as a rational for seeking and finding extra-curricular work, first in a men’s wear shop, and later in free-lance journalism.

Undoubtedly, while seeking counsel for large decisions, such as leaving a marriage, I brought to the room some sense of hope that I would eventually reach a decision. Hope had to be implicit in my search, otherwise I would not likely have booked those appointments. What I did not then, and only recently have more fully realized was a ‘face’ and quality of hope that remained hidden to this high-paced, impatient and highly motivated individual: illusion.

Here is Hillman:

Because hope has this core of illusion, it favors repression. By hoping for the ante status quo ante, we repress the present state of weakness and suffering and all it can bring. (The length of time during which I procrastinated on making a final decision, now seems to indicate a kind of hope for things to be more tolerable and to return to something like they were in the beginning.) Postures of strength are responsible for many major complaints today- ulcers, vascular and coronary conditions, high blood pressure, stress syndrome, alcoholism, highway and sport accidents, mental breakdown. The will to fall ill, like the suicide impulse leads patient and physician face to face with morbidity, which stubbornly returns in spite of all hope to the contrary. One might ask if medical hope itself is not partly responsible for recurrent illness; since it never fully allows for weakness and suffering the death experience is not able top produce its meaning. Experiences are cheated of their thorough effect by speedy recovery. Until the soul has got what it wants, it must fall ill again. (Hillman, A Blue Fire, p. 78 from Hillman, Suicide and the Soul, 79, 156-158)

Today, in homilies around the continent, in parishes of various denominations, and in likely what are millions of well-intentioned Happy Easter greetings, both virtual and floral, snail male and texting, sincere and earnest family members and friends and colleagues will be wishing happy thoughts and prayers for a “new life” and a “new hope” in celebration of the Risen Christ. And while not attempting to diminish the love and the authenticity of such time-honoured wishes, including Chag Pesach sameach for the Jewish Passover and a Ramadan Kareem for Muslims.

The religious/spiritual occasion, for all three Abrahamic religions, is expressed in the keeping of the various rituals, in worship of a diety. The pursuit and celebration of hope, including the pursuit of happiness, on the other hand, is a personal, psychological and even secular matter, from which it is very troublesome to extricate the expectations of the theology.

What our society and culture seems to have difficulty with is how, if and when to separate the expectations of faith from those of the psyche. And while they are able to be disentangled, it would seem, from the perspective of this scribe, that those engaged in the proposition of enhancing and growing and nurturing the people of their respective faith, in that faith, inevitably and almost imperceptibly, wander in the desert that lies between the secular and the religious, in sands hot enough to scorch the feet and awaken the mind and heart.

The translation, for example of ‘prosperity gospel’ as an expression of the hope of the New Testament and Easter Sunday, not only ignores the full meaning and import of the deeply religious meaning and intent of the theology. The notion of highly esteemed and ubiquitous expressions of unalloyed and unsullied self-righteousness, too, defies the meaning and intent of the Risen Christ. So, too, was my own excess of both energy and ambition in the service of career and personal goals, to justify worth, and to claim to fill the vacuum of self-respect which hollowed out the purpose of any fully authentic life or faith.

We can hope that the illusion of hope on this most important day on the Christian calendar will not sully the experience or the celebration of the meaning and intent of Easter, even in the eating of a common meal of traditional Easter food, or in the happy ‘egg hunt’ that magnetizes the day for children. Not only will the extrication of the illusion of hope offer the possibility of fewer medical complaints and the elevation of the needs of the soul to their proper awareness.