The Answer to Fear & Hope

Once our present moment and its real problems slips past, and it is always passing, two great problems of soul remain: fear, including what causes might warrant it, and hope – or rather, the need for more than the absence of pain, but for true fulfillment without expiry. Or at least that is how it feels to me.  Almost anything, perhaps in fact anything, can be borne for a time if the problem is temporary and the solution permanent, and this is exactly what I struggle with. I fear anticipated future pain, reasonable and unreasonable; I fear decline; I fear missing out on anything and everything; I fear being lost, and being self-deceived about that, and this last sum of all fears makes me struggle also to have hope for a future beyond whatever I might fear. I’m not writing this to worry anyone who might see this as a cause for sympathetic alarm – these are not new problems, and I have made a great deal of progress with them over the years. But they are persistent anxieties, perhaps because they are ultimate ones, or perhaps it is simply because of a fault in myself, a weakness. As I have grown older and have in fact developed far greater self-control in practice, I have paradoxically come to feel less and less willing to accept a commitment to any sort of prospective suffering or austerity, less able to cope with the idea of life getting worse – or perhaps defensively inflexible about the definition of ‘worse.’ Any uncertainty that leaves open the possibility of any pain or decline that does not resolve in joy eventually seems an unacceptable risk, inimical to mental peace. And I am more conscious than ever of my unwillingness to sacrifice in the present enough that I could ever believe the future secure. And security is not enough to live on; we must have a future to hope for, not some negation of suffering. Living merely toward oblivion or the release from samsara is not Life.

I’ve talked a fair amount about my Christianity, and I have no hidden agenda in bringing it up – it is the great preoccupation of my mind, which I could not sincerely avoid when discussing my feelings, if I even wanted to. The promise of Christ was never simply security and salvation, but for us to have Life, to the full – but I struggle with what that means, and in turn I consequently struggle with the fear of missing whatever it does mean. Theology in practice, passed down through the Church, doesn’t always feel like it speaks with equal eagerness or satisfying clarity to all human anxiety and desire. Milk and honey, fellowship, feasting, and song are easy to place in the Eschaton – and as a metaphor, it should seem broad enough to encompass all our hopes and dreams. But what if our desires are transitory and temporal, or are bad? Where does one locate the particular, nonfungible aesthetics of sexuality in the Eschaton, and what about the negative feelings which are still a component of heartfelt desire – the anger one feels, usually some mixture of rightly and wrongly all at once, or simple pride, the desire to make oneself great. It is difficult to imagine on an emotionally comprehensible level how these things can be either replaced or redeemed without becoming unrecognizable. And out of this anxiety about what exactly we have to hope for, comes both the fear of missing out, and the fear that if it is possible to reject a perfect future, it must be because one refuses to accept it as satisfying, which seems to suggest both fears as reasonably possible.

I’m very open about all of this all year round, but I bring it up on Christmas because, at the risk of narrating theology into a shape I can more easily accept, I believe the Incarnation has to be the answer to both the fear of loss & the uncertainty of what to hope for. I don’t want to go too far into making God’s promises neatly match my feelings about the good, the bad, and the beautiful, nor do I dare to get into the tortured question of whether or not anyone will ultimately miss out on Life.  But in becoming a human, who clearly had every feeling and desire and pain that is natural to our species, God exposed Himself to all that we fear – including disunion with Himself – and left Himself everything to hope for in a future, anticipated now that He had stepped into time. I haven’t resolved this issue of fear and hope in my life in a way I find satisfying, but I am trying to choose to believe that when Christ promises that “all these things shall be added unto you,” there is a way for that to be true, even if our dark glass is too dim to perceive how. I think it is necessary for there to be a way to know that we have no cause to fear, and that beyond whatever passing cause exists is a future in which all our hopes can find purchase. Perhaps I am downplaying the extent to which we must be transformed – I struggle with this because I do not think a better thing can necessarily replace a worse thing if there are differences, because there is something of life in the differences – so it is possible I am veering off course. I haven’t arrived. But by becoming a human, and going through ultimate loss, and then demonstrating the promise of hope, for a human, I believe Christ’s incarnation is a seal on the promise that all shall indeed be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.