I recently received a letter from a friend of mine expressing his concerns about the (admittedly not great) state of the world today. This presented me with the opportunity to reflect, again, on what I view as the point of prophetic religion.
Prophecy is a discursive genre. Its purpose, from Zarathustra to the present day, is to help one to heighten moral awareness; to assert that one's actions have consequences. Little apocalypses occur in this world on a daily basis. A literal reading of certain prophetic texts, however, can leave the best of us holed up in a bunker with a lot of canned goods, ammo, and bottled water waiting for the sky to fall. That's not a good place to be.
Our prophecy-based religious traditions are 90 percent internalized ancestral anxieties and 10 percent prophetic hope and expectation--precisely the inverse of what they ought to be in my view. Every person on this planet has the choice to order her or his life in accordance with her or his best hopes or worst fears. There is a prophetic tradition in which Muhammad is remembered as saying, "If you find yourself on the Last Day of the world holding a sapling in your hand, plant it."
Hope is our only hope.
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Faith is our only hope.
I recollect listening to a lecture by Robert Thurman several years ago. He stated that Buddhism presently has the lowest number of adherents now that it has ever had, except for its earliest history and was in decline. He later stated that he believed that Buddhism would become resurgent.
A certain Mazeppist, at the conclusion of the lecture, asked Thurman how he could reconcile the two apparently conflicting statements. He quipped, “Because that is what the Dali Lama says.” Immediately after he answered that it was a tenant of Buddhism that nature is cyclical and that after reaching a nadir, a thing will certainly experience a resurgence.
I met a friend on the street yesterday. He has a curious “dual-profession.” That is he is a lawyer during the week and a Christian minister on the weekend. Despite the darkness of our times, this man is really always in good spirits.
I attribute both attitudes to faith. For it is out of a faith, that hope springs. Without faith, hope is truly desperate. And I don’t believe that one’s faith needs to be in a personal god or based in a religious tradition. It can be a faith in say, the goodness of man, or the power of truth, etc. Without faith, hope is only desperation.
“If you find yourself on the Last Day holding a sapling in your hand, plant it.” This is a statement of faith, not hope. Faith that no good deed will go unrewarded. An assertion that one’s actions have consequences.
Faith is more powerful than hope. Faith entails a conviction that one’s actions have consequences. Hope is temporal. We would like the fruit of the actions to come sooner rather than later. That the evil may be punished and the good rewarded, in our time, so that our suffering may be alleviated.
In the words of Ghaffar Kahn “Peace.”
"Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me, which cannot but will that which I will, if what I will deserves to be willed and is, in fact, willed by the whole of my being." --Gabriel Marcel
Chew on that for awhile.
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