Hammering out scripture is easy, meeting hopelessness is not.

You feel like it is a deviant character flaw to experience hopelessness and despair, that if you were stronger, more faith filled, you would not feel so empty and devoid of hope and light.

In following up on my post of what makes a good listener, I have thought much on what supportive listening looks like when met with hopelessness. It has provoked much staring off into space, trying to avoid staring at my near constant companion, hopelessness. I write from my own experience, so it may not be for all. I thought that first I would try to paint a picture of what hopelessness looks like. Hopelessness didn’t happen during the first year of Justin’s death, it descended during the second. The losses piled up, there seemed to be no end to the disappointments, things that didn’t work out, rejections, and somewhere along the way hope was lost. You feel like it is a deviant character flaw to experience hopelessness and despair, that if you were stronger, more faith filled, you would not feel so empty and devoid of hope and light.

Labels are so convenient, so tidy, so organized, and they work well for flour and spices, but human souls? No.

Hopelessness manifests itself physically, it can buckle the knees to where you are sliding down a wall to sit hunched over struggling to breathe with a weight crushing your chest, hopelessness is trying to sleep and in the quiet you see your child’s face and longing overwhelms you and there is nothing for it but to lie there with tears sliding down your face. Hopelessness is to think “why bother”, for naught matters, there never will be any good anymore. Hopelessness is to look at projects, the yard, the house, or even laundry, and not know where to start and why bother, nothing ever changes, nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever done, so why bother? Hopelessness, to think how long you have to endure a life of meaningless activity, just to die alone. Please do not point out that what I described above is depression, either situational or clinical – there is a difference, the presence of one does not dictate the presence of the other, and yet they can co-exist. Let go of having to label someone, please. Labels are so convenient, so tidy, so organized, and they work well for flour and spices, but human souls? No.

When you have the opportunity to sit with hopelessness in another, I can’t help but think it is an invitation to sit in the tomb on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The Passion, Death, and Resurrection of  Christ takes place over a three day span, culminating in an empty tomb on Easter Sunday. But Good Friday can last a lifetime, or so it feels. Our lives reflect the paschal mystery, and we should not be surprised when another experiences being laid in coldness with a stone blocking all the light, trapping them in stone. I am not sure we are called to roll away the stone, but to instead summon the courage to sit in the tomb with the suffering. To descend into hell and meet their hopelessness with quiet courage. Please do not throw scripture our way. Yes, we are told that scripture is God breathed and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training, and so it is – but it should not be used like a sledge hammer. Hammering out scripture is easy, meeting hopelessness is not.

…you have to be hopeful to bring hope, it has to spill out over your reservoir that is already full,

If someone shares with you their hopelessness, be honored. Know that they trust you. Know that they are perhaps overcoming a fear of being chided again or “corrected”, be that safe harbor. You cannot fix our hopelessness, but you can keep company with us, supportive listening for hopelessness is to empty yourself of all the temptation to share the latest evils of the world. We know the evil, being told of the latest pandemic, or a brutal group murdering children is not the best conversation for us. Bring the hope that you hold in your heart and let it be enough, see I think that is key, you have to be hopeful to bring hope, it has to spill out over your reservoir that is already full, so full that it spills over into your very countenance.

I am not sure I answered the question of how to be a supportive listener when faced with hopelessness. Just don’t fear us or fear the hopelessness, see if the experience of sitting with hopelessness does not bring you a new awareness for small joys, simple pleasures, that by being with us in our hopelessness you are not stretched in your capacity to feel, that your heart stretches to encompass a love for the wounded. It isn’t about words or responses, it is about be willing to just be, to just keep company in the tomb for however long it takes for the stone to roll away. I leave with a quote from Sr. Constance Fitzgerald:

 “The hopelessness and emptiness of the Dark Night is precisely the condition that makes hope, in the strictly theological sense, possible. Hope comes into play when we are really radically at the end, unable to find any further resources to connect the memories, feelings, images and experience of life in a meaningful pattern or a promising future. Then hope, forfeiting the struggle to press meaning out of loss, become a free trustful commitment to the impossible, which cannot be built out of what one possesses.”

Desolation as Dark Night, The Transformative Influence of Wisdom in John of the Cross