Abandoning the Quest for a Positive Attitude: Thoughts on Hope

At the residential crisis place where I landed a few weeks ago, we had occasional groups. One day, we did some basic mindfulness practice. Mindfulness is very trendy right now, but I’ve found it to be useful, and don’t mind (see what I did there) going over the basics again. As part of the exercise, they had us look out the window and just observe something for a little while. We then reported back on the experience. I was fascinated to note that everyone in the group except for me, with no prompting to do this, didn’t only talk about the experiencing of observing; they turned it into an inspirational message. For example, they saw the dead leaves on the trees, but realized that there was new life underneath. Or they noticed how a tree continued to grow despite obstacles. I found myself wondering—are people in other cultures this well-trained to relentlessly find inspiration in everything?

In most of the psych wards I’ve been in, they have you rate your mood every day on a scale of 1 to 10. I struggle with the quantification aspect of this, but usually do my best to accurately assess how I’m doing. One day I looked around at the papers of the people sitting around me, and saw that they’d all marked 10. I was mystified. I mean, you don’t get into a psych ward without being in fairly significant distress. Such a rating might have made sense if a person had been hospitalized during a manic episode, but that was clearly not the case for any of the people there that day. My guess was that they were reporting high numbers in an attempt to get released, which is usually the primary goal of people who are locked in a psych ward, but I also wondered whether it was connected to cultural expectations about making the best of everything and having a positive outlook. There’s a certain virtue in circling that 10. Sure you might be having a complete psychological breakdown, but you wouldn’t want to not be positive about the situation. In another group in the residential place I mentioned above, I listened to a fellow patient share that he knew that he could accomplish anything if he would just put his mind to it. The group leader enthusiastically agreed. I realize I’m probably overly cynical—it’s taken me much of my life to realize that it’s not necessarily delusional to try to stay generally upbeat, and that relentlessly negative people can actually be pretty exhausting—but it’s hard for me not see this sort of thinking as problematic. Because the dark side of the equation is that if you haven’t accomplished something, no matter how unlikely that thing may be, it’s because you just didn’t put your mind to it.

Sometimes this sort of nonsense is quite explicit. When I was in the hospital in September, I sat through a presentation on how there is no such thing as reality; there is only your perception of it. And I’m not talking about a nuanced discussion of phenomenology, or a philosophical exploration of the relationship between perceptions and essences. Rather, we listened to a very straightforward message that no matter what you’re dealing with, you can simply choose to have a positive view of it, and your thinking will then change reality. The staff member emphasized that point: your thoughts alter reality. In a similar vein, I’ve heard mental health staff in more than one setting lecture us about how money has nothing to do with happiness, a proposition definitely not supported by the research, and one which has made me more than a little ragey (middle class people with decent jobs lecturing those who are dealing with severe financial hardship that they need to care less about money is beyond distasteful). And I’ve probably complained too much about my IOP experience a few years ago with the group therapists who could not be convinced that I would not be able to use my PhD to land an academic job (after five years outside of academia, without any research or teaching during that time) if I would just try hard enough, and chastised me for being too negative when I attempted to explain why I didn’t think that was a realistic path to pursue. Of course, that was also the IOP where we learned that the idea that the past plays a role in determining the future is a cognitive distortion to be overcome, I guess because it would be too negative to think that your life history might have placed any limitations on you? Looking back at all my years in the mental health system, it is striking to me that we never once had a group on something like coping with failure.

In her book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promoting of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich notes that the demand for positive thinking isn’t just a problem of individuals being chastised for failing to focus on the bright side; it’s a serious social problem. A society untethered from even the idea of empirical realities is headed for trouble. Challenges like drastic income inequality, pervasive poverty, climate change, and lack of access to health care cannot be solved by instructing people to think more positively about their personal situations.  She observes that while in Stalinist Russia, the government demanded optimism and punished people for being “defeatist,” in the U.S., the market has played this role, peddling books and DVDs that promise to change your life by changing your thinking. “The big advantage of the American approach to positive thinking,” she wryly observes, “is that people can be counted on to impose it on themselves.”¹

Religion is of course not immune to this. Christians don’t spend a lot of time reading Lamentations. One of the books I happened to have with me when I went into residential last month was Inspired, by Rachel Held Evans. I really enjoyed the whole book, but reading it in that setting I was particularly struck by her observation that we focus almost entirely on the psalms that convey joy and praise, and ignore the ones that powerfully express more negative emotions. The psalms of anger and despair are far less likely to make it into liturgical use, or into hymnals. Evans comments, “Often I hear from readers who left their churches because they had no songs for them to sing after the miscarriage, the shooting, the earthquake, the divorce, the diagnosis, the attack, the bankruptcy.”² Which psalms, I wonder, might one sing in the psych ward? After the Tree of Life shooting last October, I attended an overflowing memorial service at the local synagogue. It was powerful, and I left feeling a bit of holy envy. It seems to me that Jews have a language for communal mourning and lament that Christians have almost entirely lost.

In the last few months, as I’ve been dealing with one of the most severe depressions I’ve ever experienced, I’ve more than once wondered what it means to talk about hope. Why would it be a theological virtue, up there with faith and charity? I was texting a friend one night who mentioned T.S. Eliot’s “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing,” and those words kept coming back to me. It was Advent at the time, a liturgical season of waiting. The days were getting shorter, and sometimes the darkness weighed so heavily on me that it was difficult to breathe. I liked the idea that the waiting didn’t always have to require hope. That maybe for the moment I could just sit in the dark, without even attempting to believe in the future.

A few decades ago, it was a revelation to me that faith could be understand as something other than cognitive assent to propositional truth—that faith, in other words, didn’t necessarily consist of attempting to make yourself believe things that seemed nonsensical to you. That faith might be something else entirely: an openness to possibility, a commitment to a way of being in the world. It has only recently dawned on me that it might helpful to also reconsider hope in the same vein. Ehrenreich notes that the demand for positive thinking produces its own kind of worry: “Instead of worrying that one’s roof might collapse or one’s job will be terminated, positive thinking encourages us to worry about the negative expectations themselves and subject them to continual revision.”³ In other words, if hope is understood in terms of this kind of mental effort, we are faced with the overwhelming internal task of constantly keeping fear and negative thoughts at bay. And I’m not sure this sort of neverending vigilance is sustainable. I can definitely say that I’m not interested in investing high amounts of mental energy to maintain it. I don’t want hope to simply be a life raft that you desperately cling to while trying not to think too hard about how the storm is getting worse.

That said, I’m still figuring out what hope might be. I’m a well-trained American; I too can look out the window and see a tree in the dead of winter and come up with an inspirational thought about the coming of spring. But I’m tired of endless memes with pretty pictures and facile encouragement. What does it mean, I keep wondering, to actually live with hope? A few passages in books I’ve recently read have jumped out at me. This is one from an essay by Mary Oliver:

In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of ———. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.⁴

This image of hope as a fighter reminded me of how often it is linked with resistance. And resistance is not about looking on the bright side; on the contrary, it requires clear-eyed acknowledgment of life’s dehumanizing and destructive forces. You have to see them before you can resist them. Paradoxically, I think that it can be a hopeful act to articulate your despair. And looking back at some of my own experiences, I find myself connecting hope to acceptance, as I have discovered that the pretense that things aren’t really that bad has stifled hope rather than fueled it.

Another passage, this one from Christian Wiman:

“The great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel once defined faith as primarily faithfulness to a time when we had faith. We remember those moments of heightened awareness in our lives, those clearings within consciousness in which faith is self-evident and God too obvious and omnipresent to need that name, and we try to remain true to them. It’s a tenuous, tenacious discipline of memory and hope.”⁵

I like the interweaving here of faith, memory, and hope. Christian worship is structured around memory. “Do this in remembrance of me,” said Jesus, and so every week we once again “remember” the events of his suffering and death and resurrection. (Theologians talk about anamnesis, about the liturgical memory of God’s action in the world.) I’ve often thought about how odd this sort of remembering is, because the events in question happened two thousand years ago, and none of us actually witnessed them. We are not “remembering” in the way that you remember your tenth birthday. But this communal memory not only shapes our worship, but also our identity and the way we see the world. And I think this memory might have something to do with hope. To take the eucharist is engage brokenness in a very physical way. It is also a ritual that invokes both the past and the future. In one of the eucharistic prayers in the Episcopal church, we use all three tenses in a congregational response that interweaves memory and hope: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”

I’m currently participating in a book group in my parish that’s reading Krista’s Tippett’s Becoming Wise. Tippett organizes the book around five of what she calls “raw materials, basic aspects of the human everyday, which I’ve come to see as breeding grounds for wisdom.”⁶ One of these is hope, which she carefully does not equate with optimism. “It lives open eyed and wholeheartedly with the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it.”⁷ In her discussion of hope, she brings in issues of failure, and vulnerability, and resilience. “Hope is an orientation,” she writes, “an insistence on wresting wisdom and joy from the endlessly fickle fabric of space and time.”⁸ I love the richness of this perspective.

I think I might be recovering, very slowly, from my latest bout of depression, because while I still regularly feel despair, sometimes I think about the future a little. Because sometimes I feel a little lighter. Because the other day, I heard a song that I liked, and I made the effort to find it online and purchase it. I’m not sure if I feel hope, though. If the term refers to a belief that life will get better, or even that it is worth living, I would say no, I’m not there yet. But maybe that’s why I’m wanting to re-think what hope is. I’m still wrestling with that question. And today the sun is shining, so I’m going to go for a hike. I don’t think it will melt away my despair, or make me believe that things that will ultimately be okay. But I am learning that I can go on the hike anyway, and simply bring the despair with me. And maybe that’s a glimmer of something.

1. Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 203 [↩]
2. Rachel Held Evans, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again (Nelson Books, 2018), 110 [↩]
3. Ehrenreich, 204 [↩]
4. Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems  (First Mariner Books, 1999), 93 [↩]
5. Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Girouox, 2018), 34 [↩]
6. Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living (Penguin Books, 2016), 9 [↩]
7. Ibid., 11 [↩]
8. Ibid., 238 [↩]