Tethered to Hope
Regular readers might remember a post from some years back concerning the subject of liminality, which reflected on that “threshold” space situated betwixt life and death as depicted by Lorenzo Monaco’s rendition of the Man of Sorrows painting. In that psot, I mentioned how this image sends an important corrective to our experiences of “in between” states, where we might feel that:
…the sharing of the resurrection seems so far away, there may be the temptation for me to conclude that either the resurrection will never be a personal reality, or that God is resurrecting me only to a degree, only to prepare me for the next round of personal crucifixion.
This feeling might become partiucalrly acute for those who, for whatever reason, might feel that they are in a perpetual state of liminality. To those, my attempt at a hopeful response promised by the resurrection of Christ (as depicted in Monaco’s painting) might come across as trite. If this is you, you might need a more comprehensive, and much more sympathetic response.
I came across such a response while reading Adriel Booker’s Tethered to Hope, a book-length treatment on precisely this experience of liminality which made Sparklit’s shortlist for Christian Book of the Year.
Whilst my post spoke of hope as something to bookend the experience of the in between, Booker wisely reinforced an important point right through the book in a way my blog post did not, that the experience of the trauma (and it can be both big and small, sudden and ongoing) and its aftermath, whether it be death, loss, divorce, misaligned expectations, the “meloncholy of loneliness” or the “deconstruction” of presumed facets of faith once deemed unshakeable, the list goes on.
This was that, regardless of where one is in the experience, one is always tethered to God and more immediately, to hope.
More precisely, as I mentioned to my students in Fundamental Theology today, what we may experience as hope is the secondary aftereffect of God’s prior act of grace, in which he empties himself out to us, brings himself close to us, and ultimately tethers himself to us, making hope a divine state of being which the theologian's call the theological virtues.
Defined as a theological virtue, hope is the expectation of the completion of the journey, or the conclusion of the in between. More immediately, hope is experienced as being continuously carried by God, which continues even if we are the ones letting go. As Booker says:
We don't, through our effort and will, stay tethered to God; it is God who stays tethered to us (19).
Such is the fierce yet quiet grace that not only stays with us during the trauma and its aftermath, or see us through to the completion of the journey. Such is the grace that also, right from the start of the whole journey, turns what would be the end of us to the means of our transformation. Separation and loneliness can be the means for God to enter a rawest space within us and graft us onto Him, such that the points in which we feel God as absence may paradoxically be God’s quiet and sympathetic presence going to work.
If there is a comment to make about Tethered to Hope as a reader, is that I would rather there be an exploration of the substance of hope, especially considering that it was a theological virtue. As hope is the virtue of expectation of the end to the journey of faith, my own feeling was that it could have given some directionality to the struggle of the in between. All that said, the emphasis on such directionality would probably have downplayed the substance of the book, namely the in-between-ness of the crisis after the crisis, which the book deals with gently and deftly. The gentleness of the first two parts belies the depth with which the book invites us to enter into the awkwardness from the third onwards, and the postures with which we can properly enter into those spaces.
