Hope gives us passion for the unprecedented

First Sunday After Christmas Day | This week along the way

Biiiig waves in Santa Cruz last week! New Brighton State Beach, Aptos, CA.

I would say Merry ‘belated’ Christmas, but Christmas is just getting started:) We have eight more days of it, and I pray this finds you warm and well in the thick of it.

I’m currently on vacation mode, visiting family in the Sierra Valley for the next week or so. I’m writing this post on a Saturday, and it’s a strange sensation not to be frantically tinkering with my sermon for its usual Sunday delivery.

A friend gave me a book for Christmas by philosopher and cultural theorist Byung Chul-Han¹ called The Spirit of Hope. I’ve been circling around Han for a long time and have read a lot of people who reference him but haven’t yet dug into his work directly. Well, this morning, I finished my first Han book and am aptly addicted. What a wise soul. And so interesting. He’s a Korean Catholic who studied Heidegger and was a professor at Berlin University of the Arts (he actually writes in German even though he didn’t move there until he was in his 20s).

I love the size of his books. They’re essays of about 80 pages. He goes deep - a lot of it goes over my head - but then he always lands the plane impeccably. And for a genius, he’s full of quotable nuggets. I’m a fan.

This book carries the theme of Christmas and Advent and is about… Hope.

I’ve always been a little skeptical about the word ‘hope.’ It’s always struck me as passive. My dad used to say, “Hope in one hand and sh*t in the other and tell me which one is more real.”

Yyyyeah.

Anyhow, Han has given me the language to understand this thing called hope.

He says that, unlike optimism, hope coexists with despair. The greater the intensity of despair, the greater the intensity of hope.

Hope is not the same thing as optimism in Han’s book. Optimism lacks negativity. It doesn’t go anywhere. As Han would say, there is really no future in optimism.

But hope is a searching movement. With hope, we joyfully enter the unknown and lean into the what-is-not-yet. Hope doesn’t settle, it awakens.

Optimism and pessimism, Han argues, are alike. For both, time is closed. They “lack imagination for the new and passion for the unprecedented.” Hope breaks us out of the prison of closed time.

Han calls rampant positivity a cult. A cult that isolates us, makes us egotistical, and deprives us of empathy. In the cult of positivity, we become uninterested in the suffering of others and look only to our own happiness and well-being. (Our current neoliberal culture, which kicked off in a big way with Milton Friedman Reaganomics, is a culture based on the cult of positivity.)

But hope doesn’t turn away from the negative. It can be with the negative without collapsing into it. Hope unites and reconciles.

I’ve long had an allergy to negativity. I’ve resisted it. But since returning to the Christian faith, I’ve noticed that negativity is absolutely part of the deal. As Han says, both deep happiness and passionate love have a negative pole. “Without negativity, intensity is impossible.”

With hope, we harness the intensity that thrusts us forward into the yet-to-come.

Hope is the mood and spiritual atmosphere of Advent.

Even though it’s now Christmas, we’re always in a state of Advent. We live in the liminal. In the now-but-not-yet.

This was such a fantastic read, and I look forward to reading more of his work (I just bought his most well-known book, The Burnout Society).

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Below, you’ll find a couple of my latest homilies and notes. Both homilies are in conversation with Han. I hope you can find a good word or two in them. But for now, I’m off again to enjoy the fresh mountain air and family festivities as I hold ‘hope’ as the theme of the new year.

In Comfort and Joy,
Jonas+

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1. Author of The Burnout Society.