Hope Series Part 3: Radical Hope - Tools for Working in the Margins from Letters to the Housed by Paul Asplund
Over three decades ago I was given the opportunity to take actions to change my life. However, these actions often had little to do with addressing the problems in my life directly. In fact, my problems went somewhat ignored and amazingly many of them faded away for lack of my ruminating on them.
I wasn't dying, so my problems weren't existential, and nothing short of death could have saved me from having to deal with the IRS, but other than those two realities, every problem I had on the day I entered this new life was either gone or was being worked on by the end of my second year.
And I had a spiritual life unlike anything I knew was possible.
Finding God Again
After being ejected from the church of my childhood, I committed myself to Atheism and "drank at" God while arguing with everyone who tried to preach to me. Watching all my friends die painful, lonely deaths proved to me that there could be no God, especially the God of Jerry Falwell and James Dobson. I couldn't imagine worshipping the same God they preached about—as vindictive, petty, and cruel as any despot. But that emptiness inside me was impossible to fill by any means I knew. I learned years later to refer to it as a "God-shaped hole."
I tried for years to find some meaningful way to fill that emptiness. I convinced myself that I was a Buddhist and bought some big pillows at the futon store so I could meditate, in the morning, in the sun, still brutally hungover from the night before. It never occurred to me to even look for a meditation center (Minneapolis has one of the oldest Buddhist meditation centers in the U.S.). When the New Age movement arrived, I read every book on native spirituality and hung around with a medicine man. I was still grieving the loss of my friends so I didn't make new friends easily. I was wary of "rescuers," and grateful when I found companions who didn't force me to pray before they would feed me, or to bend a knee to anything I didn't believe in.
Meeting Ed
Ed was the first person who asked me to kneel and pray. On the night we met, after he promised me that "if you do what I ask you to do, you'll never need to drink again," he asked me to get on my knees that night when I got home and ask God for help. I told him I didn't believe in God, so he told me to get on my knees and pray to the God I didn't believe in.
Ed never pushed any doctrine on me. He was very private about his spiritual life and only occasionally, when I needed some help, did he reveal anything to me.
I struggled with surrendering my will and my life, I didn't trust that God. But I trusted Ed, and he promised me that what I had been brought up to believe was wrong—it wasn't the whole story. He gave me a copy of Emmet Fox's Sermon on the Mount and said "read this, and if you still don't believe in God, then we can talk about it again."
No one had ever told me about Christian "mysticism." I'd read all the popular books on eastern mysticism so the concepts were familiar, but I had never imagined it existed inside the tradition I was raised in.
The 30-Year Journey
That book set me on a 30-year sojourn of practice. Not thinking, but praying, acting, and meditating (I didn't really learn how to meditate though until 2009 under the guidance of Diana Stanton at UCLA.) Ed would chime in occasionally with just what I needed to hear, just when I needed to hear it. I read, attended lectures, devoured books by Elaine Pagels, Matthew Fox, and a litany of scholars who were challenging the orthodoxy of the 20th Century.
One night, after I shared my story in front of 400 people, Ed handed me a thick envelope and said, "read this when you get home." I was so full of myself in those days, I thought I knew everything, and I was sure Ed was handing me the secrets, the answers to all my spiritual questions, the elusive graduate-level stuff I had worked so hard to uncover.
When I read those 25 pages later that night, I was a little angry. This was not at all what I was expecting. It was a collection of spiritual readings, some prayers, and a list of twelve things I was supposed to do every day to be truly happy, joyful, and free: "make your bed," "brush your teeth," "call three people every day."
I called someone else I knew who'd gotten that same envelope just to confirm there hadn't been some mixup, that the important stuff hadn't been left out of mine by mistake. "No" he said, "that's everything."
I had been doing what Ed told me to do for several years at this point and was secretly expecting some reward, for obedience if nothing else. But he only told me to read those pages, and in the pages, he told me to take those actions.
And he set the platform for my entire spiritual development.
The Foundation of Prayer
The people who have come in and out of my life since then have been the greatest teachers I could imagine. One day, when I was struggling with whether or not to try going back to the church I was raised in, Ed said, "Quit bothering them, they don't want you." After a few more minutes of conversation he followed that with, "What you need is a relationship with a higher power who you can talk to like a friend, without shame or judgement (for being gay), someone you can share everything with. That is what prayer really means, and if you're doing this thing right, everything you do and say will be a prayer."
Radical Hope in Dark Times
So, I arrive at today, in the midst of all the chaos in the world (which always has been and always will be, but affects us all unevenly) hopeful for what will come next. If anything, being older is the greatest gift I could have for giving some context to the authoritarian, greedy, genocidal actions headlining almost every news outlet. I've experienced America at its worst before: racism, violence, hatred, greed, all familiar traits exhibited in times like these. I'm even a member of a minority that has been scapegoated and preyed upon for my entire lifetime, yet we still remain. This doesn't make these atrocities any less horrific, or the greed any less pernicious, but I refuse to lose sight of what I've learned to call "Radical Hope," witnessing destruction while nurturing emergence, when I know better things will come.
Radical Hope is enough.
I want to end this series with a few thoughts on the concept of Radical Hope. Author Jonathan Lear wrote, "Radical hope is hope that exists even when we are experiencing the destruction of our culture" (Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation). Junot Díaz, in a 2017 OnBeing Podcast, defined radical hope saying, "From the bottom will the genius come that makes our ability to live with each other possible" and Thomas Merton defines it "as an Unexpected, Incomprehensible and Total Gift," and offers that, "Hope is always most necessary precisely where everything, spiritually, seems hopeless" (Hope as an Unexpected Gift)
Radical Hope is a gift.
So, I try to live my life today as a prayer. The work I do is a great place to practice this. My life outside of work is a harder place to practice this, and I rely on many, many people, books, prayers and tools to help me stay in touch with my 'higher' self.
And when I feel this is all too much for me, I can return to Merton's message "It is my joy to tell you to hope though you think that for you of all men hope is impossible. Hope not because you think you can be good, but because God loves us irrespective of our merits"
Thanks for reading and stay safe.
Paul
P.S. - Daily Prayers and Resources
Here's the short list of prayers I referred to earlier:
The Daily Prayers
1. The Surrender Prayer (from Ed who said it was good for ego deflation)
"God, I give up, I'll do whatever you want me to do today."
2. The Lord's Prayer (means something entirely new after reading Emmet Fox)
3. The Prayer of St. Francis (I rarely get the first set in the right order but the meat of this prayer for me is the last half starting with "Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted, to understand than to be understood, to love than to be loved. For it is by self-forgetting that one finds…)
4. The Merton Prayer came into my life a few years ago when COVID lockdown was ending. I'd been very sick and wasn't ready to rejoin the world. I was lost and fearful when someone sent this to me. (I'm going to add this in full here for the sheer joy of reading it again):
"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think that I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never
leave me to face my perils alone"—Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
Recommended Resources
Podcasts:
OnBeing.org of course. If you haven't listened yet, it's time! (20 years of wisdom, especially good for long road trips)
Books that have helped me:
The Sermon on the Mount by Emmet Fox (includes a study on the Lord's Prayer as well)
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality, in New Translation by Matthew Fox
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels
When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön (I keep this book handy for frequent recentering)
For the full list of books, subscribe to my free Substack.
Key Citations and Sources
Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958.
Merton, Thomas. Contemplative Prayer. Image Books, 1996.
Fox, Emmet. The Sermon on the Mount. Harper & Row, 1934.
Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Harvard University Press, 2006.
The On Being Project Archive (multiple episodes cited above)
"12 Daily Actions for Being Happy, Joyful and Free" Ed M.
Díaz, Junot. "Radical Hope Is Our Best Weapon." On Being, September 14, 2017.