Hope is an Un-mapped Space

Part of an ongoing series on Pistis, Elpis and Agape — faith, hope and love — as embodied political practices…

Let us gaze for a moment into the dark: into some un-mapped place, some unknown region. Let us contemplate the unnamed and formless. What can we say about it? We do not know what we do not know. What use are words on this threshold?

It would feel a little primitive to revere this region because of its obscurity, because we feel small before its mystery, because it reveals our finitude and creatureliness. And yet it would seem even smaller to try and alleviate the anxiety by some entitled forced entry into the unknown; as though we were unwilling to play the game without first knowing we had the winning hand.

Hope stands subject to outcomes beyond its own control. For this reason, the word rings with a kind of contemptible weakness in the ears of Modernity. Power frowns business-like against all manner of unknowns; the throes of time and chance. Power is awe-phobic, and I-centric. In a way, its only function is to control outcomes, and to minimise margins of uncertainty.

“It is the glory of God to conceal things,” as it says,”but the glory of kings is to search things out.” (Prov 25.1)

For this reason, Elpis is an exercise in keeping one’s nerve at the threshold. The watch is difficult to keep because it must wait powerlessly on the brink of unknown matters. It sees some potential in the autonomy of the unknown, and so that autonomy must be respected. The ambiguous and darkened may yet have some part to play.

Power abhors unknowns. It must either dis-cover and colonise, or else deny altogether. It cannot leave an unrevealed thing to its own business. Curiosity has nothing to do with it; the drive is fear. Elpis is a difficult watch to keep, because the unknown is threatening. The watch of Elpis is kept over the compulsion to seize the matter by force or to manipulate by sleight of hand. The watch of Elpis is kept in wakefulness and restraint. The watch of Elpis is kept in creaturely receipt of unknown graces, in watching over the horizon of a world alive with so many autonomies besides one’s own.

The victors of history have never understood those who refuse the technologies and powers that maximise reach and yield and the innovations that colonise knowledge, fill in every blank and light up every dark corner. They are entranced by the penetrative reach of progress. All else is senseless inertia; laziness maybe, or primitive superstitious ignorance. They who pass by each new probing innovation exclude themselves from history. They live as not.

The watch of Elpis is kept in a kind of active and decentering patience. The life of good faith is lived in dialogue with otherness; in anticipated conversation with the dark. The unknown is not a blank canvas onto which one may just draw one’s own designs. The Earth had its own designs before we were ever here. Elpis awaits possibilities, voices and interests elsewise. It seeks not control but rejoices in divergence and dialogue, in hope of convergence and friendship.

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (1Cor 13.12). For the first century Messianics, knowing did not come through some grasping into the unknown. They did not imagine they could torture the unknown until she gave up her secrets, as it is said that Francis Bacon once said. The unknown was not viewed as enemy, nor as resource. It was, rather, a realm of messianic possibility: a mystery humming with the redemptive potentiality of friendship, and friendship rests wholly on full mutual autonomy.

Elpis is the watch that defends all autonomies by the deft move of patient restraint; a kind of active stillness. It is the watch kept over all friendships that are, and also over all friendships that may one day be. It stays gently wakeful, watching the distance and watching itself.