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By Jason Heron, OblSB
Last month, I wrote about my friend’s email signature: EGBOK (Everything’s Gonna Be Okay). I suggested that, to some, such a perspective might seem naive, tone deaf or even irresponsible. Indeed, many of our non-Christian neighbors have long accused us of using our hope as an anesthetic—a way to convince the suffering, oppressed and downtrodden to simply hang on a little longer. After all, if this vale of tears is going to end anyway and everything will be set right in the afterlife, why worry about injustice, abuse or poverty today? Just wait for heaven!
In other words, our neighbors rightly wonder how we can claim to be a people of hope when the world is in such a rotten state.
I confess that I am quite sympathetic to this critique.
Some Christians really do use the promise of heaven to justify ignoring the suffering right in front of them, and
I find this morally objectionable. But as you might guess, I do not think this is the only way to understand Christian hope. If it were, I think I would lose my faith entirely.
Hope is not simply a passive strategy for enduring suffering until we can escape it. Rather, hope is something strong, active and creative—a virtue that fills the human soul with a resilience that gives our present lives meaning.
In addition to the witness of Christ on the cross,
we are fortunate to have the modern witness of Viktor Frankl, the famous Jewish psychiatrist who survived the horrors of the Nazi death camps. In his classic book, “Man’s Search for Meaning” (a book I read every year to strengthen my own faith), Frankl asks a deceptively simple question: How did anyone survive?
As he searched for the answer, Frankl noted that the survivors were not necessarily heroes, nor were they the physically strongest or most prominent. In the camps, all strength, health and wealth were stripped away. Every prisoner was cast down to the lowest level of human existence. From a Christian perspective, every prisoner was nailed to their own cross and left there to die.
How, indeed, did anyone survive?
Frankl’s conclusion was that hope was the difference between life and death. He observed that prisoners who gave up hope died within days. But those who remained hopeful found a way to live, to laugh, to share bread and to pray. For them, hope was not a way to pretend everything was fine; it was a “weapon of the soul” that defended them from the destructive violence surrounding them.
Death was around every corner, under every bunk, in every guard tower, behind every strand of barbed wire. Most days, they saw the bad omen of their own deaths in the plumes of smoke rising from the crematoria. Yet, those who hoped were like the ones described by the prophet Isaiah: they renewed their strength and soared on wings like eagles; they ran and did not grow weary; they walked, but they did not grow faint (40:31). These hopeful souls were not waiting around to die so they could escape to eternity. They were defying their captors right then and there.
Hope enabled them to do more than merely hang on; it empowered them to assert their humanity and retain the conviction that life is fundamentally good. Hope protected them from looking at the camps and thinking, “I guess this is just what life is.” Instead, they saw the darkness for what it was: an aberration, a perversion, a twisted hell that did not belong in God’s reality.
I call hope strong because it protects the soul and actively defies the forces of evil. The Nazi guards could control the prisoners’ bodies, but they could not touch their hope. The light of that hope shone in the camp darkness, and the darkness could not overcome it.
I call hope creative because it gives life and inspires others. Evil is sterile, and it spreads to kill and destroy. But hope is fertile, and it spreads to build, to proliferate and to bloom.
So, when our neighbors wonder if we are ignoring the suffering of this life by luxuriating in our hope for the next, we should remember the lessons of the death camps. Genuine hope is not a way of ignoring the darkness of this world. It is, rather, the very posture that enables us to discern the cruciform shape of our God—the God who does not look down on our suffering from a safe distance, but descends into the dark to suffer with us.
