Looking Again at Merton's Comment on the Likeness of Despair and Hope

I have been asked by a couple of people to say more about what Thomas Merton meant by stating that hope and despair are very much alike, as I raised the question rhetorically without providing a direct answer. The original post can be found here Why does the Church Need Hermits? and includes the pertinent Merton quote.

The passage in that post that I want to write about here is the one reflecting on Jesus' cry of abandonment from the cross, because I think that it is here we see most clearly a hope that could be mistaken for despair.  What I wrote there said, "And in the very depths of Jesus' journey into the darkest absence of being and meaning, life and love, God was there. But Jesus' question in the Garden was also sharpened there on the cross: why can't you pluck me out of this situation? Why HAVEN'T you rescued me? How will you vindicate me and, more importantly, my proclamation of the truth of your Reign, your sovereignty, if sinful, godless death is allowed to win out? Don't you see, godless death is swallowing me up!! I have nothing whatsoever left to give!! My God (not the more intimate, Abba!), why haven't you rescued me?"

What I think it is important to recognize about Jesus' so-called cry of abandonment is the fact that, despite the use of a more formal, "O God, my God" rather than Jesus' more usual and intimate, "Abba" Jesus was speaking to God and remained open to God doing whatever he willed to do to vindicate Jesus and his proclamation of God's coming Kingdom. The questions I posed in the above passage were meant to reflect a sharpening of the question Jesus posed in Gethsemane, "Isn't there another way?" It was as I meditated on and struggled with Jesus' experience on the cross that it became clear to me that I might have a sense of what Thomas Merton was saying about the kinship of hope and despair. 

In my own experience, I described these two realities as being "an eyeblink apart". When I said that, I was thinking of the parallax phenomenon where we look at an object first with one eye, and then with the other, without moving our head. There is a decided difference between the two views, yet they are still views of the same reality. I think in some ways this might have been what Merton saw about the relation of hope and despair, whether the source was his own experience or his meditation on Jesus' cry of abandonment or both together (which is what I believe he was speaking of).

Imagine yourself closing your right eye and looking at the events on Golgotha with just your left eye, so to speak. Jesus had reached the end of his own resources. In many ways, his situation seemed hopeless. It was a situation that struck fear and revulsion in the hearts and minds of those who even considered such a death. Crucifixion was considered a literally godless reality, and this was true for Jews as well as for the Greco-Roman world. Jesus' cry of abandonment (or any inarticulate cry, such as Mark gives us) could well be seen as a cry of abject despair, particularly as Jesus shifts his usual Abba to O God! Everything about the situation seems worthy of despair. When someone comes to the end of their resources and their life project seems to have collapsed not only in failure, but in abjectly humiliating failure underscored by personal betrayal and rejection because that life project was built on the proclamation of a God who loved without condition or limit and willed to be with us in every moment and mood of existence, well,  this is the stuff human despair is made of.

But let's look at the events of Jesus' crucifixion from that slightly different perspective using the idea of parallax and what it might be able to show us. Imagine you now close or hold your hand over your left eye and look at the same events with only your right eye. The change in perspectives is very slight, but the shift in the image being perceived is very real. Jesus had reached the end of his resources. In almost every way, his situation seemed hopeless. It was a situation that indeed struck terror and revulsion into the hearts and minds of every person in Jerusalem that day. It was a literally shameful, godless death in Jewish theology and abject foolishness and ignominy from the Greco-Roman perspective. Jesus' cry of abandonment (or his inarticulate cry in Mark's Gospel), even if it is taken from the first half of Psalm 22, appears at first to be a mockery of the eventual vindication that comes in the second half of the psalm --- perhaps a repudiation of his faith. Yes, Jesus has been betrayed and rejected by those who most loved him, except for his Mother and a couple of hangers-on. The God Jesus proclaimed with his life is apparently powerless -- if he exists at all. This is definitely the stuff despair is made of. And yet, what you can just barely see from this slightly different perspective is that Jesus has not closed himself off to God. His cry is not just a plaint of horrific suffering. It is also truly a prayer, the giving up of the last vestige of self-defense, the whole-hearted and heart-breaking embrace of a God that is bigger than even the greatest of human resources or their loss.

From this perspective, one can glimpse more clearly than one was able from the first perspective, that Jesus knows this God whose sovereignty he proclaimed and, despite the loss of everything else that could be called a resource, Jesus has not given up all hope.  This is not failure. This is what it looks like for the one who was utterly open and transparent to God to show us precisely how far this God would journey to truly be with us in every moment and mood of our lives. And Jesus allowed this; his own journey of integrity made it possible for God to enter this darkest and most senseless of realities, and transform it with his presence.  I believe this may have been what Thomas Merton was talking about when he referred to how similar despair and hope are. It is very like what I experienced at the beginning of Lent when I realized my deepest hungers and yearnings showed me the face of God and my own deepest self as well. For me, hope and despair were only an "eyeblink apart". They were so closely related that there were times I could not (thanks be to God!) tease them apart. But it was only in entering into the shadow of death and the precincts of despair or near-despair that an even more vibrant hope was possible.

Nothing and no one but God could have redeemed my own experience, just as only Jesus' Abba could have redeemed his experience and raised him to new life. I believe Thomas Merton's own life, prayer, and human struggle for wholeness and holiness brought him to something of the same experience that led him to say, " I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man's heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts. An arid, rocky, dark land of the soul, sometimes illuminated by strange fires which men fear and peopled by spectres which men studiously avoid except in their nightmares. And in this area I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is." How alike indeed! Sometimes that huge difference really is only an eyeblink apart.