Norman Wirzba | Textures of Hope

Wirzba:

Hope says that this world is worth cherishing, it’s worth you giving your skill and your attention to and when you give your skill and attention to it, you put yourself in a position where you can help in the healing and the repair of the world. So that people, when they get up in the morning, they don’t say this world is so far gone, it’s so damaged, it’s so beyond redemption, that we turn away from it. Right? I’m finding, or wanting to find ways that will help people understand again, how much this world that we’ve been given, the people we’ve been given to share life with, are gifts of God that God certainly delights in, and we need to learn to delight in too.

My name is Norman Wirzba. I’m a Gilbert T. Rowe Professor at Duke and also Director of Research in Duke’s Office of Climate and Sustainability.

Hoogerwerf:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Colin Hoogerwerf, the producer of the show and I’m filling in today for Jim Stump as host. 

Norman Wirzba is our guest today. His brand new book is called Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis. I don’t think I need to spend a lot of time here convincing anyone that it feels like a time of crisis, though each listener might come up with a different definition of what the crisis is. We’ll talk about what the crisis is and I think Norman gives us a really compelling answer, which doesn’t reduce it to only climate change or political division or how technology is changing our world or any other existential threat to who we are…but that it is a crisis of how we find meaning. And having hope in a time of crisis is not only feeling good about the outcomes. Hope has more depth than that, many different textures. We’ll explore some them. And it’s possible too that some people are going to be sick of hearing about hope. Yes, this episode has hope in the title, and we’re going to talk about hope throughout, but what becomes clear is that when we start to really give attention to hope we are going to find that always lying below hope is love. 

Let’s get to the conversation. 

Hoogerwerf:

Well, welcome Dr. Norman Wirzba.

Wirzba:

Oh, it’s great to be with you Colin.

Hoogerwerf:

So some listeners will know your voice from some previous episodes and series we’ve done on particular topics most recently, a series from earlier this year on food. But I don’t think you’ve had a chance to actually tell your story on those episodes. So before we get to talking about your book, what are some of the milestones or formative places or people that led you to where you are now eventually you to writing this book.

Wirzba:

Sure. So I think what was so decisive in my upbringing was the fact that I grew up farming in Southern Alberta. Really wanted to be a farmer. I loved being outside. I loved being with animals, growing crops, building things, fixing things. That was the world that I knew and books were not in my orbit at all. It was about learning how to grow things and make things. And I just loved that life. And it became apparent to me, fairly quickly, as I was becoming an adult that farming was not a viable path, because the pricing already in the 1980s was such that you could farm land for your whole life and never pay back the debt that you would accrue just buying the land.

So I did like a lot of people, I thought I’d be a teacher and maybe have a hobby farm on the side, but that didn’t really work out either. And studied theology and philosophy, which was about as far away from farming as you can get. And what was striking to me when I look back on that is that, at no point in my graduate training, even in my undergraduate training, was there a farmer on the syllabus, never. And agriculture did not really show up as a topic of consideration anywhere along the way. And while I was in that, it didn’t strike me as odd, but it surely did once I met Wendell Berry in Kentucky many years later, and he helped me understand that agricultural people have a way of speaking, a way of thinking, a way of engaging that has been either buried, forgotten, or repressed.

And that was a real important time for me because it not only allowed me to understand that, it’s true that for thousands of years across the whole planet, the primary mode of people’s life was agricultural practice. And so he gave me an opportunity to integrate what I loved as a kid, growing up, with the kind of research I wanted to do, the kind of teaching I wanted to do, the kind of writing I wanted to do, which would be to take up theological and philosophical concerns, but do it in a way that really comes out of agricultural practices. And it’s important to stress that these are practices before they are ideas. Because I think a lot of people, they can think about agriculture maybe intellectually, but the real brunt of agricultural insight comes as a result of doing the work of growing and making and repairing and building. Those are absolutely essential to have what you might call an agrarian sensitivity. And I’ve tried to bring that into the writing that I do. Sometimes I think maybe more or less successfully is up for readers to decide that.

Hoogerwerf:

So you said you wanted to be a teacher with a hobby farm and that didn’t work out?

Wirzba:

Yes.

Hoogerwerf:

But you are teaching, do you grow something?

Wirzba:

I do grow something. I mean, it’s not a lot. I mean, I don’t have anything like a farm. I have a garden and we grow blueberries and blackberries and potatoes and tomatoes, that kind of thing. But it’s nothing super extensive. And partly it’s the kind of life that I have here at Duke, it does not really allow for much on the side.

Hoogerwerf:

Sure. Well, it’s pretty close. Well, we’re going to spend the rest of our time talking about your new book, which is called Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis. So to do that, I actually want to start where we used to end every episode. For a while, the last question we asked our guests was what gives you hope? Actually, not sure why we stopped doing that. I don’t think it was some clear decision we made, but pretty early on in the book, you say you’re no longer sure that that question, what gives you hope? Is the right question to be asking. So let’s start there. What’s wrong with that question?

Wirzba:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I’d go around talking with all different kinds of groups of people and often the conversation would have a lot of bad news embedded within it, talking about ecological crises, talking about polarization, talking about wealth inequality and cultures. I mean, it’s just so many things that the people I spoke to and spoke with said were debilitating, crisis inducing, despair inducing. And so the question would often come up right at the end, what gives you hope? Because the sense was that if we could still talk about hope, that somehow it would all be all right. And I didn’t like the question because I began to see it as a way of making people feel good in the midst of all the bad. And I’m not opposed to people feeling good in the midst of the bad, but how we do that is really important. And the trouble I had with the question, what gives you hope? Is that it made hope seem like something people have, it’s like a possession.

And some people have it and some people don’t. And in fact, I would even hear people say to me, “I’m just not a hopeful person.” And other people would say, “Well, I am a hopeful person.” And I was a bit wondering, how does that happen? How does some people have it and some people don’t? And the people that seem to have it seem to think that hope gives them the ability to feel good in the midst of the mess, or it gives them a way of saying, “I don’t have to worry.” And that troubled me some because I think we do have a lot to worry about because the problems are real and they’re not going to go away just because somebody has this thing called hope, which can act like a security blanket or a vaccine that if you have it, you’re not going to get sick or you’re not going to get depressed or whatever.

And I said that mistake’s what I think hope is. Hope is not about evading the crises that we face. Hope is about entering into them in a way that engages people fully with a desire to commit to the healing and the repair of the mess. And so, I said to people that the better question to ask is not, what gives you hope? But what do you love? Because that immediately changes the terms of the conversation because now you have to figure out, well, what do you love? And what are you going to do to nurture that love or protect the one who is beloved? That can be a person, it can be a community, it can be a place. But that becomes a way of, I think being more true to what hope is, which is, hope is this disposition and engagement with the world that draws you out of yourself to give your love to the love that’s already in the world that maybe is being distorted or being denied or frustrated.

And that changes the terms, because if hope becomes a way of putting yourself in a more passive position or putting you in the position of being a bystander, that’s actually dangerous. And that, I would say is not really hope. It’s more like optimism, which I don’t like.

Hoogerwerf:

I feel like I feel that conflation of hope and optimism a lot and it seems like. And we’ll come back to a lot of these ideas, I think, but I think it’s important you say somewhere that love fires up hope because love refuses to abandon others or leave them to die. Which means that the switch from hope to love is not an abandonment of hope. And I think that is important.

Wirzba:

Yeah, I think it puts hope on a more honest footing. Because when you commit to love, you commit to love no matter what. It’s not the love that says, “I’ll love you insofar as you meet all the conditions that I set.” That’s not real love. That’s a form of conditional power management or control. And I think that’s a really destructive way to think about love, but it’s certainly a destructive way to think about what hope is. The problem I have with certain formulations of hope, which I would say are really more like optimism, is that optimism is a status quo concept. When you’re optimistic, you say, hey, it’s all going to work out in the end. We don’t know exactly how, but it’s going to work out because either Elon Musk is going to save us because he’ll come up with some new technology that fixes all of our worries. Or the religious version would be, well, God’s got this. God would never let things get bad.

And I think when I talk with people, they see that that’s just really dishonest because the mess is real. We know that we are responsible for a lot of the mess and to simply pass it off on some technological fix or some theological promise can be a form of evasion and therefore actually prevents people from addressing the conditions that are causing so much despair in the first place. But if you’re going to address what causes despair, you have to do it out of the framework of love. Because love assumes, it presupposes that A, this world is worthy of our cherishing, which is a profoundly theological thing to say. That it follows from this position that Christians have maintained for a long time, which is to say that God creates as an act of love in the modality of love for the flourishing of love. And when you see those three things come together, the most important thing for Christians is to want to join whatever love they have with that divine love that is always operating in the world.

Hoogerwerf:

So I want to hear a little bit more about the title of the book, Love’s Braided Dance. So we already brought up Wendell Berry, but this comes from a poem from Wendell Berry In Rain, which is a reflection on taking an old path up a hill in the rain. You have some lines in the book. I actually want to read from even a little before that says, “I walk this ground of which dead men and women I have loved are part as they are part of me in earth, in blood, in mind, the dead and living into each other pass.” Then a few lines later, and this is where the title comes in. “The way I go, is marriage to this place, grace, beyond chance, love’s braided dance covering the world.” Can you reflect on that phrase?

Wirzba:

Yeah. So I think in my conversation with so many people, despite the hyper-connectivity that we are in, via social media and so forth, there’s a sense of profound loneliness and I think also a sense of abandonment. And the abandonment happens not simply at a personal level, but it happens at an economic, political, social level as well. And it’s reflected in something as basic as our built environments. So many of the places that people live, they bear the marks of abandonment. They feel like people have walked away and it’s been because, either whatever wealth was there to be extracted has already been extracted or they’re not worthy of the investment of others. And it creates a sense in which the world that we inhabit is not loved, the communities are not loved, and that creates tremendous despair, but also hopelessness. And so what I started thinking about this, this question about how does hope actually move? 

Wendell’s ‘love’s braided dance’ became just the perfect sort of opening into that because a braided dance is a reflection, first of all about commitment, that they are braided to each other. Plaited is an old-fashioned word I suppose you could use. But it’s also a dance in which we’re having to always navigate, negotiate, perform how we’re going to be together, and the being together is loves braided dance because love is the power that does the best job, I think, of bringing people together in ways that at least are trying to bring about mutual flourishing. We can come together in lots of ways in the forms of instrumentalization or control and power, and all of those forms invariably lead to a kind of disillusionment and despair. Because you realize you’re not loved, you’re just being used for somebody else’s advantage. But in Love’s Braided Dance, the whole effort is to commit to each other, commit to the mutual nurture of each other so that the end result is something beautiful, something praiseworthy.

And I think that’s exactly what people are wanting and needing right now, is the sense that they and their communities and their places are love worthy, are cherishable, and that they’re going to be people, communities who are going to invest in the healing of places that have been damaged, in the celebration of the goodness and beauty of the places and communities that we’re a part of. So the dance metaphor is important because it introduces this kind of improvisational way of being with each other. And the braiding is important because, committing to be with each other even when things get difficult is hard.

Hoogerwerf:

So let’s move to the subtitle, Hope in a Time of Crisis. We should talk a little bit about what the crisis is maybe. So, and this is not necessarily a book about the environmental crisis or refugees or technology, even though any of those might be parts of the crisis. Is there a simple way to say what is the crisis? Or maybe why are so many people grasping at what hope is and feeling like they need to find hope?

Wirzba:

Yeah. I think for a while I thought maybe the title should be Hope in a Time of Crises because there are so many that you can point to. But we ended up with just the singular crisis because I think for me, the main crisis that people are feeling is whether or not they and their world even matter. I think right now we’re seeing a kind of cultural period in which there’s so much profound questioning about the most basic aspects of a life that any of us want might to live, which is a life in which people feel that they are loved, a life in which they feel that what they do matters, a life in which they see that their places and their work are nurtured and cherished and celebrated. So much of that has just been evacuated from the experience of many people, and they find themselves in this sort of rut or this sort of system, which appears to be about abuse and abandonment all the way through.

People feel they’re being instrumentalized, they feel that the communities are basically extraction zones for somebody to get whatever wealth they can and then they just move on. So the crisis is one about meaning, it’s about whether or not people feel that what they do matters. It’s a crisis about purpose. What should our lives aspire to be? And that’s sort of a more general existential way of putting the matter of crisis. You can talk about obviously environmental crisis, the wealth inequality crisis, the polarization crisis. I mean, there’s healthcare crises. I mean there are all these different manifestations, but I think they boil down to the same thing. Which is people are profoundly confused about what matters and what we’re going to do to nurture what matters.

Hoogerwerf:

So this is BioLogos, and we’re going to be interested to find places where science comes into this conversation. And I wondered if this might be one of them. And I wondered if maybe science helps expose crises occasionally, but I also wondered if science might be part of the problem. Maybe not science itself, but the reliance of science to replace hope. Does that make it harder for us to deal with the crisis?

Wirzba:

Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think on the one hand, science certainly is helping us understand the crises that we’re in. Because now we’re able to show with pretty clear evidence, data, that the destruction of the world, the physical, material and ecological world, we might say is underway in forms that are unprecedented. And never have we seen the kind of anthropogenic activity that is bringing about so much ecosystem, degradation, destruction, that we’re seeing how we’re changing the atmosphere in the most fundamental sorts of ways by changing the chemistry of it, or that we’re able to appreciate things like biodiversity loss and what that means for the functioning, the resilience of not just animal and plant communities, but the human communities that depend upon them. So the science is going to be absolutely crucial as we try to navigate the many forms of degradation in our physical world.

That is the basis for any human flourishing whatsoever, so that’s key. Science is going to play a major role there. And I think the danger might be that science can save us because science will give us the ability to develop the technological solutions that will solve our problems. And I think what we’re beginning to see, if we haven’t already, is that something like the climate crisis is fundamentally a cultural crisis. It certainly has technological dimensions in the sense that we’re going to have to develop new forms of energy, energy storage, energy transmission. We’re going to need to develop food systems, agricultural systems that can withstand new conditions of heat or extreme weather. These are all very much scientific-led projects. But the danger is to think that we could simply technologize our way out of this. The issues are fundamentally about meaning and purpose, and that’s not strictly the purview of what science does or what scientists will do.

So I think it’s very, very important that we not lose sight of these cultural transformation aspects of the work that have to be embedded in everything that we do. So here at Duke University where the university has made a commitment to address climate, the temptation is to think that the Pratt School of Engineering is going to fix it and it’s not. Pratt Engineering is going to do a lot to help us, but in the end, we’re still talking about questions of human contentment, human aspiration, human desire, because what’s clear is that human desires of particular kinds have created the very problems we’re now needing to address.

Hoogerwerf:

One more question on the crisis here. Hope in a time of crisis. Is hope different in times of quiet peace? By ignoring crisis, do we lose the ability to build the kind of hope we need to have in times of crisis?

Wirzba:

Yeah, yeah. That’s a really great question. I think first of all, I wonder how often those times have existed. I think that a lot of times that people will say that the crisis today is just so horrific. But having read the book, I have a chapter where I start with the experience of my parents and World War II and the sense of desolation, you could argue was much, much more immediate at that moment. Because if you looked at the European landscape, it was utterly in ruins. So you might say there, the crisis was so apparent. And for a lot of people today, you can sort of assume that things are just fine because you could be living in a place where you’re not affected by the kinds of trouble that other people in the world clearly are. I think also, the experience of peace and tranquility, it’s a lovely thing.

I wonder how often to get there, you have to sort of blind yourself to what’s going on in the world around you, and that then can become a form of evasion, and that would not be a strategy that I would recommend. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t seek tranquility from time to time, we all need that. But I think we have to also be true to our world and our community and the kinds of struggles that we’re facing because hope is realistic, it’s honest, it’s humble, it’s not naive. A naive hope is not a real hope.

Hoogerwerf:

You say in the introduction that one of the things we’re doing is exploring paths of hope’s animating logic. I like that. So hope is one of these words that is meant to try to explain this really complex kind of thing. Which I think means we should probably recognize that it’s going to be used to mean different things at different times, which maybe is actually okay. And sometimes we’ll use it to say something that doesn’t have a lot of depth. I hope it doesn’t rain today, which is maybe optimism or maybe it’s just a synonym for I want, but there’s a lot more richness here. So let’s take at least a few of these paths. So your first chapter is on erotic hope, and I can’t help but noticing the idea of marriage from that Wendell Berry poem. “The way I go is marriage to this place.” Can you keep connecting the dots there to hope to love, erotic love, which we don’t usually think of.

Wirzba:

Especially not Christians. We’re supposed to talk about agape love, which I’m totally on board with. I’m not saying we dispense with agape love at all. But I think what Christians have done by not attending to erotic love is they have missed out on something really foundational for love, which is the desire of a human being to make an attachment to another that is founded upon the beauty of the other, the desirability of the other. And I know that the danger, of course, is that eroticism quickly moves into the domain of pornography, which of course has done so much damage. Because pornography is a way of going out to the other to satisfy a personal desire. It manifests in a kind of control objectification, all of which is just terrible. And the impulse that is pornographic, of course, it’s not just manifested to people of the opposite sex.

It’s something that can be manifested to the whole world. So we can even talk about something like food pornography. And I’m not interested in any of that because we know how damaging that way of going out to the other. That form of desire is a desire that really wants to objectify control for your own personal satisfaction or your own personal gain. That’s not true eroticism. The true eroticism, I would argue, is actually modeled for us in God’s activity of creating the world. Because what God does is out of an abundance of this love creates a world that is so desirable, that on that seventh day of creation, what does God want to do? But delight in it, come into the presence of a world that is beautifully made, that is so good and so attractive that there’s nothing else God wants to do than be in the presence of what God has made and love it. Bring God’s full energy and attention to the celebration of the goodness.

And that’s something that I think is missing in so much Christianity, this desire to affirm how beautiful this world is and how worthy it is of our engagement, our attention, and our celebration. And that’s going to be the basis for the kind of cherishing of the world that I think is at the heart of hope’s animating logic, right? Hope says that A, this world is worth cherishing, it’s worth you giving your skill and your attention to. And when you give your skill and attention to it, you put yourself in a position where you can help in the heal and the repair of the world so that people, when they get up in the morning, they don’t say, “this world is so far gone, it’s so damaged. It’s so beyond redemption,” that we turn away from it.

I’m finding or wanting to find ways that will help people understand again, how much this world that we’ve been given, the people we’ve been given to share life with our gifts of God, that God certainly delights in, and we need to learn to delight in too, and that these are gifts that as God has also committed to their healing, their redemption, we also need to commit with God in the healing and redemption of them. And that requires this erotic movement that helps us appreciate again, why we want to give ourselves to others.

Hoogerwerf:

Another layer to hope that you bring in here is talking about hope as a vulnerable way of being. And I’m not sure we think of hope that way either. In fact, I wonder if it’s often the opposite. If you ask someone for words to describe a hopeful person, I imagine you get something like ‘strong’ and ‘confident’. So that probably comes from this conflation, again, of hope and optimism. So what does it mean for hope to be vulnerable?

Wirzba:

Yeah. So the bad version of hope that I mentioned earlier was that hope is a security blanket or it’s the vaccine. It protects you, it keeps you warm, it’s fuzzy, it means you’re not going to get diseased or sick. And all of that is just not true. Our experience bears that out. Bad things are going to happen, and we can’t control them. We can’t predict them. So when I say that hope is a vulnerable thing, again, you have to come back to love being the animating heart of a hopeful way of being. When you love, you don’t know what’s going to happen as a result of your love. As a parent, you decide hopefully that you will love your child no matter what. And one of the most important gifts that you can give a child as a parent is to say, “I will love you no matter what.”

And that child, sometimes they will do things that will make you so happy, so proud, but then you will do things or the child will do things that will just break your heart. And love can’t walk away when that breaking of the heart happens and it’s the same with hope. Just because things don’t go the way we want doesn’t mean that we cease engaging the world in this outbound, affirming, celebrating, engaging way. Hope requires us to work, what I often say is in the dark, not knowing the effects of what we’re going to do. The minute you think you can only hope when things are going well is the moment you stopped hoping because you’ve stopped loving.

To think that we could control the world so that we don’t get hurt means that we’re going to do the kinds of things that will actually hurt others because we’re going to set up a control regime that is going to try to shield us from trouble, shield us from pain, shield us from suffering. And what we know from Jesus, what we know from the experience of God’s people is that God says, “You need to love even when the love is refused, rejected, manipulated.” And we know this because Jesus as the embodiment of the love, was not immune to suffering and to pain and ultimately the cross.

Hoogerwerf:

So, and then another layer here to add in, which I found really intriguing is for hope to be resonant. So our physics minded listeners, which I know we have, some of them will have a better idea of how resonance actually works. But this idea that objects have a natural frequency at which they vibrate and another object that finds some same frequency can lead to a greatly increased vibrating frequency. I’m sure there’s going to be some breakdowns in the metaphor. But as a metaphor, I think it’s a really beautiful way for us to think about resonant relationships. 

Wirzba:

So yeah, this was really, really important. And the person who really helped me with this was Hartmut Rosa, a German sociologist, wrote a fabulous book called Resonance. And in it he describes the many dimensions in which resonance can happen or not. And he has a big theory, which I find quite compelling, in which he says that relationships in modernity under certain political economic forms have become resonantless. And a lot of things can be said in how this works, but one of the basic ways is that people have adopted an instrumentalizing approach to the world and to relationships with each other. Which is we enter into relationships so as to get something out of them.

And within certain economic forms, the way you do that is you optimize your ability to extract or manipulate or whatever. And so much of modern technology is about doing exactly that, expanding your reach, expanding your control over the world and over each other. And of course some of that has done really good things, but there’s also this result in which when you exist in a relationship to control another, you end up actually occluding the other. And you know this because if you’ve ever been in a relationship in which you know that the other person is trying to control you, the relationship has broken down. Because nobody wants to be in a relationship of being controlled. But that’s exactly what we end up doing in so many of our workplaces and so many of our communities.

And so resonance is a very different kind of thing because resonance is about mutuality and it’s about transformation. It’s not about control. So if you take one tuning fork and put it next to another tuning fork and hit the one, the other one will just spontaneously start to vibrate alongside. And imagine being in a relationship where being in the presence of them had this transformational quality in your very being. And here, there are plenty of examples that we can give. I mean, think about the experience of falling in love with somebody so that the minute you see you’re beloved, your whole body changes.

You feel different, you open up your eyes, brighten or think about being in the presence of a young child and what that does, or think about the experience of listening to music where the music makes you feel different. You suddenly start tapping your foot and your demeanor, your mood even changes. I think what Resonance is about is it’s about the kind of transformation where people can say, I feel moved to be something that I wasn’t before. And that’s very different than being entertained or being stimulated. Because we have lots of stimulation in our world today, but the stimulation is not making us happier. In fact, it’s creating stress in many instances. And I think what people really want is the experience of personal transformation, the experience of personal validation, the experience of being called out into something that will be mutually beneficial.

Hoogerwerf:

I want to talk a little bit more about technology, as what I think is a barrier to this kind of being. You have a quote here, “the varied efforts to make the world legible and predictable, knowable and accessible, pliable and manageable and above all useful and purchasable, create the conditions in which places and things cease to be themselves. What they are is what we want them to be”. I mean, this is what we’re doing with technology. How does that—

Wirzba:

Yeah. So think about how so many of the technological devices that we have and platforms that we have that are so alluring precisely because they make the world or they make experiences or they make commodities available to us on our terms with almost immediate access. It’s really quite incredible. I mean, I think about something like the cell phone, I have one, everybody’s got one. You can’t function in today’s world without one. But what the cell phone has done is it’s convinced us that we don’t have to meet the world on its terms. So just to give one example, I can open up a web page and order the food that I want to have in my fridge, and I’ll punch a few buttons and I’ll submit my order and it’ll show up at my door like magic. And it is magic. If you had asked anybody a hundred years ago, would that be possible to do? They would’ve said, “No, of course not.”

Because for you to have food in your fridge, you got to grow it. And that means you got to understand plants, you got to understand animals, you got to understand the conditions for soil fertility. You got to understand the patience that it takes for a plant to grow, to give us fruit, or for an animal to get to a size that it can either reproduce or become food for us. All these needs that we have to understand the world on its term, they simply evaporate. And it’s the same with relationships. The relationships we can have with people, they can be on our terms, when you’re doing it via social media platforms. If someone bugs, you just don’t pay attention.

But if you’re in a real relationship with a person, if they bug you, do you just walk away? Well, if you do, you end the relationship. But if you want to stay in a relationship, you have to figure out, well, what is it about the person that’s bugging me right now? And that requires then also some serious introspection, because just as other people annoy you, annoy other people. And you would be really in a difficult spot if people said, “Well, we’re going to walk away from you every time you annoy us.” We’d all be very, very lonely, we wouldn’t have friends. And so that can’t be a recipe for really vibrant, resonant relationships. And so technology, because it has become an ontology that changes what we think things are and how we are to navigate them, engage them, has made it much, much more difficult to be truthful about the kind of world we are in.

More difficult for us to appreciate that the world doesn’t exist in what I would call a friction-free modality. The world has to be engaged, and that means the struggle of getting to know, the struggle to be honest before another, is something that has to be built into our relationships. Otherwise, we’re going to find ourselves not just with a damaged world, but we’ll find ourselves in a world where all of us are deeply lonely.

Hoogerwerf:

Yeah. Yeah. You say “fear, anxiety, restlessness and stress destroy resonance.” But you also have maybe a solution isn’t the right word, but at least a different way of being that could counter that, which is to remember Sabbath.

Wirzba:

Yeah.

Hoogerwerf:

How does Sabbath and rest promote resonance? And then can you link that back to hope?

Wirzba:

Sure. Yeah. So I mentioned briefly that one of God’s primary ways of loving the world is revealed in God’s own Shabbat, right? God’s own resting in the presence of a world beautifully made. And the more I’ve thought about the many crises that seem to determine the lives of people, Sabbath can be a powerful lens to understand how we came to this crisis moment. But Sabbath practice can also be a way to address, not necessarily to fix, but certainly to address the crises that we’re feeling. So for instance, when people think about the Sabbath, when I ask them to think about, I say, “Why is God resting?” And there are silly responses to that, one of them being, well, God’s just really tired, and that’s not a very helpful way to think about it. But the thing to understand about rest, I tell them is not that rest is opposed to activity.

God does not stop creating the world, god does not stop loving the world, because if God did, the world would cease to exist. So rest is not opposed to activity, what rest is opposed to is the kind of restlessness that prevents us from being in the presence of each other. Remember that God’s first, Shabbat, is God fully attending in the mode of love to a world that is God’s own love, now embodied, and that joining of love produces the delight, that is the most wonderful kind of experience that is possible for anyone. And so when I say that, as Christians, we need to come to a kind of Sabbath position, a kind of Sabbath disposition. What I’m talking about is addressing the restlessness that prevents us from coming into the presence of each other so that we can see the love of God at work there, or that restlessness prevents us from coming into our places, our communities, and seeing the love of God that is there so that we can then celebrate that love.

Or if that love is being frustrated or denied, heal the conditions so that the love of God can be expressed again through the liveliness of other creatures or through the beauty of our places, the fertility of our farms and so forth. These become ways now of inhabiting a world in which the first gesture is not to control the world, but instead to see the world as it is, as the expression of God’s love for it, God’s desire for it to be, and God’s desire for this world to flourish, or as John says, to experience abundant life.

Hoogerwerf:

Well, there are a bunch of other ways in the book to think about hope, hopeful economies, forgiveness seeking and forgiveness, granting hope, hopeful architecture, and we’re not going to have time to talk about those. So I’ll just let that be a reason for listeners to go get the book. But one more nuance of hope here. We’ve explored this idea of hope on the podcast a lot, especially in the context of the environmental crisis. And I do find there’s a tendency that seems especially prevalent in religious communities to push people toward hope and sees hopelessness as a major problem. Just the other day, I was talking to someone who made a comment about how she was always made to feel unchristian if she felt sad about the state of the world, which I think is kind of relate here.

I want to read one quote from the very beginning of chapter one. “Admissions to be hopeful can like a soporific lull people into accepting the status quo,” you said that earlier. “Suitably pacified, hopeful individuals simply wait for the miracle that will, in some hypothetical, perpetually deferred future, make everything all right.” And you quote the indigenous philosopher Kyle Whyte who instructs us to “be cautious around these often comfortable and satisfied purveyors of hope. Their calls to hopefulness can generate what he calls the ultimate bystander effect by giving people an excuse not to do the hard work of connecting the injustices that create hopelessness in the first place.” And all these ways we’ve been talking about hope becomes this really complex thing, and I think you’re calling people towards hope. Is there also a place for hopelessness?

Wirzba:

Yeah. I mean, I think the thing I want to not lose sight of is, as I talk to people about writing this book, especially younger people, they’d say, “I’m not interested.” I’m deeply suspicious of anybody talking about hope, especially from a guy like me, professor at a big university. What have I got to tell people? I mean, so I totally get that. And I think my worry is that so many people are tired of the language of hope, because it is often expressed in ways that are dishonest about where we are in the world, where we are in the history of humanity. And dishonesty does not work with young people. They are so, so aware of when somebody is lying. They’re so aware when the kind of message of hope that gets presented is unduly, dishonestly, inauthentically just a mess. It’s a garbage. It’s just a way of saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll just take care of you.”

But they know they’re not being taken care of. So I think for us to talk about hope, we have to be, first of all, committed to being honest with each other about our fears, about our anxieties, about our doubts, about our worries. Because it’s only as we take each other with this measure of honest engagement that we’re even going to have a possibility of a relationship that goes forward. So honesty is absolutely central to me, but at the same time, and the honesty is going to include moments where we say, “Hey, I’ve got no energy for this hope.” Because when you are in the position of someone who wants to love another, there will be times when you’re trying to love another and you will be at a complete loss about what to do, because you think that having tried one way of loving is going to bring about the effect that you want, and you realize it doesn’t. And so the temptation is to want to give up and say, this love is in the ruins, and that’s where we are just going to be. Now we’re going to be in the ruins.”

And I think that has to be affirmed, that oftentimes we don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know what the effects of what we are doing are going to be. And this is why I think hope also has to have this communal dimension, just as love requires a community. When we try to love by ourselves, when we try to hope by ourselves, it’s easy to get lost because things just don’t work the way we want because our imaginations are not expansive enough, we don’t know enough. And this is where a community is so, so helpful because they can surround you in the midst of your despondency, in the midst of your despair, in the midst of your hopelessness, and say, the love that you exercise is still important to exercise because we don’t often know how things are going to go.

Another window line that’s important to me in the book is that hope does not depend upon us knowing the outcome, because hope lives in the means not the ends. And I think that’s a hard thing to deal with because we do want to know that the effect of our loving or the effect of our hopeful commitment is going to be a good outcome, and we can’t be guaranteed of that. And that’s hard. But in the midst of that, if we have a community of people who are prepared to come with us, that’s bearable.

Hoogerwerf:

Well, we’re coming near the end here. But I want to not ignore the fact that we’re talking just a few weeks before election day here in the United States, and this episode will air with that even closer. I think it’s not calling out any one party to say that a lot of people are feeling some fear around this time. People are scared of what will happen if their candidate doesn’t win or scared of what’s already happening in society and what the world will look like for the next generation. I wonder if you could just help put this kind of notion of hope and love we’ve been talking about into the context of this asylum moment. Any words of advice as we go into November and beyond?

Wirzba:

Yeah. Yeah. I think one thing I would say is turn off the media and start talking with your neighbors, start doing things with your neighbors. And I can give a very specific example about this. I was mentioning to you before we started the program today that, western part of North Carolina has been hit really hard with hurricane Helene, and the damage is almost unfathomable in some of the communities. And talking to some friends and neighbors that are out there. And they were telling me about how in this smaller community called Lansing, just not far from where we have a cabin, people just came together to address what was the immediate need, which was cleanup, which was rebuilding, which was finding people who were still stranded because of washed out roads or bridges. And the question was not, are you a Democrat? Are you a Republican? Are you from FEMA? Are you from the state? Are you from whatever?

The question is, how are we going to help each other? How are we going to rebuild? And it was that face-to-face commitment to be with each other without sort of checking credentials, without checking affiliations. That was the basis for what is whatever hope is going to look like in Lansing North Carolina. It’s going to be people who commit to the care of each other, to the care of their communities, to the care of their places that are going to be the real sort of signposts for what a hopeful future looks like. Get away from all the talking heads who want to manipulate us, who want to create fear in us. Hang with the people who want to be the ones who come alongside each other and work for a better world.

Hoogerwerf:

So I said earlier, we always used to finish our interviews with that question, what gives you hope? And I’m not going to do that exactly.

Wirzba:

Thank you.

Hoogerwerf:

But at some point, we switched to asking what books our guests have been reading. And I actually don’t think those two questions are too far apart, at least for me. But I want to switch it up here and finish by asking, what do you love? And I think that, I mean, where in your life are you now finding life and joy? Maybe that’s actually in books or something you’re growing.

Wirzba:

There’s so many. I mean, I think the one that, since I trashed the cell phone a few minutes ago, I’ll mention something that is on my cell phone, it’s when I open it up, there’s a picture of my granddaughter there. And she has been the source of more joy than I can say. And when I look at her every time I open my phone, it reminds me of why I need to do whatever work I’m able to do, because I’m thinking so much about her future and what her life will be like when she’s 60. And I’m scared. But it’s also a reason for me to doubly commit to trying to do what I can to do some repair, to do some healing, to do something that can improve the world that we’re in, because we know that there are so many problems, but we all need ways to enter into it in all the specific ways that we can do and with the specific motivations that are available to us.

And so with Lila is certainly a major motivation for me, but she’s obviously not the only one. But that for me is a really powerful inspiration that does not work at the level of my fears, even though I have them, but at the level of my love.

Hoogerwerf:

Well, thank you. Thank you for your work and for the work of this writing, and thanks for being here today.

Wirzba:

Well, thank you so much, Colin. It was good to speak with you.

Hoogerwerf:

Language for God is produced by BioLogos. BioLogos is supported by individual donors and listeners like you. If you’d like to help keep this conversation going on the podcast and elsewhere, you can find ways to contribute at BioLogos.org. You’ll find lots of other great resources on science and faith there as well. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf, that’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River Watershed. Thanks for listening.