HOPELESSLY DEVOTED
Chris Bell
14 August 2005

Ecclesiastes 9 (3-4, 7, 10)
3 This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. 4 But whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for better a live dog is than a dead lion!

7 Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is NOW that God favors what you do.

10 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

There is a Tibetan Buddhist meditation manual dating from around the year 1000 called The Root Text of the Seven Points of Training the Mind. In classic Tibetan Buddhist fashion these seven points are broken down into a whole bunch of smaller units, short slogans which help train the mind in the development of loving-kindness. Some of these slogans are loaded with classical Buddhist philosophy, but others are much more practical and down-to-earth: “Don’t wallow in self-pity,” or “don’t be frivolous,” or “always meditate on what provokes resentment.” Among these nuggets of wisdom lies one slogan that always stuck with me, and that pops into my head with unnerving frequency: “Abandon all hope of fruition.”

“Abandon all hope of fruition.”

That seems like odd advice doesn’t it?

At the same time that one is dedicating all one’s energy and intention and awareness into the elaborate practice detailed in the book, the advice is to completely abandon the hope of ever achieving anything by it.

This is actually a common idea in Buddhist practice. Zen often refers itself as “Nothing Special.” The Heart Sutra declares “no path, no knowledge, and no attainment.” The desire for enlightenment is considered one of the great obstacles to enlightenment, because it creates a powerful state of wishing things to be different than how they are - and acceptance of how they are, how they really are, is itself enlightenment.

So “abandon all hope of fruition” makes some reasonable sense if you’re talking about your meditation practice. But what if that advice is not merely for the cushion? What if it applies to all our dreams and goals, individually or collectively? What if “abandon all hope of fruition” even applies to our church life, or our social justice work?

Unitarian Universalists abandoning hope sounds ridiculous, I know.

We believe in the worth and potential of all individuals, we have a vision of world peace and community and democracy. We look forward, and we move forward. We’re universalists, for crying out loud! Downright optimistic, if not unabashedly and relentlessly hopeful.

“These things shall be,” we sing from our hymnal, “a loftier race than ever the world hath known shall rise with flame of freedom in their souls...” and “Now is the time approaching, by prophets long foretold, when all shall live together secure and manifold.”

How can a hopeful people abandon hope of fruition? Isn’t hope the only thing we’ve got?

That seems to be the lesson of the myth of Pandora’s Box. Epimetheus, who has helped Prometheus with the creation of the earth’s beings, has a chest into which he has stashed all of the bad and rotten things of the earth, things that the newly created human race definitely ought NOT to have around. Pandora opens this box, and all the evils of the world come forth, except of course, HOPE. I suppose the moral is that no matter how bad things get, at least we still have hope. For me the myth begs the question - just what is hope doing in a big ol’ box of evil in the first place?

Perhaps there is something about hope which is not helpful to us.

Without clinging to a vision of the world to come, how am I to remain devoted to the struggle for justice? Without hope, where will I find the energy, when there is so much that needs to be built, to be fought for, to be saved?

Well, for thousands of years people have hoped for and prayed for and fought for and worked for and dreamed of a better world. And I hate to say it, but I don’t think things are actually getting better. The good guys aren’t winning. Each century has been bloodier than the last. Upward and onward forever appears to only refer to defense budgets and missiles, not the progressive realization of peace and human betterment. The structures and powers of evil are so deeply imbedded that no prophet, however articulate or blessed, has been able to steer his or her people from the paths of greed, anger and ignorance for very long. And there have been some damn fine prophets. Everything that has ever needed to be said about how people can and should live together in the ways of love was first said a long, long time ago, and has been repeated tirelessly ever since. Few listen. Fewer spend their lives fighting doing anything about it. And even they, as Ecclesiastes reminds us, even they also die.

Cheerful worship, huh? Sorry! We’ve got to walk through the valley to make it to the mountaintop!

Ecclesiastes, one of the most pessimistic books in the Bible, and the equally cheery Book of Job are among those books known as Wisdom Literature. Wisdom is a tricky word, but we might call it an understanding of what is true, right, or lasting, particularly as we have discovered those things through our experience. Consider what truths of human existence this Wisdom Literature calls lasting: We cannot know the mystery from which we came and into which we return. Suffering is here to stay - and it makes no sense. An abiding law of justice and fairness, some law of moral cause and effect, does not actually function among us.

“There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth,” writes Ecclesiastes, “there are righteous people who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked people who get what the righteous deserve.”

Is this lasting, right and true?

It’s hard to admit it, but it just might be that we cannot actually make things any better than they are. It just might be that the structures and powers of evil are so great that it takes the combined effort of every decent, loving, struggling person in the world just to keep things from getting worse. Maybe something like balance is as good as it gets. Maybe not, but maybe…

Now I know that sounds grim. But abandoning hope of fruition need not mean hopelessness. It is not mean depression or despair. It is not about giving up the fight or giving in to evil. We just abandon hope of fruition.

One thing this decision, this stance, does for us is to answer forever the question of whether the ends justify the means, by simply giving up on ENDS all together.

You all have heard this confession before, but I’ll say it again. I am a procrastinator - a bad one. But recently I was once again flipping through the book on ending procrastination that I, er, bought last year, and among its many insights I’ve learned that one major symptom of procrastinators is that we focus on product rather than process. Accordingly, all the energy and worry is centered on an end that is not even remotely in sight, rather than on the moment by moment work that needs to be done. The goal - an academic paper, or a sermon - looming large in the imagination in all its many pages and filled with wit and wisdom, actually becomes a barrier because the aspiration for the finished project is so great that if there is any doubt about one’s abilities, crippling anxiety is the natural result.

Relate this to political apathy. You pick up the newspaper and start reading about some social problem - let’s say the lack of health care for so many Americans, and you start thinking about what to do about it. If you’re honest with yourself, before long you aren’t just thinking about one problem, you’re thinking about all of them. The interdependent web applies to the forces of evil, too. Class issues, race issues, economic issues, and why don’t the politicians care about this, and what do care about instead and why so much money for armored personnel carriers and not enough money for healthy persons, and how do these guys get elected anyway, and what about capitalism, and whoa, before long you’re staring at the totality of world history and it’s just too big to think about anymore. You started out wanting to write a little paper on health care and now you’re imagining that the only thing that can possibly make a difference is a 117-volume magnum opus called “Everything that’s wrong and exactly what we need to do about it.”

So what doesn’t get done is the one little phone call to your representative, or the letter to the editor, or the visit to the advocacy web site to sign the petition or whatever. In other words, the one, little thing that you could actually do now.

Abandoning hope of fruition is putting faith in process, not product.

Hope of fruition is only for the future. It looks to the future, it lives in the future. Yet, across many traditions the great mystical visionaries remind us that there IS no future. There is only now. Only NOW to do our work, to love our partners, to eat drink and be merry.

And only NOW to do the work of peace and justice. Or better yet, to BE the work of peace and justice.
“Peace work means, first of all, being peace,” writes the great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. There is no other place or time to BE peace, than right here and right now, with no hope of fruition, no end in sight, only the means - the means of BEING peace.

Such a stance requires what a feminist professor of mine called “revolutionary patience,” though Lord knows that ain’t easy to have! “Revolutionary patience” was one thing she thought her fellow activists lacked, to their detriment. By failing to accept outright that the cause will not be won in their lifetime, activists fall prey to bitterness and resentment and anger. (And most of us agree that less, not more, bitterness and resentment and anger is what we’re shooting for here.)

Leaving the future for the present doesn’t mean there is no value in occasionally imagining our promised land. We’re no different than others; we long for a better world, and we need our prophets, too. But as Moses and Martin Luther King and Archbishop Oscar Romero and so many others discovered, seeing the promised land does not necessarily guarantee entering it. Yet still the people must be led.

Abandoning hope of fruition doesn’t mean believing that that which you work for CANNOT be realized, just that it might not be - and that’s O.K. Just because you’ve let go of the desire for enlightenment doesn’t mean you stop sitting. It just means letting go of attachment to the results. Freed from that attachment, we are actually liberated to become effective in the present moment. “With nothing to attain,” the Heart Sutra continues, “the Bodhisattva relies on perfect wisdom, and the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance there is no fear.” We let go of our vision of Heaven or our blueprint for Utopia, and find ourselves instead in the only place we can ever actually be, at the true heart of life, the common bond of life - the shared suffering and the shared struggle NOW.

Liberation theologians of all stripes remind us - Life is the Struggle. A life of wholeness and integrity is not found if or when we reach the end, it’s not in the dream of Heaven or the Pure Land or Utopia. The life of wholeness and integrity can only be lived now, in the struggle for compassion and justice, in the search for truth and meaning. As Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz has written, in the struggle itself oppressed people, and those who join them, “discover and affirm the presence of God in the midst of their communities and the revelation of God in their daily lives.” In the midst - NOW. In OUR daily lives - NOW.

It is in our daily process, not its far-off and maybe impossible realization, that we find true appreciation of our blessings, openness to beauty and love, and the inherent satisfaction of meaningful work. The path IS the goal. Living in the struggle, open to the suffering, we discover the unity of all who struggle and suffer, we share lot in life and our toilsome labor under the sun. And somehow, wonderfully, gracefully, accepting the struggling and suffering is itself the freedom and joy we long for.

What a magnificent irony: that in the abandonment of our goal we find that which we had been seeking. Letting go of world peace, we find inner peace, and finding inner peace our work for world peace is renewed. Letting go of enlightenment, we discover enlightenment. Abandoning hope of fruition, we find something far more powerful. Our terrible and miraculous and fleeting lives. Our real lives.

So get back to work, everybody. “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might,” but let yourself be freed from hope of fruition. Call it hopeless devotion, or call it true love: holding on to the end, that’s what I intend to do.

We don’t need to see the promised land to journey there. Like the pillar of fire in the desert, love will guide us. And as love guides us, perhaps we will guide others. It just may be, maybe, that by example of our diligence and freedom and joy others may be inspired to join us, and may find their freedom and joy in the this common struggle. If not - we let it go. We reap our own reward and the light of love in the world is briefly made a little brighter. That’s enough. We let our little light shine. That’s all we can hope for. “She who clings to her work will create nothing that endures,” writes Lao Tzu, “If you want to accord with the Tao, just do your job, then let go.” Just do your job, then let go.