Hopeful Helplessness

A lesson in prayerfulness

Helplessness leads to prayer

Hopelessness leads to despair

I have thought about this pair for a while now, and the interplay between them. I have also spent a good deal of time now feeling rather helpless, that there was nothing in my power nor purview that I could do. And helplessness does indeed drive prayer!

Prayer is an odd thing. Within Christian theology it simultaneously occupies the position of being the absolutely most powerful thing you can do and a form of doing absolutely nothing. In the first instance, prayer involves a kind of metaphorical or spiritual walking into the very presence of God, jaunting your way up to the throne of the God of the Universe, who created all, rules all, and has the power to do pretty much anything, and then you get to have the audacity to speak to him and present your requests. All because Jesus died on your behalf, which also was an entirely gracious, gratuitous act. So, you get the privilege and power of tapping on the shoulder of God himself to ask him to do things for you.

I'm being a little facetious, but only because we ought to simultaneously recognise (i) with seriousness, how great the power of prayer can be, because of the power of the one asked; (ii) how ridiculously lavish this gift is.

At the same time, prayer is a form of doing nothing. It's an expression of dependence - God, please do X. We ask that primarily and properly because we know X is out of our power. We are sitting or standing and we are not doing, we are asking. Because if we could do, we wouldn't ask.

The more helpless we are, the more we are driven to prayer. It becomes our only option. I think that is why sometimes in God's providence he allows us to experience helplessness, precisely because we need to learn our dependence. We are, by nature, dependent beings. But we are very forgetful of it.

Hopelessness is a different matter though. Hope is a looking forward, an anticipation of a future possibility. Hope, I would say, as an English word embeds in itself that the outcome is desired and desirable. Whereas expectation embeds the idea that the outcome is more probable than not, but is more neutral on its desirability. I don't intend to veer into a long discussion of 'biblical hope', but we might as well make the oft-repeated comment that ἐλπίς is more in the field of expectation than hope, though it certainly covers both.

The hopeless don't pray. If you genuinely believe that things are 'beyond hope', that not only can you do nothing, but that nothing can be done, or more accurately that there is no way that anything can occur towards improving a situation, then you won't pray (and you won't try to act, either). Hopelessness is a soul crushing condition, as the future clouds over with darkness, no brighter days are seen on the horizon, no light breaks in. Hopelessness leads to despair.

I have not been hopeless, but I have felt helpless. And hopeful helplessness fuels prayer. Because hopeful helplessness knows that something can be done, it just cannot be done by you. And so you turn to the one who can help, to the one who gives hope, in dependence.

There is a different kind of tension, almost or perhaps a kind of pain, that accompanies hopeful helplessness though. It's the tension of hoping, really genuinely hoping for something to come to pass, and not knowing whether it will or not, not knowing whether hope is in vain, whether hope will disappoint. And at the same time being unable to contribute one iota to bring it about. To draw a banal analogy, it is a bit like watching a sports game - you may hope as much as you like that your team will win, but you cannot contribute an ounce of help to them. You are stuck on the side-lines watching. It is not quite like that, though, when you do not know whether something will happen or not, and if so when, or how. Life is full of unknowns, and the course of events may take so many turns, that we are unreliable and unwieldy predictors of the future. We just do not know. But we hope.

Because if we don't hope, there is only despair. there is only turning in our hopes and putting them to rest, burying them in the grave of disappointment and 'acceptance'. Despair reveals its Latin roots here, de-sperare from sperare "to hope". We give up our hoped-for, as something beyond hope, beyond expectation, as something that cannot-be-hoped-for. The loss of hope means the light grows dim and goes out, the hearth grows cold, the world shades from cloudy grey to blacker night. A hardening, a resolve, sometimes in anger and bitterness and callousness. To stop hoping almost requires a hardening of the heart, or at least a closing off to the possibility of a brighter tomorrow.

One thing that I have not touched upon here is the shape of prayer when one is not helpless. I think that might be a topic for another day as well, but precisely when one can do something, is when we ought to carry the same dependency upon God into our prayers, and also into our actions. Helplessness drives one to prayer, but when one can help to realise desired outcomes, that is when we are most vulnerable to think we can indeed do it all, guarantee outcomes, achieve objectives, build a better future individually or collectively, and secure our heart's desires. And action itself is not wrong, but we need to take the deep dependence that we learn from and through helplessness, into the parts of our lives where we are most powerful to effect change.

But we live in the tension, between what is and what could be, or even what ought to be. It is a hard place to stay in, but what choice do we have? We choose to hope, we have to choose hope, hope against hope, hope beyond hope, in the goodness and faithfulness and power of a God who can act, and who does act, and who will act. But it is hard and it hurts to keep on hoping. And yet it is worse to stop and give up on hope. That option is only coldness and darkness and despair. And so we hope onwards. And we wait upon the Lord.