Hope and faith
According to Greek mythology, Pandora’s Box was a large jar that contained all of the evils of the world. It was given to Pandora, the first woman on Earth, supposedly as a gift from Zeus, the king of all of the Greek gods. Strangely, she was given strict instructions to never open the jar under any circumstance. Overcome with curiosity, however, Pandora took a peek inside and enabled the evils to start escaping into the world. Realizing what was happening, Pandora desperately tried to close the jar but managed to keep only one thing inside — hope. Some say that keeping hope inside the jar is what has provided man with a degree of comfort amid all of life’s hardships and has also given him the strength to persevere. Others, however, wonder what hope was doing with all the other evils inside the jar in the first place and interpret this to mean that the Ancient Greeks actually considered hope as a dangerous thing. The famous 19th-century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, in fact, went so far as to write that hope is “the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment.”
Although they are often used interchangeably, hope is a much more nebulous and whimsical commodity than faith. While faith involves believing in something that is beyond the capabilities of our human senses, it is at least grounded in experience. Even though they can’t see Him, Christians believe in Jesus today based on what the apostles wrote that He did 2,000 years ago and on the deeds and actions of a multitude of followers since then. I know that my wife will still be by my side tomorrow because I have known her loyalty for the past 26 years. Hope, on the other hand, is all about a desire or a wish for something in the future regardless of past or present circumstances. For example, some people hope to win the lottery despite the odds being one in a million. Others dream to become superstars one day even though they may not have enough talent. Pessimists suggest that, in most cases, all hope is false and that it just leads to an accumulation of heartache and disappointment. Although I worry a lot, I’ve always been an optimist and have a cavalier attitude towards life. I’ve therefore also always believed that hope is a good thing. I think that while life is certainly no bed of roses, without hope to push us on, we may end up not even trying and not living at all. But what I have recently and painfully learned, however, is that hope has to be grounded on faith and not the other way around. We should hope because we have real faith in something or someone. We should not have faith simply because we hope that it will get us what we want.
These past few months, I had put my faith for an important endeavour in someone I now realize I did not really know. I believed him because he told me what I wanted to hear — what I had hoped to hear — even though in retrospect what I had hoped for was really more of wishful thinking. And when things started to unravel and all of his promises kept falling apart, I persisted in believing because I simplistically hoped that things would get better. After all, was not my cause just, my actions sincere, and my efforts way beyond the call of duty? Alas, as Nietzsche warned, my hopes only prolonged my agony. By the time I decided to cut clean, the fool had already done a lot of damage not just to me but to others as well. Like Pandora, perhaps, I was too late in closing the jar.
But now as I pick up the pieces and try to salvage the situation, I also unexpectedly find that hope still remains. Hope remains because of family and friends who know me and who continue to have faith in me. Even my children who are still too young to understand these things have pitched in. Sensing the other night that something was amiss, both of them volunteered to massage my feet. Recent events may have emphatically reminded me that my feet are most certainly made out of clay; nevertheless, amid such a loving display of faith, how can one ever lose hope?
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