When You Wish Upon A Star—Authentic vs. Fake Hope (A Meditation in the Second Week of Advent)

Why do we need to live in hope? Because we know well that the happiness we seek is just what we’re seeking, not what we already possess. And the longer we’re alive on this earth the more heavily it weighs upon us that our happiness is perhaps (we wish!) just around some corner, just over some bend, but never in our hands. I am a desiring being. Desire must lead to fulfillment or otherwise it is meaningless and life in this world becomes a cruel joke played upon me by who else but God Himself? Without hope, my posture toward God will be that of hatred and resentment, not love. We might too easily say that the problem of hope is only solved when we reach confidence in the identity and nature of a God worthy of hoping in, a God who we can take seriously because he takes us seriously. But our age has taken a different tack.

 

Sentimental Optimism: the perversion of Christian Hope

Enlightenment Liberalism 

We live in the age of the secularization of Christian culture. As a society we’ve become convinced that we can harvest as it were the fruit of Christian culture without the authentic cultus (worship and doctrine and ecclesial structure) of Christianity. We’ve become convinced as a society that we can do this for various reasons, but they can all be summed up in what we might call the “Enlightenment outlook.” This outlook says that the fundamental goals and truths of Christianity have been abstracted out, established and archived in our social constructions and politics and educational systems such that we no longer need to refer to the original authority of “organized religion” to carry these goods and truths for us.

Replacement of Christian Hope with “Science”

We have been trying to replace Christian hope with hope in science and technology. We think we can see on the horizon a new civilization of wealth, prosperity, and freedom. We have long heard talk even of a transcendence of human nature, a transcendence of the body, by means of technological engineering—we are told that we can make ourselves into whatever we desire or wish to be, that we can free ourselves of the constraints of physical nature and craft a new, superhuman species. We think that we are destined to become God Himself.

Rising despair in the face of the technological promise

And yet, in the face of all of our new technological sophistication and the promises of world peace and universal prosperity and freedom, there has grown a deep skepticism and cynicism in our society, a profound doubt of the promises of the New Age. We see that corruption and shortsightedness and every other kind of human failure and weakness are not being eliminated from our world, but instead bring with them the perversion of all our best plans and systems, such that we are faced not with greater unity across the human spectrum, but greater division and violence and alienation. Our dreams of heaven-on-earth repeatedly turn to dust and disillusion in our hands.

But because we have eliminated the possibility of a sober, steady practice of Christian faith as the ground of our society, the practice that gave spiritual sustenance to so many generations, where else is there to turn but to manufactured pseudo-spirituality saturated with sentimentality, with the sugary platitudes epitomized by the Hallmark greeting card and the Yoga Salon and the Meditation Center and pop music and art culture, epitomized by the Disney movie. In the face of all of our achievements in scientific and bureaucratic rationality, we have failed to make ourselves peacefully content with such promises, which leave the world of the spirit untouched—we’re hollow inside and this feeling of emptiness must be addressed, somehow. And so we have turned to making a sort of drug out of the lofty ideas born and crafted and given to us by centuries of Christian worship and theological and philosophical reflection. Chief among the Christian ideas perverted in this way is the supernatural virtue of Hope.

Fake Hope

Think about the old pop song from Disney’s Pinocchio (1940). “When you wish upon a star…” etc. Herein lies a counterfeit promise of universality taken from the Christian vision: no matter what your lowly estate in life, your disadvantages culturally or politically or socio-economically or personally, that twinkling star will bring your dreams to life. And yet they say it is Christianity that invokes magic and wishful thinking over science.

“If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme….” Borrowing from half-forgotten memories of the Old Testament prophecy that “young men shall dream dreams and old men shall see visions”, (Joel 2:28) and from the centuries of development in Christian culture of the Biblical imagery of the “heart” as the organ of the person which makes us both most human and most like to God, these profound ideas are winked at and manufactured into counterfeit emotions whereby, again, “with all my heart” I am to place my dreams into the hands of a ball of flaming gas, I suppose (for isn’t that what Science tells me a star really is?). 

“Fate is kind”, the song continues, and “brings to those who love the sweet fulfillment of their secret longing.” Is that so? It’s all nonsense and an especially callous insult to anyone in profound suffering and want, anyone who has been left out of the prosperity of capitalism. Such people have no recourse to the narcotic of sentimentality that pervades our western world.

The very notion of “Fate” in this song is based on a lie. In the ancient world, “Fate” was the power even above the immortal gods, the power from which even the Undying Ones had no protection. Fate is pure will and power which cannot be opposed by any wishing, which cannot be bought off with sacrifices and acts of humility. Fate simply decrees without recourse. The notion is quasi-Christianized in the Disney song, however: “Fate” has only the good in store for “those who love” (whatever “love” is supposed to mean here—we’re given no idea of the content but are supposed simply to nod our heads at the vague sentiment). No sober-minded pagan of antiquity could have thought such a thought, for he knew that Fate in the end brought about the undoing of every human plan and purpose, grinding it into the dust of history.

“Fate” is presented here as the benevolent “god” who knows the deepest destiny of the human heart and is bent ever toward its “sweet” fulfillment.  But this is not the experience of fallen humanity, who for millennia acted out in the blood cults the violence and anxieties of a life lived in fear and alienation from nature and its awesome, destroying power, and also from the violence wrecked by one man upon another.

And then, what, precisely, are my dreams? My wishes and dreams aren’t always of the best sort, but are perhaps just as often revenge fantasies or self-aggrandizement. I should remember, though, that “Fate” will only grant the wishes of “those who love.” Aha! Fate has good-will, you see. But as we’ve said, this is precisely the one trait that although occasionally some god or other might possess for a fleeting moment, Fate in the classical imagination most certainly does not. Ancient man was right: what happens as a result of Fate’s willing may be better or worse for me, better or worse for mankind. But that’s no concern of Fate. It is the looming threat of Fate that despite all our wishing and dreaming, what will happen will happen. The idea of Fate does not inspire humanity to hope, but rather to resignation.

 

Christian Hope: Grounded on Evidenced Faith

Such pieces of pop-culture flotsam carry a message that, however eviscerated of reason and reduced to shallow stupidity, however dangerous in a certain way they may be as substitutes for authentic and sober expressions of the human condition, their power to soothe our anxieties—what little power they have—is based on the achievement of an older, sober and profound philosophy bequeathed to us and drilled into us as it were through centuries of a Christian culture which had received the message of the Gospel over centuries of contemplation and translated it into something like a new mythology, an overarching Grand Story, a Great Tradition which in fact fashioned a new society out of the worn out and exhausted cultural machinery of the old. Even though in modern times we’ve tried as best we can to throw off the story of the Gospel, we’ve found that we haven’t quite been able to do it. The aesthetic—the shape—of the Christian gospel is so beautiful and powerful, it has sunk so deeply into our language and thought-forms, that getting rid of it entirely is simply impossible and even the many avowed secularists find it undesirable to do so.

“Because he holds fast to me in love, I will deliver him;
I will protect him, because he knows my name.

When he calls to me, I will answer him;
I will be with him in trouble;
I will rescue him and honor him.
With long life I will satisfy him
and show him my salvation” (Ps 91:14-16)

As the faith teaches us, the “secret longing” of the human heart is for God and God alone. “You have made us for thyself, Lord”, writes St. Augustine in the opening of his great work, Confessions, “and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” But we must note that this longing for God remains a “secret” even to our own selves, that is, until it is brought forth and made manifest in us when God Himself stands before us as one of us, as one who has translated himself into the world of limitation and time and history, even into our fallen world, our fallen nature, into the weakness of human infancy, and speaks to us in our language and in our idiom of the great love that we are destined for. Without this revelation of God to us, we cannot truly Hope, but can only wish. And our wishes turn to bitterness, resentment, and despair in our hands until the good news of God’s merciful condescension to us enters our hearts and transforms them from “hearts of stone to hearts of flesh” (Ez 36:26).

For those who live in this faith, “no request is too extreme” because our requests are conditioned by the infinite grace of the heart of God in us. Prior to this faith “we know not how to pray as we ought.” But with Faith “the Spirit intercedes for us.” Let’s look at what St. Paul says about the true “saving Hope” of the Christian.

For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man sees, why does he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it. Likewise the Spirit also helps our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searches the hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because he makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren (Rom 8:24:29)

This passage summarizes and crystalizes the sober, existential condition of the Christian in the fallen world. We are brought into alignment with Heaven, with our true destiny, when we live in Christian faith. Faith makes it possible—and Christian Faith alone can do this—to possess an authentic Hope that sustains us through any trial, through any suffering, even that which would break the most naturally stalwart among us.

 

Come, Desire of Nations

Christianity is the true Way of being human in this world, the way of practicing our destiny. Christian faith unlocks the door that allows us to pass from mere wishing and desire and all the threatened disappointment that comes with it (the anxiety caused in me by the fear that my wishes won’t come true) to real, founded hope in a happiness that truly awaits me. Christian faith gives us evidence that God is not cold and aloof from us, that he has not given us the promise of some happiness that can never be fulfilled, but rather that he has come close to us, come among us as one of us, in order to show us a glimpse of what awaits, in order to show us that he has not left us alone but that he has involved himself in his creation so as to bring it to its proper fulfillment, the supernatural fulfillment of all the desiring and wishing that constitutes our nature and otherwise makes up our life on this earth.

This is the meaning of the Incarnation. In the season of Advent the Church invites us to begin again a journey of hope. Not mere irrational or thoughtless “wishing upon a star” but rational hoping on the true star of the nations, the star of Bethlehem. If we give ourselves to this beautiful season, we will find again the joy of living the journey of faith, the faith in the child of Bethlehem who makes us ready for the next world and gives us the power whereby we live well and joyfully in this one.

Perhaps there is an alternate set of lyrics which might be set to some more properly sober, and yet truly joyful and authentically hopeful music.

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan's tyranny
From depths of Hell Thy people save
And give them victory o'er the grave
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Day-Spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
And death's dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Key of David, come, 
And open wide our heavenly home; 
Make safe the way that leads on high, 
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, O come, Thou Lord of might, 
Who to Thy tribes, on Sinai's height, 
In ancient times did’st give the Law, 
In cloud, and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

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Fr. Byron S. Hagan is the Parochial Vicar of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Northeast Minneapolis.