This week I’ve been thinking about Sisyphus. Condemned to forever roll a boulder up a mountain only to see it roll back down, this Greek mythical character knew a thing or two about hope.
Sisyphus came up in a conversation I had a couple of years ago with renowned professor of race and education, Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings. We were talking about my research, and she got rolling on the question of how to maintain hope for the long haul.
She said you can tell a lot about what kind of hope people have by what they pay attention to in the story of Sisyphus. “White Americans focus on the boulder,” she said. “But the African American struggle is focused on Sisyphus. Sculptural renderings and paintings of Sisyphus will show you a person with these incredible biceps, amazing quadriceps and deltoids. It's about the strength that Sisyphus has developed from pushing this daggone boulder. It is going to come back down the hill. But listen, your job is not about getting the boulder up the hill. Your job is that you’re gonna get up there and push it. And as you're pushing it, you're going to get stronger.”
Your job is not about getting the boulder up the hill. Your job is that you’re gonna get up there and push it.
Enduring hope, in other words, is ready to struggle. We need a kind of hope that knows the weight of the boulder and keeps pushing anyway.
Her take on hope was consistent with what I heard across five years of researching the differences between enduring hope and flabby hope. People with enduring hope for justice don’t deny challenges. As one White man who worked for years in an organization focusing on racial justice told me, “I know that I could really cause some damage. I know that I'm scared. I know that. I don't always know what to do. But I'm still going to show up. I'm still going to be here. I'm still going to trust God even if I don't understand all the time or I’m working through it.”
Real hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism chooses to ignore what goes wrong. It expects goodness will happen just because good things have happened before. As Theologian Jürgan Moltman wrote in 1965, “Genuine hope is not blind optimism. It is hope with open eyes, which sees the suffering and yet believes in the future.”
In another of my favorite research interviews, a woman told me, “I would probably describe myself as either a really hopeful pessimist or a crabby optimist. I find no hope in not naming what really is happening.” She said her hope is “totally bruised and bloodied and it's scraping by, like by my fingernails. On days it's like you may not be able to see it, but there's maybe a scrap of it hanging on and pressing on.”
Because real hope knows that justice will require a struggle, it also knows to make space for joy.
The same woman told me she maintains hope by “leaning into joy. I think it's an act of resistance to play, to practice joyful things in the midst of it. That's exactly what we need to do in the midst of all the horrible things—joyfully gather. And not in denial, but as an act of resistance. We play, we eat, we celebrate, we do all those things. But it's only hopeful to me if we can actually be honest about what is also really happening: both/and.”
That's exactly what we need to do in the midst of all the horrible things—joyfully gather. And not in denial, but as an act of resistance.
Long-haul hope also requires an ability to hold contradictions in tension. Both lament and joy. Both struggle and freedom. Both impossibility and possibility.
Dr. Ladson-Billings described how hope threaded through the history of her own family. “I’m four generations out of slavery. My grandparents were sharecroppers on both sides. My parents grew up in legal apartheid, state-sponsored segregation. My mother could not try a hat on in a downtown department store.”
Referencing a mantra she’d learned from race scholar Derrick Bell, Ladson-Billings said, “Just because something is impossible doesn't mean it's not worth doing.” She explained, “Slavery was impossible. But it didn't mean that my ancestors didn't fight against it. You could never get ahead in sharecropping, but that didn't mean they didn't fight against it. Those folks who were enslaved didn't see what my life would be today, but they didn't have to see it. They just knew where they were in the struggle. And to presume that the struggle will not continue today is really folly.”
Just because something is impossible doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Real hope isn’t complacent. As I’ve written elsewhere, Martin Luther King’s message that “the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice” is too often used out of context as a justification for inactivity. King was clear that hope demands action. “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability,” he wrote. “It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”
Finally, enduring hope has a reason. It knows goodness keeps on interrupting the bad. The troubles we’re facing might be heavy as a boulder and steep as a mountain. But we also have felt the grace of goodness that keeps on interrupting the bad.
The other day I came upon a quote by the formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass, speaking in 1852. This was eight years before Abraham Lincoln’s election, eleven years before the Emancipation Proclamation. The bulk of Douglass’ speech told just how bleak the present circumstances appeared. And then he closed with this:
“Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. The arm of the Lord is not shortened, and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope.”
Beloveds, may we, too, leave off this week in the same way we began it—with hope.