Over the last several months, I’ve been meditating a lot on the nature of hope. It may seem ironic, really, that a book about depression would spark such thoughts, but as I’ve told and retold the stories of the Companions, I can’t help but circle back to what kept them alive in the dark.
If, in the midst of our suffering, we had nothing to turn to that was bigger than our pain, no reason to expect an end to our agony, no whispers of the possibility of redemption, we would have much reason to be pitied. In a world like the one we live in, where pandemics strike and justice goes unmet, I need hope to be more than wishful thinking or a spiritualized cliché. I need a hope that’s deep and robust enough to withstand the darkness.
I’ve returned often to a story I heard too late to include in the book. Martin Luther, the great Protestant Reformer, struggled with depression on and off throughout his life. One of those seasons came after his teenage daughter, Magdalena, died in his arms. It’s a heartrending scene. As you can imagine, Martin and his wife Katie were devastated. But as the carpenters were nailing the lid on Magdalena’s coffin, Luther yelled, “Hammer away! On doomsday, she’ll rise again!”
Every time, it sends chills down my spine.
When I hear a story like that, I can’t help but think of hope as an audacious thing. It plants itself in the darkness and defiantly insists that, in the end, light will have the last say. Hope stands in the midst of burned out ruins and refuses to accept a blackened shell as the end of the story. And it can stand by a graveside, as the hammers still ring, telling death not to be proud.
Such hope does not remove our pain. (And it does not cure depression.) But it does prove strong enough to sustain us in the midst of the greatest of suffering. Hope gives us the strength to stare the darkness in the face—and still defiantly insist, “This is not the end.”
There will come a day when sorrow and suffering and sin will forever be undone. A dawn will rise where there is no more death, no more tears, no more sickness. There will come a day when our joy will be complete, a day when nothing will take that joy away from us.
Hope reminds us of this Day. Hope sends roots down deep, to keep us tethered when we are battered by life’s storms. Hope gives us the courage to keep breathing, to keep loving, to keep seeking joy where it may be found, even in the valley of the shadow.
My friends, I know so many of you are bearing your own weight of grief. It may be the death of a loved one or an unresolved illness. It may be chronic depression or anxiety. It may be unemployment or disconnection from your loved ones. There is a fair share of suffering.
But yet there is hope. Defiant and audacious hope. And that hope will not disappoint us.