In the Land of the Living

Years ago, on a beautiful sunny Saturday during my mom’s last battle with breast cancer, I turned aside from my stroll around Philadelphia’s Italian Market and walked into St. Paul’s Church. This huge pile of old-school Italian Catholic churchcraft broods over 9^th Street like a mother hen and my visit proved a fascinating cultural experience.

Of all the exotic things in the capacious sanctuary—marble floors, muraled walls, confessionals with Si parla Italiano inscribed on them—the painted statues of the saints fascinated me most. I caught sight of a kneeler in front of a statue of Saint Jude, the renowned “Patron Saint of Lost Causes.” Despite my Methodist upbringing, which taught me such things were idolatrous, and my Episcopal re-education, which taught me they were tacky, I felt irresistibly drawn to it. Kneeling and making the Sign of the Cross, I began inchoately interceding for my mother with sighs too deep for words.

Suddenly, a strong and very clear voice spoke these words into my head:

Your mother is not your responsibility.

Now, you’d think Saint Jude would answer a prayer like mine by giving me hope. But I left the building with a lighter heart precisely because he had taken hope away. 

Hope, at least as conventionally understood, is a pernicious thing that wraps like barbed wire around the heart, drawing out our pain endlessly with superstition and magical thinking. When hope is mentioned in the Bible, it is hope in something or someone, “in him the Gentiles will hope” (Romans 15:12), for example. This sort of hope is a very close relative of “faith.” But we don’t generally use the word in that way; in conventional parlance. We “hope to,” “hope for,” or “hope that”, often with our fingers crossed and some inner utterance that resembles casting a spell more than praying.

“Hope” teaches us that, by maintaining some inner disposition of the heart, we can bend events outside ourselves to our will, as when my dad’s fishing buddies told me I needed to hold my mouth a certain way to make the fish bite. When my mother was sick, I was indelibly certain that, were I to relax my inner vigilance enough to pause the jaw-clenching and white-knuckling of my soul, Something Bad would happen to her. Saint Jude told me, “The Bad Thing has already happened, and you cannot, by anxious thought, add a single day to the span of your mother’s life.”

I’m sure this all sounds terribly grim. “What if I had not believed,” wrote the psalmist, “that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living?” (Psalm 27:13) But that is how hope deceives us—by holding a vision of our desired outcomes between our eyes and the world. Take that veil away, and we can see the goodness everywhere, every day.

C.S. Lewis said Hell is defeated “when a man knows that horrors may be in store for him, and is praying for the virtues wherewith to meet them.” Hope, in the common sense, makes us neglect our prayers, and leaves us unprepared for the horrors when they come.

When I was a hospice chaplain, people used to ask what I did all day. Setting aside driving and filling out forms, the one single thing I spent most of my day doing was listening to dying people tell me how grateful they were. Released from the lacerating rusty toils of hope, they poured out to me their gratitude for their families, careers, faith communities (as applicable), and the care they were receiving as the shadows lengthened and the evenings came. In all my time as a hospice chaplain, I was never asked to pray for a miraculous cure. No longer hoping that, hoping to, or hoping for, my patients were hoping in at last.

Author’s Note: This post is an expansion of the “Memorial Lesson” remarks preceding the reading of the names of singers who had died during the year that I gave at the 24^th Annual Keystone State Sacred Harp Convention on January 26, 2025.