Hope--Friend or Foe

As the universe winds down, I come back to hope.

Hope is the last addition to Pandora's Box--the one that remained when all of the evils and pains and fears flew out at humans when she opened it. Was hope a grace or just another curse like all the rest? A way out and beyond the evils of the world? Or a frustrating trap which kept humans within them?

Hope invites and invents belief: the gods, God, religion, pleasure, self-worth, drugs, cosmetics, body beautiful, universal knowledge, boundless sex, eternal soul, health and wealth, legacy and immortality. And dashes them to dust.

Is hope another trick of the gods, of the genes, of evolution, and the brain? Another illusion like the conscious self, the knowable world, and everlasting love?

I don't know for sure. And sometimnes when I think that I am thinking most clearly and honestly I am on the brink of despair--and hope. Depression, like paranoia, becomes a heightened state of consciousness. But then again, so does bliss and hope.

Hope, fine friend, you lead us along promising us salvation--or at least some meaning and reason to hang in there with the experiment of human life.

But we won't of course, fickle friend. We die, the sun dies, the universe dies. All your enticments are vanities vanishing. So we hope against hope. Maybe in somewhere beyond--outside nature, outside reality, outside the universe, outside life itself.

Yet we are told "faith, hope, love--but the greatest of these is love.

The past orientation of faith,

The future orientation of hope,

Are not, except in the presence

Of love, right now, here, with you.