Successful Ineffectiveness

Vaclav Havel was a dissident when Czechoslovakia was Communist and then became the first president of the Czech Republic as the Soviet Union dissolved. He was a well-known writer and playwright before he became president, and always a thought-leader. He wrote this about hope:

“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. It is an orientation of the spirit and orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope…(is not the) willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed…”

In the 1980s Reagan engaged us in a massive nuclear arms build-up and I felt true despair by the end of that decade. The US was spending an enormous percentage of our national capital on weapons of mass destruction and also showering millions and millions of dollars on dictators in proxy wars. Our protests felt like shooting spitballs at Godzilla. I began to lose heart.

Then someone pointed out to me something about the Hebrew prophets I had failed to notice: they were not asked to be effective they were asked to speak out and act. How things turned out was not something they could control. Those prophets were ancient poets of hope, and even when their sacred poetry was a javelin aimed to pierce the heart of their audience, the verses were laced with hope.

Amos is one of my favorites prophets. He was a shepherd and also worked in the orchards picking figs. As the story goes, he lived and worked in the southern kingdom of Judah and one day God tapped him on the shoulder and told him to get on up to the northern kingdom. Tell that bad boy king, God said to Amos, that he and his whole nation were about to be taken over by another nation and all because they had been so darn decadent and unjust.

Amos knew that king and everyone associated with him would just laugh a southern fruit picker right off the stage. In fact, that would be the best scenario to hope for. So Amos developed an ingenious plan. He stood up and started raging against all of the king’s neighbor states. He pointed in every direction — east-west-north-and-south — at all the neighboring kingdoms and described with poetic brilliance what was wrong with each of them. He told how God was going to punish those neighbors for all their bad deeds. Everyone cheered. The crowd wanted more great prophesies of doom against their enemies. But then Amos stopped and said, “But you, you are the worst…”

He went on to name all the awful injustices perpetrated by their king and described in detail the awful things about to happen to them. They kick him out of course. But his job was to deliver the message, his audience’s job was to hear it.

Hope is the ability to work toward something “because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.” We are surrounded by critical tasks whose shear size and difficulty could cause us to lose heart. Our task is to speak and act because it is good and right to do, not because we can see the outcome.