December 6, 2021
The habit called hope
I packed my candy pink trainers when I left for Scotland more than two weeks ago. Trainer is the first word that pops into my mind as I sit down to write this letter, but not knowing if I’ve chosen the right word, I look it up in my dictionary:
BRITISH. train-er: a soft sports shoe suitable for casual wear; a sneaker. “a decent pair of trainers.”
After ten years in Canada, part of my confusion probably owes to the fact that I no longer recognize Canadian parlance versus American parlance. Likely trainer is a Briticism incorporated into Canadian English, and I’ve begun using it, without even knowing it. But maybe I use trainer because I’ve just come home from the UK, which on one late night, my friend Heather explains to me is different than Great Britain. “Great Britain is the island of England, Scotland, and Wales. The UK includes Northern Island.” (I don’t pretend I know this, although it appears I missed a basic geography lesson in middle school.) Or maybe I use trainers because to call them running shoes would imply that I run, which I don’t.
Why my trainers are candy pink is another conversation entirely, one where I admit I grow paralyzed when buying athletic shoes. I’ve now left this job to my husband of 25 years.
Trainer is the perfect word for this first-of-the month meditation on habits. If you’re a new subscriber to Post Script, I can orient you a little by telling you that the first of the month, I say something about the importance of our regular and routine practices, especially in our life with and in God. I don’t exactly mean praying the rosary, although when my contractor returned from Italy with a small round box and a string of red rosary beads, blessed apparently by Pope Francis, I thanked him.
We can be given to thinking that faith is about the esoteric, about the emotional, but I think that ends up being a deflating, defeating exercise. If you go looking for God on the mountain and end up not finding him, is that your fault—or God’s? By contrast, I like focusing on faith and its habits, first because I think it’s a biblical category, and second, because I find it a hopeful one. You don’t have to be a spiritual giant to practice good spiritual habits like daily prayer, regular Scripture reading, sacrificial giving, fellowship with other Christians, service to the poor, and Sabbath. You just need to have small, ordinary commitments along with enough structure and accountability to keep them. You only need God at work in you, to will and to work for his good purposes.
But here is some of the good news I am apt to forget, when I beat this horse. Habits serve us; we don’t serve our habits. This is to say we have every prerogative to change them, reimagine them, set them aside for a short time if that serves our larger purpose, a purpose Brother Lawrence described best: “Let what may come of it, however many be the days remaining to me, I will do all things for the love of God.”
I packed my trainers for Scotland—and they sat on the floor of my bedroom until I packed to go home. I packed them thinking I might steal some early morning light for exercise. But with jetlag and late nights hanging out with a lifelong friend, I didn’t see much of that light. And after full days of helping my friend manage her house in her husband’s absence, I had little energy left to even think about loading some HIIT workout on my phone and shaking the house with burpees.
And guess what? It was all ok. My habit of regular morning exercise was here for me when I got back. I wouldn’t have wanted to leave it abandoned for too long, of course, but I also knew that setting it aside for another good made sense.
Probably the best habit I picked up in Scotland was helping myself to the deliciousness of pouring cream in my coffee and sitting many long hours in the high-ceilinged, sunbathed living room of my friend’s house—a house which villagers call the house above the old surgery. The only thing urgent during our time together—beside two sweet potato casseroles, one for a bereaved friend and one for a Thanksgiving feast—was friendship. This is a gift we have been nurturing since we first met in our early twenties: before graduate degrees and children, before global moves and now, an incurable cancer diagnosis.
“I don’t like the word, ‘hope,’” Heather tells me. She doesn’t mean hope in the most biblical sense of that word. She means hope as the word people substitute for optimism, for the fortuitous turn of events, for healing. She explains what she means in her most recent post for The Incurable, which I hope you’ll consider subscribing to and reading:
“The poets and philosophers and theologians and even the sages of Instagram all have said plenty about hope. For me, it’s easier to say what I think hope is not. It is not a wish for all to be well. It is not an optimistic outlook. It is not staying positive. It is not a belief that things will be better in the future. In fact, it is not a feeling or idea or notion at all. I think hope is an action—it is holding on, right now, in the present. Hope sees the reality of the storm and the darkness, and gets out of bed anyway. Hope acknowledges that incurable cancer is terrible, but embraces the gift of life for today. Hope is a discipline of holding on to truth: Jesus came, Jesus will come again, and in the meantime we are able to hold on because God is holding on to us.”
I saw my friend keeping at the practice of hope in the week I spent at her home above the old surgery. This habit looks like embracing the uncertainty of the future—while living fully in the now. It’s a habit of in-between time, a habit of Advent time. A habit that’s okay with saying: not all shall be well, at least not yet. That might seem like a depressing thought, but if you’re struggling, it can strangely feel like good news.
Yours,
Jen
P.S. Thanks for waiting on this week’s letter. Thanks, too, for the kind responses many of you sent two weeks ago, when I let you know about my visit. Here are a couple of pictures: one of the Scottish sky, which seems to be the primary subject in most of my photos, one of the white schnauzer, Sophie, who Heather best described after Sophie was disciplined for jumping on on the dining room table. “I can make her sit, but I know she is standing on the inside!”
