The Existential Challenge:
How to Hold Hope in Times of Darkness

©2004 John Schneider

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
But to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain,
But for the heart to conquer it.
Let me not look for allies in life’s battlefields,
But to my own strength.
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved,
But hope for the patience to win my freedom.
Grant me that I may not be a coward,
feeling your mercy in my success alone,
But let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.

--Rabindranath Tagore

We live in times of profound, accelerating and sometimes traumatic change. Those changes involve opportunity and tragedy, deliverance and danger, pain and joy, freedom and its loss. The world of the twenty first century bears rapidly fading resemblance to the world our parents and grandparents knew. While some yearn to return to the past, it is only through selective memory that we can see in bygone eras better times—the changes were just different than they are today. Nor is staying the same an option: as Norman Mailer starkly reflects in the Deer Park; “There is a rule so cruel and so just which demands that one must grow or else pay more for staying the same.”

While there is no guarantee of success in any conventional way, growth will only come through facing fully what has been lost and what remains. The most important resource in the face lies within. That resource is the capacity to hope even in the darkest times.

That hope comes from knowing on some level that change in itself contains both hope and despair. Every change has a loss embedded in it: every change also has a gain. The internal resource to discern both is our capacity to grieve. The capcity to grieve is the source of hope.

Yet there are times when we need the grasp of a hand to find the courage to grow. There are times when either the gain or the loss is so prominent we can’t see the other. There are times when the change comes with suddenness and violence, a radical altering of life as it was—it traumatizes. There are times when all that is visible is failure and darkness—we can’t find any basis for hope. There are also times when the mortal coil of our body, mind or spirit becomes unbalanced in ways that limit or eliminate our capacity to grieve.

There are few things more irritating at such times than a cheery friend who tells us to look on the bright side, or gives us the latest self-help book with five quick steps to happiness. While their intentions are often good ones, they are conveying their naiveté or lack of experience with what it takes to negotiate times of genuine darkness. If they did, instead of standing outside of our cave, they would come in and see things through our eyes—and remain hopeful for us.

There is no substitute in my opinion for life experience in being able to hold hope for others. Someone else needs to have done it for us at some dark time in our own lives. It may not have been the person who most believe should do that—parents, teachers, coaches, spiritual directors or counselors, to name a few who we expect to do that. It may have come from complete strangers with a knowing stare, or someone who has shared a portion of our journey. Experience counts—and with it our own growth.

There is a tool that helps turn that life experience into a process which empowers. That tool for holding hope is validation. Validation is doing what Tagore notes in the opening passage. In action, it involves the following five steps:

Holding Hope: Principles of Validation
Principle	Key Points
Commit to Empowering the Best Self	Believe in the inherent worth, dignity, and integrity of all individuals. Believe in an individual’s ability to rise to the occasion. Believe that there is more to people than what “meets the eye.”
Appreciate the Moment and the Journey	Live the moment fully. Savor the journey and the process. Honor sacredness.
Witness the Moment and the Process	Hold hope. Be present at significant times. Share in an ongoing life story.
Be Gentle, with Honesty, and Find Abiding Truths	Be sensitive to communication dilemmas.
Suspend Judgment	Commit to gentleness of the moment and truth of the process. Help to create emotional and spiritual safety. Know and respect your own values. Acknowledge differing viewpoints. Temporarily set aside perspectives that are not helpful in the moment.

For more detailed discussion of holding hope and of validtion, see the chapters on Holding Hope In Times Of Darkeness and Validation