Hope and the End(s) of the World

A few weeks ago, I made Austin and my mother-in-law watch World War Z with me. (Sorry, Kathy).

I’ve loved this movie for a long time, which Austin says is “out of character,” just like my obsession with frozen pizza. I love it for lots of reasons—I like that it’s family instead of romance based. I like that it’s smart, that killing the zombies isn’t just about shooting them, but also about thinking. I like that there are strong women in it who are strong in different ways. What I wanted to watch it for this time, though, was the hope: in the movie the world ends, and it’s awful, but there’s still hope. It’s the worst case scenario, and then things keep going.

I’ve been thinking about how the world has ended lots of times. On March 13, the same day Austin and I decided to get out of Boston and left our apartment two hours later, I was listening to a podcast called Hardcore History on the Celtic Wars. The world ended for the Celts. Their society and culture were razed and their people were slaughtered. The world ended with Noah’s flood. Worlds ended in colonialism—with Native Americans wiped out by disease and violence, with tribes in Africa that lost their cultures and peoples to slavery, with the Hawaiians who saw Captain Cook’s soldiers walk up the beach and called them “ha ole,” no breath, because they were so pale they looked like the death they would bring.

The world has ended over and over again. Entire “lifeworlds,” ways of understanding time and space and reality and divinity that vary from culture to culture (and person to person), were wiped from existence. And each time it was a tragedy. Each time God wept.

Although I believe in God and in His goodness, though I believe He wept every time the world ended for some of His children, He nonetheless allowed it to end. This is frightening, because He didn’t love them less than He loves me. My lifeworld is not more stable than theirs. My world could end.

A few years ago I figured out that the world could be a very dark place. Maybe that sounds silly, and it probably should. I’d grown up in a very happy, protected world, and though I’d known that bad things happened to good people, my direct experience with it was fairly limited. But then, during my time at college, I lived with women who had severe PTSD. I found that people I knew to be good, who I knew had made covenants with God, who were his daughters not just by birth but by consistent choice, could nonetheless have their worlds end. They could hurt more profoundly and longer than I’d ever imagined, and God let them.

I remember calling my dad after one particularly bad night and asking, “Is the world as bad as this?”

“Oh, Marissa,” he said. “It is so much worse.”

I had to re-learn my God, who I had thought was a God of protection. It turned out that, sometimes, He is a God of healing instead. He did heal. I saw it. It is the closest thing to a miracle that I have ever seen. Though my friends still hurt, they have reconstructed bits of their world. With God, brick by brick, they have built new realities in which they can be OK.

During this period, I struggled to find hope. I felt that I’d misunderstood God’s promises. I didn’t know what they meant, so I didn’t know what I could hope in. I didn’t know how to trust God.

In the face of this, I did what I’ve always done when I had no idea what to do: I researched the heck out of it. I spent a year reading Joe Spencer’s For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope (even though he writes like a philosopher, which is to say, it’s hard to know what he’s saying unless you already know what he’s saying). In Spencer, I found a definition of hope I could put weight on. He says, “in hope, the past event that calls for faith is recognized to contain . . . a promise, an indication that things can be different.” In other words, faith is the ability to recognize what God has done. It is seeing that He brought the walls of Jericho down with trumpets, made it so no arrows could hit Samuel. Faith means seeing that, sometimes, God protects us. It is also seeing that He brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, that He helped Noah build a boat; it is seeing that, though God does not always stop the world from ending, when it does, eventually He comes to heal and preserve. Hope is the projection of faith forward: it is the belief that what God, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, has done in the past, He will do in the future.

In yesterday’s General Conference, an apostle of my church, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland testified of this, saying: “Because the Restoration reaffirmed the foundational truth that God does work in this world, we can hope, we should hope, even when facing the most insurmountable odds. That’s what the scripture meant when Abraham was able to hope against hope. That is, he was able to believe in spite of every reason not to believe, that is that he and Sarah could conceive a child, even when that seemed utterly impossible.”

Spencer says that theological hope—hope in God’s goodness and work and the belief that we get to be part of it—only ever exists in the face of impossibility. He suggests that “Hope, genuine hope, arrives only when I see that deliverance is objectively impossible, only at the point of real hopelessness or despair.” Hope is what we feel in the face of God’s work, which is impossible. We serve a God of miracles, whose son was birthed by a virgin and rose from his tomb after three days, whose work is the eternal life and immorality of people. God’s work is impossible from where we sit. So hope and impossibility enter the door together. They are the work of God, and so it is the work of those who seek Him. When impossibility knocks, we know it is for us.

For me, hope ends up being hard work. It starts as innocence, but it ends as force of will.

This feels especially relevant right now, with the world rendered so frightening and unsure by life-threatening illness. A few weeks ago in Dear Hank and John, Hank Green said, “If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly swinging between under reacting and overreacting and never quite sure which one of those things you are doing.” I feel this constantly. Some days I am very calm, and some days I cry over everything. There are big hurts—like people dying—and small ones too, like not getting to walk for graduation, and all of them feel like endings in ways I want to resist.

Elder Dieter F. Utchdorf, another apostle in my church, says that we resist endings “Because we are made of the stuff of eternity. We are eternal beings, children of the Almighty God, whose name is Endless and who promises eternal blessings without number. Endings are not our destiny.” Perhaps this is what I am trying to say. That worlds end, but they also go on. That none of us are immune to what Elder Utchdorf refers to as “very fabric of our world tear[ing] at the seams,” and yet God is good with a needle the same way He is good with clay, and He can sew our worlds back together.

I think the existence of God, the Atonement of Christ, I think what these things mean is that through whatever happens, however bad it gets, there is hope that things will go on. God may choose to protect us—as he often has, invisibly, from so many things—but if He chooses not to, then He will heal us.

But I’m still praying He chooses to protect us—you and me and everyone you love and everyone I love and everyone they love, radiating out across the world.