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And I say to you tonight, let us not forget: there is Hope.

I sit here tonight tired and slightly confused. Tonight there are wars, and rumors of war. With darkness and fatigue comes fear. Divisions I perceive threaten to tear apart the very fabric of my nation as the barbarians wait outside the gates, sitting impatiently around their mellow fires. When Pandora opened the box that bears her name, all manners of ills, diseases, sorrows, vices, crimes, pains, and anguish escaped. But after all of them came one final spirit, whose name was Hope.

I went to a discussion group tonight, a group of like-thinkers who are dissatisfied with the modern establishment of the American Protestant/Evangelical Church (whatever you make take that to mean). At some point, all of us have somewhere encountered the word “postmodern”, tried it on, and found it to fit the persons we had already found ourselves becoming. About half of us were Wheaton alumni or current students, about half again of those I recognized from my church. I discovered this group via a flier on the Forum Wall on campus, and was one of two people to meet the shuttle at the given place and time.

Tonight’s topic for discussion was the role of mysticism in the church–to avoid certain connotations, mysticism in the ancient sense, with a long tradition rooted in the early Church and stretching at least until the early Medieval period, before the first birthing pains of Modernism. Mysticism in the sense of accepting that there are and will always be mysteries in the world created by God, mysteries which we shall never be able to compass.

Somewhere in the discussion, I left to go to the restroom. When I returned, the conversation had turned briefly to the subject of Hope. Hope. One of our number was a pastor at a church in Wheaton, and he confessed his despair at finding any hope within the church, considering its apparent complacency against the state of the world. A young woman, a student at North Park University, countered that perhaps the only hope we had was the Church, not the building or the legal entity, but the body of Christ, and His work performed through us in the midst of a hurting, self-destructing world. Hope. Mystery.

Later, after the formal discussion had ended, we all lingered, standing about and talking or listening to each other. I spoke with one of the guys from my church, and we discovered a mutual love for speculative fiction, himself a lover of the dystopian scenario, especially Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″:http://www.google.com/search?q=fahrenheit%20451. Before we had pursued the topic much further, the young woman from North Park joined us and began to quiz him about his recent travels through sub-Saharan Africa, leading a group of Wheaton students on a month-long journey. AIDS had come up as a possible topic for the next month’s discussion, and he had been volunteered to help bring the opening presentation.

This young woman passionately desired to go to Zambia, where he had stayed for some time. A vegetarian, she worried when he mentioned the diet high in meat. He spoke of the things he had learned, about the depth of relationship he had discovered among the Africans he befriended, about how their nations were in the midst of a soul-searching identity crisis, about how they had tried to ease their doubts and fears, and about how touched the Africans were that Americans, to whom they looked up to and admired, would come and spend time with them. The young woman despaired at this–”Why do they look up to us?” she lamented. Later, she said, “I need to go there. I just need to get away from this country, get as far away as I possibly can.”

Mystery for me right now is as simple as tomorrow. I know that I will most likely go to work tomorrow at 12:30pm, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. That’s about all that I am certain of. I hope for more. I hope that I will rise early and exercise. I hope that I will write more words in the story I began this morning. I hope that I will run into old friends that I haven’t seen yet. I hope that I will meet new friends. I hope that I will fall in love and find my love reciprocated. I hope that the wars will end. I hope that men and women who yesterday would have slaughtered innocent men, women and children in the name of a cause or an idea or a god or a name will remember themselves (having forgotten) and turn away from their evil and be healed and forgiven. I hope that a cheaply manufacturable cure for AIDS will be discovered and put into immediate distribution wherever that scourge has traced its deadly finger. I hope that the leaders of this country (present and future) will receive supernatural wisdom for the impossible task they attempt. I hope that my mom will be healed, her sight restored, her body strengthened. I hope that my dad will finally have enough money to pay the bills and be able to relax. I hope that I will finally learn how to show my love for them.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. This is an enigma, and Hope is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Tomorrow will happen, and I am not quite sure how or why. The cosmos are open, all bets are off. Grace reigns over all–the rain still falls on the fields of the righteous and the wicked. Grace. Now, there’s another mystery. “For now, I will sleep, and think no more on these things.”:http://subverbia.eykd.net/archives/2002/11/77/a-contemplation-on-a-winters-evening-before-sleep/ Good night, and pleasant dreams.

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