We are six months into the year, and I’m wrestling. Surprisingly, one of the lights that guides me these days is theologian and activist Miguel de la Torre’s advice to embrace hopelessness. What? Didn’t St. Paul say that only three things last and hope is one of them?

De la Torre takes a different tack. He notes that one person’s hope may be another’s hell. For example: Manifest Destiny and the 1863 Sand Creek massacre in Colorado. As de la Torre puts it, “How can people leading the massacres be the instruments for the world’s salvation?” What was hopeful for the pioneers was a hopeless hell on earth for Native Americans.

I think about the religious leaders who encouraged Dr. Martin Luther King to be patient and wait in hope. But Dr. King questioned their definition of “patience.” Three hundred fifty years seems like a fairly long time to wait. Would 360 qualify? Four hundred?

Having considered a whole series of atrocities, de la Torre concludes that hope can be a mirage, an ever-moving goal post, or an asymptote approaching a New Jerusalem without ever arriving. We don’t have much evidence that the arc of history bends toward justice. Injustice marches on, and the oppressors counsel patience. Forgive me, Julian of Norwich, but for too many of us, all shall not be well. 

We are taught to trust in eternity. But when Rabbi Abraham Heschel was asked about eternity and heaven,  he said, “We don’t have a lot of information.” We do have the prophets. And they call for justice now. Let God handle eternity.

De la Torre distinguishes hopelessness from despair. Hopelessness “is a cold-eyed gaze at the reality of generational oppression and the difficulty for success. Despair leads to giving up. The hopelessness I advocate leads to struggle in spite of the outcome” (123). It propels marginalized people toward “liberative praxis” (139), whereas hope can lead to complacency with the oppressive status quo and breed apathy or contraction of being. We keep our heads down, try to feed our families, and hope the police don’t find us.

As for what this liberative ethical praxis looks like in our world, de la Torre uses some salty language. He says forget success and just go out and “screw with” the system that kidnaps people and deports them without due process. It might mean civil disobedience, such as praying in the Capitol rotunda, like Rev. William Barber and his friends with Repairers of the Breach, and getting arrested for it.

Two thousand years ago it meant turning over bankers’ tables outside a temple. Fifty years ago it meant crossing a bridge and getting beaten nearly to death like John Lewis, who called his disobedience “good trouble.” De la Torre calls it being “a royal pain.”

Maybe you chain yourself to a prison bus transporting undocumented folks to trial, as some activists did here in Tucson in 2013. It may not be practical or prudent or effective, but it reminds us that we are alive, creative irreverent human subjects and not just flesh to be frisked, zip-tied, and deported. Or maybe like some friends at Voices from the Border in Nogales, you can fund health care or an apartment for a single mother and her children stuck at the border.

And maybe, on a more mythical plane,  some of our old stories are true. Maybe, as Tessa Bielecki notes in her recent reflection on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the “big players” –kings, wicked wizards, and angelic elves–don’t call all the shots. Maybe little folk can pull the rug out from under the Dark Lord’s feet. And maybe not. Tolkien’s Frodo Baggins paid a terrible price, but I’m glad he took up the Ring.

I was taught to take God so seriously that I take everything else, especially myself (and unjust laws?), lightheartedly. De la Torre affirms that “screwing with” the system is an act of love for oppressors and abusers. It is not driven by vengeance. It is nonviolent. “Oppressors are also victims of structures designed to privilege them yet rob them of what it means to be human” (154). De la Torre suggests we let go of the messiah complex we may harbor and simply “struggle for justice knowing the battle is already lost and history stands against us” (155). It may be nutty, but this cheers me up. I hope it cheers you, too.

Photos above appear courtesy of Voices from the Border. All quotations are from Embracing Hopelessness, by Miguel de la Torre.