Rediscovering Hope

As a Christian who is recovering from religious excesses and disappointment with various mainstream spiritual and self-help practices, I am rediscovering hope through inquiry, also known as The Work.

What is Hope?

The modern-day meaning for the word “hope” veers towards wishing for a certain outcome: I hope my team wins on Saturday, for instance. The more archaic and Biblical use of the word “hope” is in the context of an expectation of good. Hope is the opposite to a sense of dread and a sense of despair.

The Bible talks about the hope of salvation in 1 Thess. 5:8. I believe that the Christian salvation experience is meant to bring a sense of hope: a freedom from worry and fear – an expectation of good. Hope is referred to throughout the Bible and it is one of the “three graces” together with love and faith, as found in 1 Cor. 13:13.

A Sense of Security

My many years of pursuing spiritual and self-help practices have led me to the realisation of some fundamental truths. One of these truths has been the realisation that the development of a sense of security is the key to enjoying freedom, happiness and success in this life. It is little wonder that I make mention of this fundamental concept throughout my writings.

I have spent a great deal of time and energy trying to attract, claim, suppress, resist, control and change things; but not of my efforts have really worked. But the more I observe other people with a view to discovering what brings true happiness and success, I have come the realisation that truly happy people do not spend a lot of time and effort attracting things and claiming things. Such people simply live from the position of who they are on the inside – it is this which attracts all the good things that they experience in life. This observation has led many spiritual and self-help gurus to attempt to create a formula out of this concept, so that all one has to do is to think positively and make an effort to do the right things, and success and happiness will be theirs. But it’s not as simple as that.

A sense of security comes when we have an expectation of good. An expectation of good comes when we are free from the sense of dread and despair that result from our attachment to certain beliefs.

The Gospel

I don’t mean to brag and I don’t purport to know everything, but I feel that I have taken Christianity to its fullest conclusion. I can’t see anywhere else to go with it. I’ve been through the charismatic phase with deliverance, spiritual warfare, faith for finances and healing – right the way through to the message of grace which majors on righteousness and no condemnation in Christ. I mean, there is nowhere else to go with this.

What I have discovered is that the Gospel is a short message and it is not meant to be complicated. However, the institutional church has taken this message of grace and turned it into a business. The church has presented a system of “do-good-get-good-do-bad-get-bad”. However, nothing could be further from the truth, because it is not about how good you are – it is about how good Christ was on your behalf.

A sense of guilt can really rob a person of a sense of hope. When a person comes to believe that there is a God, it can soon lead to a sense of guilt, because it all becomes about pleasing God with your efforts. Guilt is the ultimate sense of inadequacy when you realise that your best efforts are never good enough.

Thankfully, we can find a sense of hope in knowing that it is all about what we believe, as opposed to what we do. For this reason, Christianity in its purest form, apart from the warped performance-based message presented by the institutional church, is actually one of the best antidotes to a sense of guilt. There is something freeing in knowing that there is a God who loves you, that you were created for a purpose and that you have right-standing with this God and that you are not judged according to what you do or don’t do.

As a Christian recovering from religious abuse and excesses, I find myself seeking to know the truth, to find balance and to learn what works and what does not work. I find myself revaluating the mainstays of Christianity, such as prayer, fellowship, worship and so forth. There always seems to be a never-ending demand for Christians to have more faith, love, hope and to pray and read the Bible more. However, I believe that maintaining a sense of hope, with and without the Bible, is the best thing that we can do.

A Question of Right or Wrong Motives

I would always make an enthusiastic start whenever I would come across the latest spiritual or self-help fad: be it affirmations, visualisation, prayer or whatever. But I feel that these efforts were always short lived and unproductive, because of my wrong motives. Whenever I tried to claim or attract wealth – it was always with the motive of alleviating a sense of inadequacy and a sense of dread of what may or may not happen in the future.

But rather than seeking peace through attempting to control circumstances – I should have sought after some means of maintaining a sense of hope, which is an expectation of good. This approach is akin to maintaining a sense of security, as opposed to feeling insecure.

I have learned that I can’t always know what is going to happen in the future and I certainly can’t do a lot to change it. But what I can do is to change my perspective in the present movement from something negative to something positive.

I now find that what I can do in this moment is to work with my expressions of anxiety, which is dread and despair, which arise from the subconscious mind. Rather than trying to affirm these anxious thoughts down or trying to change them through positive thinking – I can use this simple process of inquiry in order to move from a condition of despair to a condition of hope. In this way, I ensure that my motives are always pure; I’m not assuming that I know what is best for me, or how other people should live their lives or what should or should not happen in my environment.

Hope through Inquiry

I find that inquiry works every time because it reconnects my mind with that source of wisdom and hope that is within me all of the time. I have worked with various practices over the years and most of them have not endured – the main reason probably being wrong motive. But if I make my motive the maintenance of a sense of hope – I move closer to ensuring that my motives and pure and that the wisdom I receive from the heart is also going to be pure.

I am convinced that the only thing that keeps a person from being all that they were created to be – is contraction around a thought, in other words, fear. Through inquiry, fear loses its power because the framework of inquiry is so designed to loosen the contraction around a thought that we experience as fear. There is a wellspring of hope inside all of us that is waiting to be tapped into. But instead, we just tend to hold onto our fears and try to avert them through logical deduction, aspirations and hasty actions. Maintaining hope is the best thing, and the only thing, we can do in order to ensure a good quality of life for ourselves: that means we can be the best father, mother, brother, sister, friend or work-colleague to someone else.

When we use inquiry, we don’t demand that things change to be the way we want them to be; we don’t demand answers as to why a certain thing happened in the past and how we can avoid it again, and so on. Through inquiry we rediscover hope which lifts us out of a sense of despair – in this position we are more able to live life at an optimum level – without the need to change things, demand things, control things, attract things and claim things. This leaves us open to the element of surprise as we wait with anticipation what life has in store for us.

Thankfully, inquiry does not demand a great deal of spiritual knowledge for it to work for us. All that we need with inquiry is an earnest desire to know truth and experience freedom than we want to uphold our own beliefs, to be right and to get our own way. In order to experience the sense of hope and freedom that inquiry can help us attain – we need to put in the time and effort to inquire into anxious thoughts as they arise, or as soon as possible thereafter.