Here’s an intriguing observation, learned from a book by a prominent expert on the biology of the brain and how it relates to mental disease. The book is A First-Rate Madness, and the author is Nassir Ghaemi, MD, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts University.
He says that studies have shown that the average, non-neurotic person is more optimistic than he or she has a right to be. That’s right. According to science, the average person, meaning most of us, has an unrealistic expectation that everything will turn out well. Now, that may come as a surprise to you. It certainly did to me. I suspect we often perceive ourselves or others as worried or anxious.
Yet, statistically, we remain unrealistically hopeful.
My source for this statistic did not explain what he means by unrealistically hopeful. I heard a story recently about a man who had spent his whole life fascinated by the Grand Canyon, learning all about it, always believing that one day in the future he’d go visit, but never getting around to it. Finally his friends at work said, “Dude, you’re seventy. You are never going to go to the Grand Canyon, so will you just please stop talking about it?” And suddenly, the man realized, They’re right. I’m not going to the Grand Canyon.
So I wonder about this guy: was holding on to the hope of seeing the Grand Canyon something that enabled him to get through the drudgery of the day, even though secretly family and money and time conspired to make it impossible for him to visit this dream place? Maybe that’s what they mean by “unrealistically hopeful.”
But that’s not the end of the story. His co-workers had burst his fantasy bubble. So he quit his job, stuffed a backpack, warmed up his thumb and hitchhiked across the country to The Grand Canyon.
So now, again, I ask you: is that what was unrealistically hopeful? A seventy year old man dropping everything to hitchhike across America? If he has any grown kids, they’d probably be worried to death. Wouldn’t any reasonable person have told him he was a little off his nut?
Enter this guy who has made it his life’s work to listen to and tell the stories of ordinary people. He is driving along and he sees this septuagenarian hitchhiker a few hundred miles short of the Grand Canyon, and he decides to pick him up. Now, here’s another unrealistically optimistic person, a guy who thinks it’s fascinating and fun to pick up complete strangers on the side of the road so that he can learn something new and interesting about being human. Isn’t that pretty risky?
But he takes this stranger to the Grand Canyon, where he wasn’t planning to go in the first place, and he’s wondering the whole time: This poor old man has built up the Grand Canyon so much in his head. It can’t possibly live up to his fantasy. I hope he’s not too disappointed.
And you know what? He isn’t. He gets there and he is dumbfounded. He is awestruck. It’s better than he imagined it.
But he is seventy years old, and he has no job and no savings. It’s not clear if he was thinking, I will do this, and then it doesn’t matter what happens next. Maybe he thought seeing the Grand Canyon was worth essentially dying for. Regardless, his friend the driver is a bit more, shall we say, realistic: he takes the older man to the Grand Canyon National Park tourism center to see if maybe he can get a job. They talk to him a few minutes, and they’re amazed by his knowledge—he knows more about the Grand Canyon than they do!—and they hire him as a docent on the spot. And now the man is living his dream: He’s a docent at the Grand Canyon.[1]
So much of this is just so highly unlikely—even unrealistic. And yet they happened because he refused to let “realism” get in the way of “optimism.”
One could make the argument that the man had faith.
And that at some level, most people have some kind of faith, some kind of vague, ungrounded optimism that in spite of everything, things will turn out all right. Researchers suspect that this unrealistic optimism is built in to the human brain, that it is an evolutionary tool that has enabled human beings to strive forward and transcend the limitations that are set before us by nature and mortality, and our own shortcomings.
They also hold this up as in contrast to what they call “depressive realism.” Scientific tests show that people who are clinically depressed are far more realistic about how things will turn out than non-depressed, so-called “normal” people. In A First-Rate Madness, Ghaemi is writing about leaders who can likely be diagnosed with some sort of brain disorder or psychological illness—people like Lincoln, who was probably depressed, and Churchill, who would likely today be diagnosed as bi-polar. Both seemed to be able to see danger clearly when everyone around them was far too optimistic. Lincoln knew that the tensions ripping the United States apart would not be ended if the Civil War ended in an inconclusive peace. Churchill saw the dangers of Hitler’s Germany long before his peers did. Ghaemi says that when times are normal, then “normal,” non-depressed people are the best leaders; their optimistic viewpoint tends to be exactly what’s needed. But in times of crisis, those with a more depressive personality are the best people for the job. They are more likely to have struggled with difficulties in life and aren’t as afraid of being considered crazy. They are more likely to view a bad situation realistically, whereas the tendency the rest of us have to be optimistic can seriously hamstring us in a crisis.[2]
I was prompted to think of all this as I read our NT scripture for today, Jesus’ predictions about the end of time. On the one hand he says, awful things are going to happen, but “When these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” On the other hand he warns: ”Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”
Jesus is advising us to be at once unrealistically optimistic and depressively realistic at the same time. We are unrealistically optimistic in the face of crisis because we put our trust not in ourselves, but in the Lord. But we’re depressively realistic because we look at the world the way that it is, without blinders.
We look at human nature honestly and we still talk about something that’s not popular in the world at large: we talk about human sin. We know that no one of us is completely righteous, and that any group of human beings together can be extremely risky business—including the church–because of the risk of multiplying our faults. We understand that civilization is built on a series of faulty assumptions, and that whatever good that civilization creates is always compromised by the flaws inherent in human nature. We try to suggest alternative ways to live with boldness but also with humility, because we know we’re as sinful and flawed as anyone else, and so we have no right to be arrogant, because our ideas may be as bad as anyone else’s. This is what Jesus means by “Be alert at all times”: Never assume that the world is okay as it is, that all it needs are a few tweaks here and there; or that you and I are okay, everything is fine about us the way we are. No one is righteous, no, not one, Paul reminds us depressingly. Unpleasant news, but things go badly when we lose sight of it.
On the other hand we’re unrealistically optimistic, because we believe that everything is in the hands of God, and God loves us. We believe that our judge is also our redeemer, and that the Son of Man who returns to judge us is Jesus Christ who forgives us, redeems us, saves us, and saves the world.
People argue that belief in a good and loving God is just completely unrealistic in a world like ours. But honestly, that argument is itself flawed. If there is no just and loving God, then what you’re saying is that correcting the problems of the world as it is rests entirely with human beings—but you yourself have just said that the world is a big mess! Well, who made it that way, if there’s no God? Us humans, obviously—and yet we expect humans to correct it? Talk about your unrealistic optimism. So we hope that God will fix the things we humans can’t seem to get right.
But there’s a difference between hope and faith, and here’s where I’d like to return to our friend who loved the Grand Canyon. For most of his life he hoped to see the Grand Canyon. He studied the Grand Canyon. He became for all intents an expert on the Grand Canyon. But his hope never crystallized. It gave him the strength to make it through the day, to deal with the problems of life, but that was it.
His hope turned to faith the day he quit his job and put out his thumb—the day he put his hope into action.
For many of us, our hope in God is the source of great inner resource. It helps us to get through times of personal difficulty and certainly gives us hope in the afterlife. We hope to see God; we study God; we can even over time become “expert” on God. But where hope becomes faith is when we recognize that the world remains in an ongoing crisis, and we take the risk of acting on the faith we believe in to touch the lives of others, to show others that our faith in a loving God can make a difference in their lives, too. It’s often risky.
It is, for instance, risky to be part of a church. After all, it is a group of people, and we know how people can be. No doubt we’ve all had times when we’ve found church disappointing and the people in it to be abrasive or petty. But likewise we’ve had those times when we found something in church that we couldn’t find somewhere else—a community that supports us when others turn us away, people who visit and take care of us when we’re sick and grieving, opportunities to serve others in real and concrete ways, spiritual strength for the journey of life.
It’s truly risky not only to join a church, but to step out in faith to actually do more than sit in the pew on Sunday—to contribute time, talents, or money—to take a Sunday school class, to become an usher, to meet homeless folks at Room in the Inn, to take on the daunting challenge of becoming an officer. It’s that double acknowledgement that we’re not as good as we could be, but we believe the church is the place where God challenges us to take life to the next level, and where God and God’s people will pick us up when we fall.
Is it unrealistically optimistic to believe that the good in an individual church outweighs the inevitable “bads” of a bunch of humans gathering together? Or is it stepping out boldly in faith to believe that, in spite of all our human foibles, God is here—God is among us—God joins us, and we join God, and all of us together become one with God in this place where we take the Body and blood of our Lord, and consume it and are consumed by it?
No. It’s faith in the good and loving God—the faith that will save us and the world.