Abstract
Against a backdrop of modernity’s hope in human progress and postmodernity’s confusion about hope, Pamela McCarroll seeks to ground hope at the foot of the cross, even though her definition of hope, intended to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, lacks direct reference to God. Within that tension, the particularity of her commitments and the openness to multiple forms of hoping is commendable. It seems that her theology of the cross impacts more the form (or cruciformity) of hope, an engagement with death, than necessarily its content. In this way, she offers narratives of hope that do not detour around the Good Fridays of peoples’ lives, but go right through them.
Her account of the literature on hope within cognate fields is focused and clarifies the diversity of perspectives about the nature, origin, process, and telos of hope. Whether hope is about being or act, self or relationship, time or eternity, McCarroll deftly works with seemingly conflicting views and makes way for paradox within hoping. She does not determine to resolve whether despair is the enemy of hope, its mother, or its dialectical partner. To do so could deny valid forms of hoping that have born fruit among faithful people in times of death and trauma.
McCarroll offers five metaphors for the hoping process, with narratives and reflections on each: fight, meaning, survival, lament, and surrender. She focuses on how people narrate their hope from a place of suffering, impending death, or post-trauma using one of these five metaphors. Taking on perhaps the most problematic metaphor first (fight), she narrates a journey of a 28-year-old single mother of three, who experienced an irreparable spinal cord injury from a motor vehicle accident. Her ensuing fight was the inner conflict between rage and depression, which was partially resolved through a covenant with God not to take her life, as well as a visitation dream in which she forgave the driver who caused the wreck. For McCarroll, fight is multilayered and dynamic rather than a rigid, predetermined posture. In this way, she opens the potential for the fight metaphor not to have to back a stage-4 cancer patient into a corner in which she must receive superfluous chemotherapy in order to maintain her identity as a fighter.
In reference to the metaphor of meaning, McCarroll illustrates a way of deftly maneuvering problematic forms of meaning-making in the face of death. She lifts up an account in which a mother continues to grieve the death of a beautiful 6-year-old boy, even as she is dedicated to embedding his (now completed) life with meaning through ways of honoring and remembering him. Meaning does not evade or defeat grief; rather, it gives one a way to go on living amidst grief, lament, and surrender.
The chapter on the metaphor of survival attends chiefly to trauma, which always separates life into before and after. McCarroll holds up the trauma of the crucified Jesus—a trauma that lives (and dies) at the heart of the Christian story. When one lives in Holy Saturday, hope as it was known has disappeared and must take a new form if there is to be any hope on the other side. Referring to the metaphor of lament, McCarroll insists that while lament seems to offer a movement away from hope, lament is described as a paradoxical reality within the psalter that often moves one through a process of hope and its absence. McCarroll names lament as having a cathartic effect, serving as a dynamic expression of faith, and protesting the chaos that the God of hope stands against.
Her treatment of surrender, a metaphor that is anathema to healthcare, is particularly compelling. A 35-year-old minister is diagnosed with ALS and lives his next years with a wife and child, knowing death will take him away from them. However, McCarroll is clear to name his surrender in relation to God, not to ALS. Thus, she created space in which one can fight the illness while at the same time surrendering to God.
McCarroll provides a vision for a hope, the last metaphor he addresses, that is low to the ground, lived, encountered. Hope is dependent neither upon the realization of the fullness of the hope, nor is it an evasion of the present. It is a rugged engagement with the messiness of reality, offering the possibility of life to those for whom death (in some form) threatens to take away their alive-ness. A real strength of her work is that hope, while being connected to transcendence, is also immanent. She is doing theology not for its own sake but as a resource to good and right living. Clergy and lay leaders can find much hope both in the form and content of her pastoral theology.