I was thinking of love and hope today, both are clichés, and writers are taught to hate clichés.The irony is we writers also know that clichés become clichés for a good reason – they are almost always true.
Clichés are words and phrases that are used so often they become less effective, and tend to be dismissed and ignored. Clichés are considered bad writing, words and ideas so common they have no impact. From the first, writers and journalists are taught never to use cliches.
Love and hope are cliches.
The very idea of love and hope are invoked so frequently and so inappropriately and inaccurately that they are numbing, they have little meaning or impact in our every day lives. They put us to sleep, they are neither newsworthy or addictive, as is apparent from the news at any given time on any given day.
You will not find a single mention of hope or love in our political campaigns, on our daily newscasts or the thousands of messages beamed into our tablet and smart phones every day. Love and hope are considered by journalists and politicians and pundits and the people in power to be metaphors for weakness, naiveté and irrelevance.
The story of tragedy is also a cliche, it is always the story of love, hope and community. Tragedy is the one time these cliches are recognized and invoked and celebrated.
The good news from tragedy is that we never love more, help more, empathize more. When we see the worst of us, we also see the best of us. That is the great story of the human being.
When there is tragedy, we come running, we open our hearts, our wallets, our faith. We worship the idea of the First Responder, the brave souls who rush into burning buildings and face bombs and bullets to rescue us. People open their homes to one another, share their food, bind one another’s wounds. In tragedy, we are all brothers and sisters. In normalcy, we recede and return to our other selves.
We are at our best in tragedy and catastrophe.
The irony of being human is that it takes tragedy to make us truly human. We are the only living thing that rescues and seeks out community. But being at our best does not often see to be our natural state, just look at our political campaigns. When it is our natural state, in the midst of tragedy or conflict, great men and women appear to rise up and inspire us. Sometimes.
The people running the corporate media understand that fear and anger are addictive, and thus lucrative. They make a lot of money from fear and anger, the renegade siblings of love and hope.
Love and hope are not. Stories of love and hope are not considered serious news, and do not ever make the news. We don’t take them seriously, the people who speak of them are considered weak.
The people who preach love and hope are found on the edges of society and culture and news, not ever in the center. They are not the people who give interviews in Washington, or appear on panels to explain the world to the rest of us in 20-second sound bites.
We profess to admire Gandhi and King and Jesus and Merton and the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa and Mandela and Pope Francis, but since they so often speak of love and hope and so rarely embrace anger and judgement, we don’t really believe them or pay much attention to what they say. Or we use their names and spirits to gain more power and wealth.
Their values are rarely reflected in our daily lives, even as they are evoked more than ever.
We hide behind them all the time, but we don’t do what they did or what they urged us to do.
That is what the moral philosopher Hannah Arendt means when she says criminals force us to contemplate the meaning of evil, but only hypocrites are rotten to the core. Again and again, we are drawn to hypocrites like moths to flame because they never speak of love and hope, cliches that have become less and less effective.
The demagogue is a vampire, he feeds on the fear and anger that is so integral a part of the human condition. Only the strong and the determined can walk away from it. Only, I think, the truly chosen.
In my life, love and hope have become central tenets of my faith, even as I sometimes forget them or fail to practice them. I take them very seriously, they are my real truth. They keep me grounded and clear, they give me strength when the ugliest and most broken part of human beings is revealed to us. They have saved my life.
Perhaps one day fear and anger will become a cliché, but as long as men are running so much of the world, fear and anger still shape our lives. Hope and love are orphan children, the lurk in the background, they peek out of the bushes, they are never invited to those green rooms for croissant and coffee.
I have a different experience of love and hope, they are not clichés to me, and both rescued me, and while they both may be clichés, their power and meaning are very real to me, and very intense and dramatic. They are not greeting cards for me, or sappy ads on television, or the preaching of dead spiritual gurus, they have been my own hope and salvation. Selfishly, they have brought me what I need and what I want, they have brought to me to life.
The thing about love, for me, is this. When I love, I become better. I become more empathetic and compassionate, I am compelled to be less selfish and angry, I am called to learn and listen and grow and change. When you love someone or something, you wish to keep it, even when it means understanding yourself in a new and different way.
When we love, we become better than we were, and when we become better than we were, then everything we see and touch becomes better as well. Love and hope are not selfless, they are quite selfish. They bring us the life we want and sometimes, deserve.
The thing about hope is that is the most powerful tool in the human consciousness for living lives that matter, that are filled with meaning and purpose. When I was alone, I hoped for someone who could share my life. When I took a bad photo, I hoped I could take a better one. When my first book was rejected, I hoped I could write a good one. When my marriage of 35 years collapsed, I hoped I could find one that worked for me. When I was broken, I hoped to heal. When I was angry, I hoped for peace of mind. When I was afraid, I hoped for change. When I despaired for my work, I hope to find a way to keep doing it.
I do not have everything I want, or everything I need, but what I hoped for, I found. Love. Creativity. Meaning. Connection. Hope works. So does love. Hope is the engine that brings me forward, that gives me strength.
I was afraid of love and hope once, I never wrote of either. I am not afraid of hope and love, I am not ashamed of those cliches.
Today, another onslaught of horrific news. It is hope that brings me to the idea of a better world, where love makes us better and hope heals. It sounds like a cliché even when I write, and writers are not supposed to like clichés.
But we are also supposed to be authentic and tell the truth, and hope and love is my truth.