“[Hope] transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope...is not the same as joy that things are going well…but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”
—Vaclav Havel
My apartment looks out on the Mississippi River, where I watch barges travel back and forth each morning. But on nights when I wake up after midnight, scared and uncertain about what the months and years ahead will hold, I find my mind drifting from river barges back to my adopted hometown of Baltimore, of oceans and sailing ships.
Usually I think of anchors as something to keep us in place, to hold us steady as the world around us moves. But there’s at least one other use for an anchor. Imagine an old sailing ship: on a big, 150-foot schooner, there aren’t any motors or oars on the boat itself. The ship is designed to work with the wind; when you’re out in the open sea with the wind at your back, it cuts through the waves fast and straight.
But how does the ship get out of port? What do you do when the wind isn’t at your back, but coming straight at your face? Maybe you’re stuck, no wind to be had at all.
There’s at least one other way to use an anchor, called warping. The crew of a becalmed ship would take a kedge anchor and put it in a rowboat. A crew rowed it as far as they could out in front of the ship, and dropped the anchor. The crew aboard the ship hauled on the anchor—not bringing it up, but bringing the ship slowly overtop of the anchor. Then they pulled the anchor up, put it back on the rowboat, and repeated the process. It’s not fast, and it takes an enormous amount of work from many people working together, but in this way even the largest sailing ship can move forward without any wind.
I think of an anchor as a kind of motivation when the wind is against us. Hope doesn’t require that the wind be at our backs; it’s not moored to a certain understanding of the experienced world. Hope is challenging, if not impossible, to grasp alone. Hope, in this sense, is a discipline to anchor myself to something that I can’t quite grasp yet, but I trust is there—and a discipline to pull towards that goal together, one day at a time.
Prayer
God of all that is spoken and all held too close to be said aloud, help us to hold on to hope. When we find ourselves becalmed, remind us to drop an anchor over the horizon; pull along with us as we haul toward a more hopeful horizon.