Hope is the Thing With Feathers -- A 14th Whoniversary Retrospective
I am not a naturally hopeful person. I don't know if I was when I was really young and life just sort of stamped it out of me or if I naturally tend a bit more to the nihilistic view of life on Earth, but... Hope has always seemed to be in short supply.
I hear you now though. Luna, you say. You have a Master of Divinity and you study Christian Scripture. Hope is a part of that, right? That's true, but hope is as complicated a concept and reality as faith and justice are. There are some days when I find I could not even explain the concept of hope to a person if they asked me; that's how foreign of an idea it can be at certain points of life. I remember as a kid and an adolescent listening to people talk about what "gave [them] hope" and I sat there wondering, "What does that feel like?" Does it feel like inspiration -- a transient feeling that comes into the soul at a beautiful scenic view? I once heard it described as a "peaceful faith," but I am from a generation of people that has a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea of "faith." This is mainly due to the breakdown of language wherein people say one word while meaning something quite different. Most people say "faith" when they mean "general belief."
Side bar: this is a very important distinction, though hard to articulate. The best explanation I ever heard was in the Kevin Smith film "Dogma," which is one of my favorite theology based films of all time. (Seriously. I'm not being ironic or anything there. Despite the bad language and sexual humor, there is some deep theological insight and doctrinal questions being thrown out into the popular media within that film. Watch it with an open mind, and I genuinely think you'll walk away with your world view changed.) Within the context of Dogma, the 13th disciple Rufus (played by Chris Rock) speaks with the heroine Bethany about the difference between "belief" and an "idea." Rufus claims that Jesus once said that the worst thing humankind had done was take a great idea and build a belief structure out of it. Beliefs can't change; people will kill each other and die for a belief. But an idea develops and reshapes with questioning; there are parameters and borders set for how far an idea can go before it no longer falls within its initial theology, but those borders are truly far apart. At the end of the film, Bethany (who was raised Catholic, but was an agnostic at the film's beginning) is asked by Rufus, "Now that you've seen her [God], do you believe?" Bethany responds back, "No. But I've got a really good *idea.*" In similar language, faith is not a set of beliefs; faith is made up of ideas -- theologies and worldviews that are solid in foundation, but can be built upward and laterally in various ways without compromising the integrity of that foundation. To my mind, if one can wrap their head around the idea of "faith" as "ideas" instead of beliefs, the concept of a "peaceful faith" begins to take shape though it still somewhat amorphous to my mind.
I guess what always threw me in my youth was that when people spoke of "hope," they always seemed to mean something different than the person next to them. There was no uniform definition, which meant that I could never describe any positive trajectories or ideas for my life as "hopeful." The word meant virtually nothing to me. At more pessimistic stages of my existence, I even stated in my personal writings that "hopes" were synonymous with "wishes." Did it matter if I used one word or the other? Things were just as likely to happen from my wishing for them as they did my fervently hoping for it. That's not to say that I spent my adolescence in a perpetual state of doom and gloom. I had my down moments, but I had my triumphant ones as well -- I worked hard both physically and mentally and therefore did well both academically and in extracurricular activities. However, if you had asked me back in 2004-2005 during my senior year of high school about my "hopes and dreams," I would have responded that I had no place in my life for "hope." I had worked hard and therefore I had plans that I believed I would achieve based on my merit. Transient feelings such as "hope" had no place in my worldview. Hope was a word my dad preached from the pulpit on Sunday that was embraced by people who had no other way of getting what they wanted than to pray for it and "hope" that God deemed them worthy of receiving aid or favor. Goodness, was I full of myself at 17!
That belief in "merit-based reward" and "hope is for those who can't help themselves" would be completely discarded by the end of senior year, and the hazards of having nothing to replace that belief system would be felt by me until about halfway through sophomore year of college. But let's not jump ahead because today's reflection isn't going to go quite that far into the story. Today's story will end on 17 March, 2006, which was halfway through the spring semester of my freshman year of college. The reason I'm bringing up senior year of high school, however, is because what led to my rediscovery of hope starts way back in November of 2004. One cannot understand the beauty of hope unless one has trudged through what writer John Bunyan termed "The Slough of Despond."
For long-term readers of my blog, this story will be pretty familiar. I have shared my #newtowho experience before: once during a 30 Days of Me meme here on LJ back in 2012 and again on Tumblr just before DW's 50th Anniversary celebration in 2013. However, in both of those write ups, I focused on the immediate situation Doctor Who addressed for me, but I glanced over the ideological, theological, and existential quandaries that played into the dire immediate situation I was living through when my dad introduced this beautiful show to me. So, you may be asking, in the words of the wonderful character of Cordelia Chase, "What is your childhood trauma?!"
To be honest, up until August of 2004, I did not really have one. I was never an overly optimistic person, and I was a loner, but I was not a depressive person and considering the extremely rural area of Virginia that I grew up in, I was pretty content. I was close to my family, and I was (as stated before) a good student and not overly concerned about being refused from universities. In fact, in October of 2003, I had attended the National Young Leaders Conference in Washington, DC (a huge honor, apparently), and in June-July of 2004, I had gone to England and France with People to People Student Ambassadors. This latter one was a huge deal for me because I had first needed to have someone nominate me to go and then I had to get numerous recommendations from teachers and friends, go through an interview process, and then I had to raise my own money for the trip. But I had succeeded in all of these things, and I was in the run for valedictorian for my high school class, I was building up a decent following for my stories in the Harry Potter and the Alias fandoms. (Never read those early stories of mine. In retrospect, they are terrible. Thank goodness I eventually improved. *shudders*) I mean, I had my teenage drama (same as anyone), but I had a solid immediate family and church family, and most of my friendships spanned at least a decade, if not more. Despite all this, however, I still was not what I would have termed "hopeful." I was a terrible worry-wort and have spent most of my life waiting for the other shoe to drop whenever things appear to be going well. No matter how much I study, I feel like I haven't learned anything and I know that, even now, if I went and pursued a Ph.D or D. Min, I would not feel like an expert in my field of study after completing my program. Plato once wrote that Socrates stated that "the un-examined life is not worth living," but (as I once argued in a college English paper), the overly-examined life doesn't get lived at all. Before the age of 17, I would have equated hopefulness with busy-ness because if I wasn't running myself ragged then the dreams would fade from sight. I was working hard for a good future, expecting everything to go horribly wrong.
And then it did. And all at once, too. Man, I hate it when I'm right...
First, we moved. August 19, 2004. Just three weeks before my senior year of high school was due to start. Unlike the rest of my family, I stayed behind and lived with what had been my near life-long next door neighbors (and some of my family's closest friends.) And it was all downhill from there. On moving day, I kept seeming to be in everybody's way, no matter where I went. I finally did a Rogers & Hammerstein's "Cinderella" and sat "in my own little corner, all alone in my own little chair." Only in this case, "the chair" was the floor and the "little corner" was a corner of my (former) closet. As the year progressed, it was bad news upon bad news. The friendships I had stayed behind to nurture fell apart one by one, and in retrospect, it was as much my fault as it was theirs. I resented them for making me want to stay behind and I resented my parents for choosing God and God's church over me (my dad had been talking about moving us for two years and I had always been very outspoken against it). Despite being one of the top students in my class, I was rejected from all the schools I applied to, save one, and it left me not wanting to go to college at all but feeling like I should go because I had no real technical skills to fall back on. And then I lost out on valedictorian to one of my close friends by .001 point. Within six months, my life went from meticulously planned out merit-based, high brow academic future to "What is the point of any of this?" As my parents' hopes were coming to fruition, my plans were going down in flames.
Have you ever seen a naturally pessimistic person try to be optimistic, especially when things are going terribly? It is so obvious of a lie that it could be described as a farce. If it was a cosmological farce, then I really hope God was laughing at the show because I was not. I had always been a card-carrying pessimist/cynic. Have you looked at the byline of my LJ page? "The Inner Musings of a Lifetime Pessimist." This is actually a play on the earliest blogs I wrote back in my senior year of high school, but they were actually blog emails I sent to my closest friends during study hall about whatever strange topic was occupying my mind at the time. At first, they were just writing exercises to see how far down the rabbit hole I could take a downer line of thought and how could I put a comedic spin on life events that we normally don't find funny. As time went on, however, I found these pieces I was writing led my brain to ask questions that I wasn't sure I would want answered. It's like Samwise says to Frodo in Return of the King about the old stories, "the ones you didn't want to know the ending to, because how could the ending be good?" I was asking questions about my future that, because the concept of hope was so elusive to me, didn't seem like they would lead to good answers. These email blogs were called "The Inner Musings of a Teenage Pessimist," but they went from being fun satire to my daily reality.
University came, and the problem was more of the same. I declared my major at the beginning of the year to study what had been one of my favorite hobbies in high school -- theatre -- and was told by my acting professor that I should look into another profession. "You're an okay talent, but others here are far more polished and willing to go the extra mile,and you don't have the looks to offset your average talents." That is verbatim what he said to me at the end of Acting 201. (Teachers, remember what criticism you give your students. Cos I can guarantee you they will remember, even almost 15 years later.) Once again, my best was not good enough. Once again, I had unsteady friendships and was forced to choose constantly between creating new friendships (which didn't seem worth the effort) and being with my family when I could. Once again, I was going through the daily motions of study without caring about what was going to happen afterward. For that first year of college, I was only there because I could not think of anything else to do. But what had initially been me making the most of a bad situation quickly spiraled downward. By the end of the fall semester, I was seriously doubting that I was cut out for higher education anymore than I had been cut out for anything resembling technical skills. My grades were decent, but (as stated before) on the subject I had thought was to be the key to the rest of my life, I was deemed unfit even at the entry level. And I didn't care about the rest of it. I was good at history and English, but I didn't want to be a teacher, and did not see what else I could do with those degrees. My roommate situation had gotten terrible, and I remember calling my mom during finals week and begging her to not make me have to come back to university after winter break. I was so miserable that, if it wasn't for the money and student loans the family had taken out to send me there, she probably would have let me drop out.
Life had hit rock bottom. My pessimism was almost at nihilism by the time March of 2006 rolled around. I had tried everything to give myself some optimistic feeling that my dad called "hope." I recited Bible verses to myself (I grew up doing Bible Drill and memorizing whole plays/musicals, so I had quite a few Scriptures in my repertoire), I studied the lives of saints and martyrs. I even tried praying for motivation and positive thoughts. Nothing seemed to be working. I felt like I was screaming out into Nietzsche's Void and being disappointed when it didn't answer back. The words of God, the Prophets, Jesus, and the early Church were all failing me. The Scriptures felt like platitudes repeated so often that they were meaningless; the only words that resonated with me were those of Quoheleth ("The Book of Ecclesiastes.") As I write this I find myself smiling because I can see 18 year old me banging her head against the keyboard of her Compaq desktop computer (not a laptop, but a proper desktop that I often fantasized would be my weapon of choice if I wanted to kill a passerby through a random act of defenestration) as she laments that "vanity, vanity, all is vanity!" I mean, really. I was quite dramatic back then and I'm pretty sure I shouldn't have listened to my acting professor. But, hindsight is 20/20 and all that jazz...
And all of these disappointments and fears/recognized realities of life's pointlessness led to eating problems, a tendency to sleep 20+ hours a day, and serious suicidal ideation. I was tired. I was hopeless. I lacked a purpose. And, worst of all, I was alone.
And that brings us to 17 March, 2006. St. Patrick's Day (though I didn't notice that at the time), and the Friday at the end of my Spring Break. I won't go into the crazy circumstances of that night, but I will state that, strange as it may sound, I believe God had a hand in my introduction to Doctor Who on that fateful night. And the reason I think that is because it was pure chance that I came in on a moment that made me take notice. I wasn't in the room at the beginning of the episode (Dad was watching the premiere of the reboot on Sci-Fi in his room), and I had watched countless shows with Dad from beginning to end that were fun but didn't change my world in a profound way. Sci-Fi showed the first two episodes together that night and I came in about halfway through the first episode, entitled "Rose." By the time the first episode ended, I assumed that I would find the show fun, but I didn't think much of it. I related to Rose Tyler a bit -- a girl who seems to be living her life with no direction and little to no opportunities to change the course her life seems predestined to take. Rose Tyler's life looked as suffocating as mine felt. What shocked me was that, by the time we got the end of the second episode, entitled "The End of the World," I was realizing something I don't think many other people do. I related to Rose Tyler in some ways, but at the heart and soul of who I was, I related to the Doctor. At the end of the second episode, he stands with Rose on a London street in 2005 after they had just watched the Earth burn a billion years in the future, and he revealed that he was alone. Not just traveling alone because he chose to be, but he traveled alone because he was the only one left. The rest of his race had died in a war that his people had lost.
To be honest, the loneliness is something that still defines me as a person. I don't know that I've ever *not* felt alone, even when sitting with my closest friends. I'm not the last of my kind like the Doctor believed him/her self to be, but the moment the Ninth Doctor uttered the words of "I'm left traveling on my own cos there's no one else," I felt in my very bones that I understood him. I've studied a lot of characters over the years -- they're as real to me as breathing people -- but the Doctor was the first (and so far only) character whose voice speaks to me as clearly as those I know in real life. I don't have to wonder what the Doctor would do in a given situation because I *know* what they would do. It may be a strange way for God to speak to a person, but God knows what methods I'm most likely to listen to, and a story has always been the way to get my attention. Stories are my first and greatest love. The Doctor is often referred to throughout the course of the series as a God figure and numerous essays have been written analyzing this particular interpretation of the character's self image. And, in those moments of that evening in 2006, God told me through an unforgettable story that God knew and understood both my loneliness and my hopelessness. At the end of the Doctor's speech about being "The Last of the Time Lords," his new friend Rose looks at him, is silent for a moment and then softly responds, "There's me." God heard my hopeless calls into Nietzsche's Void and did what God does best: created. Out of the seeming void came new stories to tell, new worlds to explore, new (internet) friends to make, new subjects to be introduced to that made academics fun again, and new futures to plan. What I discovered that night, and in the ensuing Friday nights for the next 11 weeks (DW series 1 was 13 episodes), was that the future was just another word for hope. As the years went by and I ended up watching every episode of DW that still exists and reading the scripts for the episodes that have been lost, I realized that the message I took from DW that night is the same message the show had been spreading for 43 years before that. The presence of pain and suffering does not negate the presence of hope. In fact, as the Third Doctor stated, "Where there's life, there's hope." When the Doctor meets someone for the first time, they are usually not setting out to save the world. Most of them are going through their day to day lives -- e.g. Tegan is about to start her first day on the job as an airline stewardess, Sarah Jane is researching a story undercover at UNIT, Jo is a bumbling laboratory assistant to the Doctor who got the job due to nepotism, Rose Tyler was helping to close up the shop she was working in -- and find themselves putting the extra in extraordinary. The hope the stories offer to generations of viewers is not based in the unlikely extraordinary events that unfold for these characters, but in the everyday strength that we can find in ourselves through day to day life.
UGH. I feel like I am not accurately describing what I mean in this post AT ALL. But it seems important to articulate that I don't think any other show could have done for me what this one did at that point in time. The previously familiar stories that had offered me comfort in previous years had failed to do that during the 2 year period described. I don't know if any Doctor aside from the Ninth Doctor would have even had the same effect. He was exactly the character I needed in the exact story I needed at the exact right time. And others may think it silly that a show with insane plots (including farting aliens at one point) and science that isn't even science can speak to me on such a theological and philosophical level. How can a show with so much death, destruction, war, and misery bring me such hope? Well, I think that is best answered by the Doctor him/her self. As the Eleventh Doctor once wisely stated, "The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant." You can't know hope without despair; you can't recognize the feeling of hope without having first viewed the world through a lens that lacks hope. I will never travel through the universe in a spaceship that is bigger on the inside (at least, not outside of my imagination), but I can travel through day to day life, making the seemingly ordinary into something extra-ordinary. And whenever I'm alone to the very depths of my soul, I still hear God whisper as clearly as I did 14 years ago, "There's me," too.