In the book Waiting at the Foot of the Cross, Rev. Dr. Pamela McCarroll writes: “We have been mastered by mastery and are blind to the severity of the crisis, despite the fact that the signs are everywhere around us.” The crisis she speaks of is “a consequence of living according to the false vision of the human as master.” This mindset has muddied the way we think about hope, which McCarroll says is found at the foot of the cross. That is, by giving up our desire to master the universe, to control each moment, to direct the future and then by placing ourselves at the foot of the cross, we open ourselves to God and the wonder that entails. It is a profound book; and the first of two. In the second, The End of Hope, McCarroll shares five stories of people facing death and trauma, and how they, too place themselves at the feet of the crucified Christ.
The Presbyterian Record asked Rev. Dr. Glynis Williams, associate secretary of International Ministries, to talk to McCarroll about the two books, and about hope. This is an excerpt of their conversation. You can see a video of their chat, edited by Andrew Faiz, on our website. An excerpt from The End of Hope follows this interview.
Glynis Williams: Pam, you have written two books, one based on your dissertation, Waiting at the Foot of the Cross: Toward a Theology of Hope for Today. And the second book, The End of Hope—The Beginning. Both are narratives of hope in the face of death and trauma.
Pamela McCarroll: They’re both focused on the subject of hope. But the first one, Waiting at the Foot of the Cross, is a much more macro vision, really critiquing the way that the West and North America has implicitly understood hope as kind of mastery over chance, mastery over making things happen the way we want them to happen and having goals that we reach and bring to completion. It’s a big picture and it’s trying to draw out some other ways of thinking about hope. Hope as waiting at the foot of the cross is the metaphor I use to get at some of the more biblical ways of thinking about hope and how that might intersect with our experience of living and as Canadians today.
But while I was working on my dissertation, I was also serving in spiritual care, in palliative care, in pediatric trauma. Here I was writing and thinking about these big picture ideas about hope when I was walking with people who were facing endings and facing their own death, facing just the utter devastation of their lives and their families’ lives. Yet sometimes, and there’s nothing inevitable about this, sometimes in the midst of these terrible, tragic situations there was this sense that hope was present in a kind of mysterious way that unhinged anybody’s expectations of what would be normal in that kind of context. In the case of a young boy dying tragically of a brain tumour, or sudden violent death, somehow there would be this sense of hope there. Or walking with people in palliative care who were wrestling through all of what their life and dying meant for them at that time.
I found I was thinking about these big ideas, but then here I was having these conversations, hearing people who were bearing witness to hoping quite something … something a lot bigger and more mysterious in some sense. But also in a very hidden way, in a way that I wouldn’t have anticipated. These two things going on at once. That’s what compelled me to write the second book. It challenges some of the things in the first book but it also really brings it down to earth in terms of the lived human experience and the kinds of things that we all face as we all die.
Williams: What does hope mean for you now?
McCarroll: It’s changed. In the second book there’s a chapter that tries to draw together themes from healthcare, literature, theology and from pastoral literature to look at what is it we’re talking about, because people have very different ideas about what it is we’re talking about when we talk about hope.
Williams: It was really interesting in reading the book how broad the areas of research are—the people who do research from across many disciplines beyond faith and church.
McCarroll: And nursing literature and psychology, causative psychology and occupational therapy literature. A lot of the health disciplines are really looking at seeing hope as that lynchpin that makes all the difference for well – being and care. Instead of sectioning them off and having theology here, and spiritual care here, and the health system, I wanted to get them talking to each other.
When we think about despair, there’s this closing off, this isolation—being disconnected from life, from relationship, from the larger cosmos, from God. And so the shift toward hope is when there are intimations of that opening up to something larger. And I use the language of a larger horizon, a larger horizon of meaning. My life has meaning in a larger sense than I would have known before—and discovering one’s self almost to be participating in this larger reality that was shut off from me before.
Williams: All of your examples are coming in some ways out of a healthcare context of people facing something that happens in their body and in their life. And those are very isolating experiences. The only person who walks those journeys is the individual. Still there are intimations of hope.
McCarroll: Hope is in these things … like God. We always point toward God. We can never fully grasp what it is, the fullness of God and hope. There is this quality about hope that always transcends however we want to talk about it and it jumps away the minute we try to grab hold of it.
At the same time, it’s deeply important, I think, for us to be mindful of all the ways in our life where hope may be present. I am thinking of one of the stories in the second book. It’s the story of the young boy dying and reflecting on hope as meaning. … It was a very, very tragic story. I’m not trying to pretty things up. That’s part of the problem; sometimes Christians have been noted for trying to make things nice and happy. The cross really invites us to go to those dark places and trust that actually in some way, hidden hope at least can be found there and touched there. And so in the case of this boy, I worked a lot with the mother through that time. And for her, I just kept seeing it. She was wrestling meaning out of this.
Williams: What strikes me is that in another part of theological literature we’re talking a lot about the end of empire. And I think where mastery comes from is from this sense of control and empire which we live in. We’re having a hard time letting go of that but there’s a whole part of our church that’s working on that. But here you are working in these circumstances with real people.
McCarroll: There are multiple ways, I think. We tend to think of hope as only future – focused and as goal oriented and a lot of even pastoral theologians and positive psychologists—that’s how they talk about it. And what this person helped me see is there are also all sorts of other ways to recognize hope—at least hope’s possibility. So like the emphasis on meaning; a life lived as meaningful points to hope. Even survival, which is one of the other metaphors I work with, is just surviving, just breathing, the idea that breath itself speaks of life’s possibility.
So this idea that people who are facing death are facing the end of that kind of hope—they can’t master anything. The movement is not toward a hope as mastery, it has to be something else. And this is really what struck me when I was working on my dissertation or working with people. I can not say because someone is reaching the end of life, even if they have faith in God and they believe they’re going to be resurrected and living in fullness with God, the reality is hope as mastery isn’t what’s functioning there. It’s not about an end goal or a future that they are achieving.
Williams: Yeah. That’s a faith comment of the future. But you’re saying it’s something different that they’re discovering.
McCarroll: That’s right—and what they’re living and how hope is present. Actually, sometimes they come to the end … lots of people come to the end of their ability to do or to make the world change or make things how they want them to be. And that transition is the key thing. If we resist that, hope just goes away, which is ironic because the way often hope is thought of is this idea of mastering the future. But when people are able to walk through that and consent to that, somehow hope emerges with all sorts of different guises.
If hope is going to be present in that context, when people know they’re moving toward death for example, it can’t be the kind of hope that is all about mastery and taking control of one’s life. It’s a totally different kind of thing. In fact, I would say that kind of mastery leads to a great suffering or that kind of hope leads to great suffering. So it’s entrusting one’s self to something much bigger. When people have walked this journey and I’ve been privileged to walk with them, the shift where they are prepared to surrender some self, let it go, trust, and entrust themselves to something much bigger, you can start to see beauty in the world again. Start to see others in the world.
Williams: The End of Hope—The Beginning, has a subtitle which is, Narratives of Hope in the Face of Death and Trauma.
McCarroll: I think we too easily want to have cookie – cutter ways of getting at things. We want to say this is what it is. The complexity of life, and the differences that we live, and how all of those get lived out, invite us, challenge us to be more open and to pay attention. The desire to have cookie – cutter ways is a desire for mastery over life.
