The worst temptation, and that to which many monks succumb early in their lives, and by which they remain defeated, is simply to give up asking and seeking. To leave everything to the superiors in this life and to God in the next – a hope which may in fact be nothing but a veiled despair, a refusal to live. And it is not Christian to despair of the present, merely putting off hope into the future. There is also a very essential hope that belongs in the present, and is based on the nearness of the hidden God, and of His Spirit, in the present. What future can make sense without this present hope?
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1965). (Image Books edition, 1968, page 184)
Hope in the present! What a strange yet enticing concept. When we think of hope, we think inevitably about the future. When we live on the basis of hope too much, we begin to see that “hope is a beggar.” It is so much better than outright despair, but only a wan shadow of what we really want. To live on hope too much is to invite despair.
“Hope in the present.” One might water this down by thinking Merton simply meant hope in the very near future, but I don’t think that’s what he’s about. I think it has to do with a dimension of reality that is here now, but may not be clearly manifest to us, and perhaps in our looking at it that way, it does become clearer. Constantly we are told in our culture to “focus on the present”: take Eckhardt Tolle, for example. But perhaps what Merton is telling us here is not some ascetic cutting away of past and future to some infinitely narrow point called “the present.” What he promises here is something more rich and strange.