Romans 15:24

One of the most agonizing problems within our human experience is that few, if any, of us live to see our fondest hopes fulfilled. The hopes of our childhood and the promises of our mature years are unfinished symphonies. In a famous painting, George Frederic Watts portrays Hope as a tranquil figure who, seated atop our planet, her head sadly bowed, plucks a single unbroken harpstring. Is there any one of us who has not faced the agony of blasted hopes and shattered dreams?

In Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians we find a potent illustration of this vexing problem of disappointed hopes: “Whensoever I take my journey into Spain, I will come to you.” One of his ardent hopes was to travel to Spain where, at the edge of the then known world, he might further proclaim the Christian gospel. On his return he wished to have personal fellowship with that valiant group of Roman Christians. The more he anticipated this privilege, the more his heart quickened with joy. His preparations now centered in carrying the gospel to the capital city of Rome and to Spain at the distant fringe of the empire.

What a glowing hope stirred within Paul’s heart! But he never got to Rome according to the pattern of his hopes. Because of his daring faith in Jesus Christ, he was indeed taken there but as a prisoner and was held captive in a little prison cell. Nor did he ever walk the dusty roads of Spain, nor look upon its curvacious slopes, nor watch its busy coastal life. He was put to death, we presume, as a martyr for Christ in Rome. Paul’s life is a tragic story of a shattered dream.

Life mirrors many similar experiences. Who has not set out toward some distant Spain, some momentous goal, or some glorious realization, only to learn at last that he must settle for much less? We never walk as free men through the streets of our Rome; instead, circumstances decree that we live within little confining cells. Written across our lives is a fatal flaw and within history runs an irrational and unpredictable vein. Like Abraham, we too sojourn in the land of promise, but so often we do not become “heirs with him of the same promise.” Always our reach exceeds our grasp.

After struggling for years to achieve independence, Mahatma Gandhi witnessed a bloody religious war between the Hindus and the Moslems, and the subsequent division of India and Pakistan shattered his heart’s desire for a united nation. Woodrow Wilson died before realizing the fulfillment of his consuming vision of a League of Nations. Many Negro slaves in America, having longed passionately for freedom, died before emancipation. After praying in the garden of Gethsemane that the cup might pass, Jesus, nonetheless, drank to the last bitter dregs. And the Apostle Paul repeatedly and fervently prayed that the “thorn” might be removed from his flesh, but the pain and annoyance continued to the end of his days. Shattered dreams are a hallmark of our mortal life.

Before we determine how to live in a world where our highest hopes are not satisfied, we must ask, What does one do under such circumstances?

One possible reaction is to distill all of our frustrations into a core of bitterness and resentment. The person who pursues this path is likely to develop a callous attitude, a cold heart, and a bitter hatred toward God, toward those with whom he lives, and toward himself. Because he cannot corner God or life, he releases his pent-up vindictiveness in hostility toward other people. He may be extremely cruel to his mate and inhuman to his children. In short, meanness becomes his dominating characteristic. He loves no one and requires love from no one. He trusts no one and does not expect others to trust him. He finds fault in everything and everybody, and he continually complains.

Such a reaction poisons the soul and scars the personality, always harming the person who harbors this feeling more than anyone else. Medical science reveals that such physical ailments as arthritis, gastric ulcer, and asthma have on occasion been encouraged by bitter resentments. Psychosomatic medicine, dealing with bodily sicknesses which come from mental illnesses, shows how deep resentment may result in physical deterioration.

Another common reaction by persons experiencing the blighting of hope is to withdraw completely into themselves and to become absolute introverts. No one is permitted to enter into their lives and they refuse to enter into the lives of others. Such persons give up the struggle of life, lose their zest for living, and attempt to escape by lifting their minds to a transcendent realm of cold indifference. Detachment is the word which best describes them. Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to experience sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist. Their eyes do not see the beauties of nature, their ears are insensitive to the majestic sounds of great music, and their hands are even unresponsive to the touch of a charming little baby. Nothing of the aliveness of life is left in them; only the dull motion of bare existence. Disappointed hopes lead them to a crippling cynicism such as Omar Khayyám described:

This reaction is based on an attempt to escape from life. Psychiatrists say that when individuals attempt to escape from reality their personalities become thinner and thinner until finally they split. This is one of the causal sources of the schizophrenic personality.

A third way by which persons respond to disappointments in life is to adopt a fatalistic philosophy stipulating that whatever happens must happen and that all events are determined by necessity. Fatalism implies that everything is foreordained and inescapable. People who subscribe to this philosophy succumb to an absolute resignation to that which they consider to be their fate and think of themselves as being little more than helpless orphans cast into the terrifying immensities of space. Because they believe that man has no freedom, they seek neither to deliberate nor to make decisions, but rather they wait passively for external forces to decide for them. They never actively seek to change their circumstances, for they believe that all circumstances, as in the Greek tragedies, are controlled by irresistible and foreordained forces. Some fatalists are very religious people who think of God as the determiner and controller of destiny. This view is expressed in a verse of one of our Christian hymns:

Fatalists, believing that freedom is a myth, surrender to a paralyzing determinism which concludes that we are

and that we need not trouble about the future, for

To sink in the quicksands of fatalism is both intellectually and psychologically stifling. Because freedom is a part of the essence of man, the fatalist, by denying freedom, becomes a puppet, not a person. He is, of course, right in his conviction that there is no absolute freedom and that freedom always operates within the context of predestined structure. Common experience teaches that a man is free to go north from Atlanta to Washington or south from Atlanta to Miami, but not north to Miami nor south to Washington. Freedom is always within the framework of destiny. But there is freedom. We are both free and destined. Freedom is the act of deliberating, deciding, and responding within our destined nature. Even though destiny may prevent our going to some attractive Spain, we do have the capacity to accept such a disappointment, to respond to it, and to do something about the disappointment itself. But fatalism stymies the individual, leaving him helplessly inadequate for life.

Fatalism, furthermore, is based on an appalling conception of God, for everything, whether good or evil, is considered to represent the will of God. A healthy religion rises above the idea that God wills evil. Although God permits evil in order to preserve the freedom of man, he does not cause evil. That which is willed is intended, and the thought that God intends for a child to be born blind or for a man to suffer the ravages of insanity is sheer heresy that pictures God as a devil rather than as a loving Father. The embracing of fatalism is as tragic and dangerous a way to meet the problem of unfulfilled dreams as are bitterness and withdrawal.

What, then, is the answer? The answer lies in our willing acceptance of unwanted and unfortunate circumstances even as we still cling to a radiant hope, our acceptance of finite disappointment even as we adhere to infinite hope. This is not the grim, bitter acceptance of the fatalist, but the achievement found in Jeremiah’s words, “This is a grief, and I must bear it.”

You must honestly confront your shattered dream. To follow the escapist method of attempting to put the disappointment out of your mind will lead to a psychologically injurious repression. Place your failure at the forefront of your mind and stare daringly at it. Ask yourself, “How may I transform this liability into an asset? How may I, confined in some narrow Roman cell and unable to reach life’s Spain, transmute this dungeon of shame into a haven of redemptive suffering?” Almost anything that happens to us may be woven into the purposes of God. It may lengthen our cords of sympathy. It may break our self-centered pride. The cross, which was willed by wicked men, was woven by God into the tapestry of world redemption.

Many of the world’s most influential personalities have exchanged their thorns for crowns. Charles Darwin, suffering from a recurrent physical illness; Robert Louis Stevenson, plagued with tuberculosis; and Helen Keller, inflicted with blindness and deafness, responded not with bitterness or fatalism, but rather by the exercise of a dynamic will transformed negative circumstances into positive assets. Writes the biographer of George Frederick Handel:

His health and his fortunes had reached the lowest ebb. His right side had become paralyzed, and his money was all gone. His creditors seized him and threatened him with imprisonment. For a brief time he was tempted to give up the fight—but then he rebounded again to compose the greatest of his inspirations, the epic Messiah.

The “Hallelujah Chorus” was born, not in a sequestered villa in Spain, but in a narrow, undesirable cell.

How familiar is the experience of longing for Spain and settling for a Roman prison, and how less familiar the transforming of the broken remains of a disappointed expectation into opportunities to serve God’s purpose! Yet powerful living always involves such victories over one’s own soul and one’s situation.

We Negroes have long dreamed of freedom, but still we are confined in an oppressive prison of segregation and discrimination. Must we respond with bitterness and cynicism? Certainly not, for this will destroy and poison our personalities. Must we, by concluding that segregation is within the will of God, resign ourselves to oppression? Of course not, for this blasphemously attributes to God that which is of the devil. To cooperate passively with an unjust system makes the oppressed as evil as the oppressor. Our most fruitful course is to stand firm with courageous determination, move forward nonviolently amid obstacles and setbacks, accept disappointments, and cling to hope. Our determined refusal not to be stopped will eventually open the door of fulfillment. While still in the prison of segregation, we must ask, “How may we turn this liability into an asset?” By recognizing the necessity of suffering in a righteous cause, we may possibly achieve our humanity’s full stature. To guard ourselves from bitterness, we need the vision to see in this generation’s ordeals the opportunity to transfigure both ourselves and American society. Our present suffering and our nonviolent struggle to be free may well offer to Western civilization the kind of spiritual dynamic so desperately needed for survival.

Some of us, of course, will die without having received the realization of freedom, but we must continue to sail on our charted course. We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. Only in this way shall we live without the fatigue of bitterness and the drain of resentment.

This was the secret of the survival of our slave fore-parents. Slavery was a low, dirty, and inhuman business. When the slaves were taken from Africa, they were cut off from their family ties and chained to ships like beasts. Nothing is more tragic than to be divorced from family, language, and roots. In many instances, husbands were separated from wives and children from parents. When women were forced to satisfy the biological urges of white masters, slave husbands were powerless to intervene. Yet, in spite of inexpressible cruelties, our foreparents survived. When a new morning offered only the same long rows of cotton, sweltering heat, and the rawhide whip of the overseer these brave and courageous men and women dreamed of the brighter day. They had no alternative except to accept the fact of slavery, but they clung tenaciously to the hope of freedom. In a seemingly hopeless situation, they fashioned within their souls a creative optimism that strengthened them. Their bottomless vitality transformed the darkness of frustration into the light of hope.

I first flew from New York to London in the propeller-type aircraft that required nine and a half hours for a flight now made in six hours by jet. When returning from London to the States, I was told that the flying time would be twelve and a half hours. The distance was the same. Why an additional three hours? When the pilot entered the cabin to greet the passengers, I asked him to explain the difference in flight time. “You must understand something about the winds,” he said. “When we leave New York, a strong tail wind is in our favor, but when we return, a strong head wind is against us.” Then he added, “Don’t worry. These four engines are capable of battling the winds.” At times in our lives the tail winds of joy, triumph, and fulfillment favor us, and at times the head winds of disappointment, sorrow, and tragedy beat unrelentingly against us. Shall we permit adverse winds to overwhelm us as we journey across life’s mighty Atlantic, or will our inner spiritual engines sustain us in spite of the winds? Our refusal to be stopped, our “courage to be,” our determination to go on “in spite of,” reveal the divine image within us. The man who has made this discovery knows that no burden can overwhelm him and no wind of adversity can blow his hope away. He can stand anything that can happen to him.

Certainly the Apostle Paul possessed this type of “courage to be.” His life was a continual round of disappointments. On every side were broken plans and shattered dreams. Planning to visit Spain, he was consigned to a Roman prison. Hoping to go to Bithynia, he was sidetracked to Troas. His gallant mission for Christ was measured “in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren.” Did he permit these conditions to master him? “I have learned,” he testified, “in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” Not that Paul had learned to be complacent, for nothing in his life characterizes him as a complacent individual. In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon records, “Paul has done more to promote the idea of freedom and liberty than any man who set foot on western soil.” Does this sound like complacency? Nor did he learn resignation to inscrutable fate. By discovering the distinction between spiritual tranquility and the outward accidents of circumstance, Paul learned to stand tall and without despairing amid the disappointments of life.

Each of us who makes this magnificent discovery will, like Paul, be a recipient of that true peace “which passeth all understanding.” Peace as the world commonly understands it comes when the summer sky is clear and the sun shines in scintillating beauty, when the pocketbook is full, when the mind and body are free of ache and pain, and when the shores of Spain have been reached. But this is not true peace. The peace of which Paul spoke is a calmness of soul amid terrors of trouble, inner tranquility amid the howl and rage of outer storm, the serene quiet at the center of a hurricane amid the howling and jostling winds. We readily understand the meaning of peace when everything is going right and when one is “up and in,” but we are baffled when Paul speaks of that true peace which comes when a man is “down and out,” when burdens lie heavy upon his shoulders, when pain throbs annoyingly in his body, when he is confined by the stone walls of a prison cell, and when disappointment is inescapably real. True peace, a calm that exceeds all description and all explanation, is peace amid storm and tranquillity amid disaster.

Through faith we may inherit Jesus’ legacy, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” Paul at Philippi, incarcerated in a dark and desolate dungeon, his body beaten and bloody, his feet chained, and his spirit tired, joyously sang the songs of Zion at midnight. The early Christians, facing hungry lions in the arena and the excruciating pain of the chopping block, rejoiced that they had been deemed worthy to suffer for the sake of Christ. Negro slaves, bone-weary in the sizzling heat and the marks of whip lashes freshly etched on their backs, sang triumphantly, “By and by I’m gwin to lay down this heavy load.” These are living examples of peace that passeth all understanding.

Our capacity to deal creatively with shattered dreams is ultimately determined by our faith in God. Genuine faith imbues us with the conviction that beyond time is a divine Spirit and beyond life is Life. However dismal and catastrophic may be the present circumstances, we know we are not alone, for God dwells with us in life’s most confining and oppressive cells. And even if we die there without having received the earthly promise, he shall lead us down that mysterious road called death and at last to that indescribable city he has prepared for us. His creative power is not exhausted by this earthly life, nor is his majestic love locked within the limited walls of time and space. Would not this be a strangely irrational universe if God did not ultimately join virtue and fulfillment, and an absurdly meaningless universe if death were a blind alley leading the human race into a state of nothingness? God through Christ has taken the sting from death by freeing us from its dominion. Our earthly life is a prelude to a glorious new awakening, and death is an open door that leads us into life eternal.

The Christian faith makes it possible for us nobly to accept that which cannot be changed, to meet disappointments and sorrow with an inner poise, and to absorb the most intense pain without abandoning our sense of hope, for we know, as Paul testified, in life or in death, in Spain or in Rome, “that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”