But We Were Hoping

Have you ever been the only person in the room who does not know there is a celebrity standing there? I had that on the first day of deacon formation. This was in Idaho. A man walked in that everyone else already knew as Chef Lou.

I did not know him. We had never had cable. When the signal went from analog to digital we got rid of the televisions. I live in a kind of TV desert. So I did not recognize him.

Everyone else had. They had seen him on local television, and some had seen him on national cooking shows. They had already decided who he was. That is a real problem for a person in that position. The more you think you know someone from a screen, the less willing you often are to meet the actual person.

I called him Lou. I asked questions because I did not have a finished picture to protect. I got to meet him. The others had a harder time putting the television version down. One of them told him they could not see themselves calling him anything except Chef Lou.

In Luke chapter 24, in the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, something like that happens after a hope has died. Jesus has been killed. These two are walking away from Jerusalem. A man joins them. They do not recognize him. He asks what they are talking about. They tell him the story of the last few days, and then they say the sentence that names the wound. “But we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel.”

They were not faithless. They knew many true things about Jesus. What they also had was a finished picture of how the story had to go. When the story did not match that picture, hope collapsed. They walked beside him and could not see him. The conclusions they brought on the road got in the way.

The piece that was missing was curiosity. I had curiosity with Lou because I did not have a choice. I had no prior conclusions. The disciples had too many. They thought they already knew what redemption had to look like.

Grief often works that way. A marriage did not become what you had already decided. A child did not become what you had already decided. God did not show up in the form you had already decided. The hope was real. The picture of how it had to happen was too small. It is easy, after that, to close the matter and walk.

Curiosity is how you stay in the conversation long enough to find out who is actually there. I try to ask questions. I try to pause before I decide I already know. It is a rare hour when that does not teach me something I did not have when I walked in.

If your hope did not arrive in the form you had already chosen, you do not have to pretend it arrived. It’s perfectly okay to be sad and disappointed that your expectations did not match reality. Grief can be appropriate in times that do not involve the death of a loved one. It’s more about letting go of what “was supposed to be” and embracing more of “what actually is.” And, that can be a terrible experience. At the same time, you do not necessarily have to treat the story as finished. Name the sentence that starts, “I already know…” Then, this week, ask one question before you conclude. If you are in grief, ask one question that assumes the story may not be over. It could be that the work you have to do is more about letting go of what you imagined and instead understanding what the reality is.

God is not absent from that road. The man walking beside those two disciples was the one they thought they had lost. They did not see him until they had little choice but to be curious about the real situation that they were facing.

This is a pastoral reflection, not clinical care and not a substitute for it. If you or someone you love is in immediate danger, call 988 or local emergency services.

Drawn from a homily for the 3rd Sunday of Easter, Year A