You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

by Alan Noble

Instead, we must “wait without hope,” as T. S. Eliot says.1 This phrase, which we’ll look at more closely in a moment, has occasionally been misinterpreted to mean that Eliot, himself a Christian, had no hope for the resurrection. But the hope Eliot tells his readers to wait without is false hope: a hope that demands results, an impatient hope, a hope that is pragmatic, a hope that rushes to action, a hope that cannot be still and know that God is God.2 This false hope naturally leads to bitterness. When we are convinced that we have the plan for redeeming the world and that we are the agents of that redemption (whether it be spiritual or political or physical), we won’t have grace for those who aren’t part of our movement or who aren’t doing enough. The inadequacies of others become intolerable because redemption is just around the corner if those people would just get on board. When your neighbor fails to recycle, or they don’t vote the right way, or they aren’t as righteous as they ought to be, you grow bitter at them. It is because we wait without hope that we can have grace for our neighbors.