Hope and the wounded healer
“Return to your fortress, you prisoners of hope; even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you.”
Zachariah 9:12
The phrase “prisoner of hope” perfectly captures the ambiguity of this quality of yearning that can both uplift and confound, yet prove impossible to abandon. Archbishop Desmond Tutu once described himself this way in a reference to a line attributed to the Hebrew prophet Zachariah.
This was a man who chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, as that country sought to heal the terrible wounds of apartheid through radical forgiveness. Tutu’s conviction sprang from a deep well of living faith as he “witnessed so many incredible people who, despite experiencing atrocity and tragedy, have come to a point in their lives where they are able to forgive”.
There are levels of hope, and Tutu was referring to a transcendent hope that grapples with the paradox of certain salvation in a fallen world.
Hope can be experienced as sometimes cruel, because in a dualistic worldview, it is inextricably tied to its polar opposite: disappointment. The Buddha used the term nirāsa (or nirāsā) to describe one of the qualities of an enlightened person. It can be translated as ‘hopeless,’ ‘wishless,’ or ‘without expectation’.
Disappointment is its own bitter medicine. Hope can keep us in the game, get us out of bed, but is it enough?
SERVANT LEADERSHIP
Tutu practiced the Christ model of servant leadership. It is leadership through humbling, not by hoping for an outcome or resolution. The servant leader abides in the place of transcendent hope itself—and holds a vision of healing and redemption when another cannot.
“Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in his own heart and even losing his precious peace of mind?” the late theologian Henri Nouwen wrote in The Wounded Healer. “In short: Who can take away suffering without entering it?”
The servant leader willingly enters into the suffering of others. It is not a performance trick by the ego looking for recognition.
In my experience, few things feel as naturally good, easy and loving as that respite from the mind’s ceaseless demands for proof and form.
THE WOUNDED HEALER
When hope is fixed to the same spectrum occupied by disappointment, healing itself becomes a vicious cycle. In my case, for as long as I measured my worthiness by my wounds, I was bound to shame.
Yet shame cannot be healed, because that legitimizes a false sense of self. Instead, true transcendence leaves nothing behind, including shame, but sweeps it up in a much larger vision. Shame then becomes the rich soil for the bloom of compassion.
Who can sit with another’s deep shame without recoiling or judgment, except one who has worked that same black seam? Judgment here can refer to trying to bring that person out of their experience prematurely in the name of ‘healing’. It is a subtle, and therefore dangerous, form of abandonment.
Nouwen wrote that we are all wounded—it’s our human inheritance—but when our wounds are no longer a source of shame, we can put them in service of others as wounded healers. Our wounds are made holy, in other words, and become the very portal to commune with the soul of the world.