Where Our Attachments Are

Both denial and hope show us where our attachments are.

Terry Tempest Williams Cited in Mystical Hours

Wayne Teasdale gives us some insightful thoughts surrounding these two powerful emotions in these words:

“Terry Tempest Williams, a writer and naturalist in residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History, demonstrates a deep understanding of human nature in identifying the meaning behind these two human tendencies.

Denial usually means an unwillingness to face a deep, uncomfortable truth in a part of one’s life. Yet, what we are trying to avoid is unusually something we feel very strongly about. 

Similarly, hope indicates an attachment to a positive outcome. Hope is also a theological virtue associated with the Divine; it is a connection with God that seems to know something important.

But we need to pay attention, with a pointed awareness, to both our denials and our hopes, without judgment, to identify our commitment, and perhaps our unhealthy attachment, to a point of view. 

We can all learn a lot from the views of reality and ourselves that we express in each posture.”

In my experience, these two very common human feelings can be pitted against each other.

Both are quite powerful and convincing, and both take a great deal of psychic energy to be maintained- especially when faced with a strong challenge from an opposite feeling. While denial is primal fear that operates best when it preserves some perception about life that feels threatening, we use denial as a preventive– stopping its admittance into our emotional world of possibilities.

If we do not exercise denial, then we will have to accept the new information/reality being presented to us which could upset our emotional status quo; or if allowed, this new idea/stimulus/reality could threaten something we thought to be real and reliable. 

At its most positive and receptive use, denial of what is false, harmful, or toxic can make us broaden and deepen our compassion that softens our hearts and opens us up to a further step of spiritual and soulful growth.

Hope has some prickly parts to its reality, too. There can be a facile acceptance of a false hope that proves itself to be shallow and brittle- an outlook that breaks apart easily when tested or challenged. True or genuine hope, on the other hand, can be a formidable force that holds to spiritual outlooks and principles that are not yet complete in our thinking and feeling

Hope, when true to itself, is a cardinal virtue because it makes room for spiritual perceptions and for a promising or emerging, transformative reality to appear. 

As it says in the Epistle to the Hebrews,” Hope is the anchor of our faith…” and this quote from Jurgen Moltmann, quoted in my book, Spirit, Time, and The Future:

“To live with a dream and a hope in its realization is something great and extraordinary.”