World-Weariness and the Duty of Hope

What to do when the world feels unbearably out of control

Photo by Bill Gullo on Unsplash

Lately I have been feeling an increasing sense of world-weariness. It’s true that my personal life has been stressful and busy, but that isn’t the cause of the weariness I’m feeling. I can accept my personal challenges as burdens I have to face, as obstacles which I can tackle with concrete actions that lead to resolutions. It’s the world’s problems that get to me, the ones that feel out of my control, or at least out of my immediate control. In Charlotte, NC, a man randomly stabbed to death a Ukrainian refugee sitting on a train this week. And, of course, terrible images of the moments before death were spread all over the Internet. Our President shared a meme of him declaring war on Chicago to deport people, riffing (badly) on Apocalypse Now. Our Vice President defended the killing of 11 drug traffickers without arrest, trial, or conviction. It also didn’t help that there was denominational drama going on this weekend (whatever denomination you belong to, there’s always drama). I understand that not all of these issues are on the same level of concern, but together they weighed on me, particularly coming off of the Minnesota Catholic school shooting. They left me with the feeling that the world was hopelessly out of control. That everything is falling apart and that we have no agency to do anything about it. Or if we do have agency, it is so small and trivial, that it isn’t worth bothering with. I was left with the feeling that the Fall had done its infernal work and chaos was spreading so completely that the work of redemption was indiscernible. All I could do was keep my head down and focus on my own life, those little concrete actions which did accomplish something. The problem with my world-weariness was not that I was feeling bad. It’s reasonable to feel bad in response to evil and division in the world. The problem was that I was giving into despair, to hopelessness, and that was causing me to deny the reality of my own agency.