In June, I left for Austin, TX to begin a summer of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). I settled quickly into a rhythm, spending my days in the medical and surgical intensive care units of the biggest hospital in Austin. The hardest cases for me were the ones that offered no way out. I froze every time a patient said I can’t imagine what comes after this. As if the patient were looking into an oncoming nothing. I called these crises of imagination, and they haunted me then. But I’ve since discovered that real hope is, in fact, born of imagining nothing. As the literary critic Terry Eagleton has famously pointed out, when King Lear gloats that “nothing will come of nothing,” he is phenomenally wrong. “Something,” Eagleton continues, “if it is finally to emerge, can do so only from the ruins of some illusory all.”
Hope, then, lives at the limits of what we can see, feel, and believe. In order to hope, we must be willing to imagine an oncoming nothing, the disintegration of this illusor..
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