The Architecture of Hope

I’ve been reflecting recently on the architecture of hope. I am curious about the internal resources that allow some individuals to maintain an abiding and unshakeable sense of hope through extended periods of personal and collective hardship and suffering.

A number of news articles, stories and personal experiences in the lives of my loved ones have sparked my interest in this topic. The story of Dr. Edith Bone, a Hungarian physician, writer and translator who stated, upon her release from seven years in solitary confinement for a crime she did not commit, that she was emerging “a little wiser and full of hope” left me wondering what it was about her inner architecture that enabled her to survive her imprisonment, six months of which were spent in total darkness, and come out of her ordeal hopeful. In delving deeper, I discovered that to pass the time and maintain her sanity, Dr. Bone composed and recited poetry, translated every poem she knew by heart into the six languages in which she was fluent, enumerated her vocabulary in each of the languages she spoke, and took herself on imaginary walks through every city she had ever visited. In the face of extreme deprivation, she carefully constructed for herself an inner fortress that allowed her to maintain her peace in circumstances that could very easily have driven her to madness.

I watched an interview with Dr. Bone filmed shortly after her release from prison. As I listened to her speak, I was struck by the dignity with which she conducted herself, the razor sharpness of her thoughts, and her developed sense of self-awareness and self-mastery. Shoghi Effendi, in a letter to an individual believer, wrote that we must “exert our own will power in mastering ourselves” (From a letter written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi to an individual believer, January 27, 1945), and Abdu’l-Baha, in Star of the West, tells us that:

Today the confirmations of the Kingdom of Abha are with those who renounce themselves, forget their own opinions, cast aside personalities and are thinking of the welfare of others… Whosoever is occupied with himself is wandering in the desert of heedlessness and regret. The ‘Master Key’ to self-mastery is self-forgetting. The road to the palace of life is through the path of renunciation.¹

The connection between hope and self-forgetting or self-mastery seemed at first an odd one. I do see the value in self-mastery, but the link between ego and hope was not immediately obvious to me. This led me back to the following passage from The Hidden Words, written by Baha’u’llah:

O MOVING FORM OF DUST! I desire communion with thee, but thou wouldst put no trust in Me. The sword of thy rebellion hath felled the tree of thy hope. At all times I am near unto thee, but thou art ever far from Me. Imperishable glory I have chosen for thee, yet boundless shame thou hast chosen for thyself. While there is yet time, return, and lose not thy chance.²

I have been conversing with two close friends about hope. One has been dealing with debilitating chronic health issues that have prevented her from working for a number of years now, severely impacting her ability to mother her child and be the partner she would like to be for her husband. She has gone to every doctor she’s been directed to and tried every remedy presented to her, but nothing has restored her health. She tells me how hard it is to continue to remain hopeful. Another friend’s son is dealing with health issues which recently affected his heart. None of the answers they have been given so far seem to provide a clear path to making sure that his heart is not affected again, so they spend their days in doctors’ offices getting scans and internal scopes, and seeking out anything that might shed light on the problem. In both cases, even though they may not see their daily striving to care for themselves and their families as hopeful, in their dogged determination to keep searching for answers—in their setting aside of their own fears and desires long enough to make one more call to a specialist, one more trip to a doctor’s office—what impresses me is how tenacious their hope is.

I was reading a prayer by the Bab recently that included the following line: “Thou art the Lord of bounty and grace, invincible in Thy power and the most skillful in Thy designs.” Since we humans are, in my understanding, one of God’s designs, this line seems to imply that there is something innate in how we were designed that makes us uniquely adapted to navigating through the harrowing times that we pass through in this life.

To me what is necessary to fuel hope is enduring reliance on God. When we allow our egos to convince us that we alone are responsible for determining the outcome of our circumstances, we undermine the effectiveness of the power latent in the architecture of hope with which we were all so lovingly constructed.

Never lose thy trust in God. Be thou ever hopeful, for the bounties of God never cease to flow upon man. If viewed from one perspective they seem to decrease, but from another they are full and complete. Man is under all conditions immersed in a sea of God’s blessings. Therefore, be thou not hopeless under any circumstances, but rather be firm in thy hope.³

We do need to do our part. To exert effort. To gather knowledge. To ask for support from specialists. To take action. But we also need to remember that so much depends on faith in a higher power.

When I am struggling through seemingly insurmountable challenges, I find hope in prayer. It may not provide an instant solution, but it immediately makes me feel lighter because it reminds me that I wasn’t designed to find my way through life’s tests entirely on my own. Divine guidance is an integral part of the architecture of hope. I will close with a beautiful musical rendition of a prayer that I recite often when I’m struggling to remain hopeful, sung by Rosalynd and Pascal. I hope it lightens your spirit also. 

1. Abdu’l-Baha: Star of the West, Vol. XVII, p. 348 [↩]
2. Baha’u’llah, The Hidden Words [↩]
3. Abdu’l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha, p. 205 [↩]

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Ariana Salvo

Ariana Salvo was born in the United States, and spent sixteen years of her childhood on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. She moved to Prince Edward Island to do her master’s degree in Island Studies, fell in love with the tightly knit community, and has never left. When not writing, she can be found exploring art at galleries around the world, flower farming, traveling to remote islands, hiking and taking photos of the wild natural landscapes of Canada’s eastern shore, teaching English to international students and reading historical fiction with a good cup of tea.