–Doctrine & Covenants 88:118
It's not a shocking revelation that the scripture above is one of my favorites. Literature exists so we can learn about ourselves. We write things down to document what we've learned.
Which is why I want to start writing about nuggets of wisdom I find in books I read, as a sporadic feature on this blog. It's not like I ever talk about books, anyway.
And since I opened this post with a scripture, I thought I'd kick off this series with a book many consider to be scripture: The Return of the King.
The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy explores hope and despair, but it's illustrated most beautifully in Book V after the Battle of Pelennor Fields. It's the calm before the real battle starts, a battle that makes Pelennor Fields and Helm's Deep look like warm-up games. They know what's coming because the Palantir has shown them what would appear to be their doom.
Denethor takes this information and despairs. He saw what Mordor was about to throw at them and came to the logical conclusion that humanity could not possibly overcome such odds—and gave up. He justifiably assumed that the only choice left to him was when/how he would die. So he died by fire before the bad guys could take him.
Aragorn and Gandalf saw exactly what Denethor did and came to the same conclusion: we can't beat these guys. But instead of succumbing to despair, they chose to have hope that perhaps not all was lost. Perhaps they just weren't seeing the entire picture. So they drew the armies of Mordor out, that massive army they knew they couldn't defeat, for the sliver of hope that it would help Frodo destroy the ring of the enemy and the source of his power.
We all know how it ends. Frodo succeeds, the world is saved. All because of hope.
I've gotten a lot more cynical as I've gotten older. One side effect being that I've started to view hope as a useless emotion. Hoping for the best is not a plan. Saying "hopefully" before the thing you want will not make it happen. The hope you feel about any given situation will not spontaneously change said situation.
Despite Denethor being the Worst Dad Ever™, I sympathize with him more than I ever have. He gave up when he knew he couldn't win—isn't that the smart thing to do? What can man do against such reckless hate, after all?
Movie Aragorn has the answer: Ride out and meet it.
The king is here to remind us that that's the moment hope changes from a useless emotion to an action. Being hopeful about a situation may not change it, but your actions can. Even a fool's hope can change how you react to a challenge or setback—and as we see with Frodo's quest, that makes all the difference. The Lord of the Rings trilogy would have had an ending similar to Denethor's if Aragorn and Gandalf had chosen to act on their despair rather than their hope.
It's much easier to let despair dictate our actions. You're much less likely to be disappointed that way. But the changes that needs to happen in our world will only happen if we allow hope to drive our decisions.
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