Despairing hope

Suppose the only son of a widowed mother goes off to war. She no longer has his protection, assistance, or companionship. She doesn't know when or if she will see him again. She doesn't know when or if he will return. All she can do is wait and pray for his return. 

Maybe one day, years later, as she sits on the porch or looks through the kitchen window, she sees a familiar figure limping towards the house. All the prayer, suffering, loneliness, heartache, and waiting were worth it. Even if he's no long 100%, it's more than worth it to have him back, to be reunited. 

But suppose she waits and waits until the war is over, yet he never comes back. She presumes that he died. If he survived, he should have returned by now. Hope fades. It's too late to hold out hope. 

Yet even though she waited in vain, he was still worth waiting for. It's not as if she had anything better to wait for or pray for. If she never sees him again, holding out for him was the right thing to do–even in retrospect. It's not like she had a better life waiting for her if she gave up on him. It's not like she put a wonderful life on hold. If she says good-bye, what's facing her when she turns around? There's nothing to go back to. So even with the benefit of bitter hindsight, she'd do the same thing all over again. 

Suppose she knew that she'd never see him again. Was it still worth the wait? That seems irrational. But what's the alternative? It's not like she's passing on better offers. It's not like she's passing up better opportunities. It's him or nothing. There's a sense in which clinging to a vain hope is better than no hope at all. 

Even if, for the sake of argument, Christianity is false, it's better to hope in vain and wait and vain and pray in vain for the only thing that could be good, without which nothing else is good, than settle for what is worthless and amoral. If that's the dilemma, then even despairing hope is better than hopeless despair. 

And that's the worse case scenario. A limiting case. Sometimes it's useful to begin with the worst, then work back from that, since anything is better than that. If you can adjust to that, you have nothing left to lose and everything to gain. If it can't get any worse, it can only get better. Sometimes, when you have nothing more to lose, that's the turning-point.