HOPE

Back in the day, meaning when I was in seminary studying theology, one of the authors I constantly read was the late Andrew Greeley. He had a knack for taking deep and often obtuse theological thoughts and ideas and making them understandable for those of us who read Karl Rahner, paragraph by paragraph, sometimes three times over, trying to understand what he was saying. With Greeley, I understood immediately. The “real” theologians mocked him, of course. Not me.

In the year I was ordained, 1969, he wrote a book he titled A Future to Hope in. As one who remembers the Turbulent 60s – war protests, civil rights actions, assassinations and the riots that followed, serious debate in the church about birth control and clerical celibacy, etc., etc. – we who were about to be ordained that spring wondered what we were getting ourselves into. What kind of future did we have? Did we really have a future to hope in? Greeley said “yes” and gave us the courage to help make it happen.

Fifty years later, under different circumstances, we are asking the same question. What does our future look like? Is it a hopeful one or not? What will our country, our world, our own personal lives look like in the years to come? Will we overcome the divisions among us that are so prevalent right now? Will our standard of living change? Will we change the way we had been living before the pandemic and incorporate the lessons we have learned because of it? What lessons have we learned, if any?

We don‘t know the answers to those questions. We don’t know what the future will be like, just as we didn’t know the answers to the many questions my classmates and I had prior to ordination and certainly did not know what the future would portent. But what we had and had in abundance was hope. Yes, it was a hope because we were young and full of energy and, I dare say speaking only for myself, rather smug. The world was waiting for us. We had the answers. All one had to do was ask.

Of course we did not. We learned the hard way. Change and lessons learn take a long, long time. But what kept us going in spite of all the setbacks and discouragements is that we never lost hope. Fifty-plus years later, I for one, still have not lost hope. There is a great future awaiting us. What it will be like we do not know. But what we do know is that it will be up to us to make that future.

We can and we will if, if we never lose hope, if we never forget that we have been given all that is necessary to solve the problems that surround us. We can’t do it alone just as my classmates and I knew we couldn’t change the church or the world alone even if and when our egos sometimes got in the way. Change is a community effort. It was then and it is now and always will be. Making the future we hope for a reality is only possible when we work together, and never let the prophets of doom and gloom discourage us. There is a future to hope in when we do our part. We must never lose hope.