HOPE

Liz McAlister (in Year One via Other Side): "Hope never consists in thinking 'things will work out.' Hope finds its substance looking reality in the eye; realism finds its possibility in hope. Without a living hope, we can't stand reality; we lie to ourselves, cover up what is real, arm ourselves with illusions and rationalizations. Hope does not begin to exist except in the harshness of the reality with which we are confronted. Everywhere else we get along quite well without it."

Hope begins and ends in the real world, not in the world of our imagination, not in the world of our dreams, not in fantasy but in fact. Hope starts with what really is: with the bad and the hurtful, with pain and suffering. As McAlister says, when all is going well, or at least relatively smoothly, hope is not part of the picture. We only resort to hope when the picture is quite blurred.

Yet, no matter how blurred, how bad the picture, we must have hope. We must. We must somehow believe/know that what is so bad can, somehow in some way, even in some small way, become better. If there is no hope, we give up or we begin to live in a world of "illusions and rationalizations." We then either convince ourselves that the situation really is not so bad or we come up with some logical explanation why it really is such a mess – and for which we or nobody can do nothing.

Noam Chomsky (in Salt of the Earth): "If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If [for instance] you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, there's a chance you may contribute to making a better world. That's your choice." Once we at least assume that the bad can be made better, that we can help make it better, there's at least a chance it can happen. Otherwise, we can either cash it in or collapse into a fantasy world.

That is easy to do, all too easy. Hope does not live so much in the future as it lives in the present because that is where hope begins. Milan Kundera (in The Art of the Novel): "There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable, than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact." Maybe not all but much because it is the present, the here-and-now, that we must change if we are to have a hope for the future.

What gives us the ability to hope, of course, is our faith, which "is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," as the writer of Hebrews (11:1) reminds us. That is not quite the same as saying "things will work out, eventually, if only in eternity." That is true.

What is also true that this working out begins right here with faith as the foundation, hope as the guiding light and the strength of the Holy Spirit to enable us to do our part in this messy, often painful present, in this very real world. It will require work, often hard work, to make our world and our life as it should be and not as it is. Hope spurs us on but we must do our part.