Hope during Hard Times

Alexander Pope

When I was growing up, I often heard my mother citing snippets of poetry.  One such snippet was:

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast."

I knew that aphorism by heart long before I learned it was from the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope.

As I grew, finding my own identity, I heard many people expressing ideas that circled around that matter of being hopeful.  Radio and TV hosts frequently ask people, "Are you optimistic about the future?"  But optimism is different from hope (as the wide variety of answers given to that question demonstrates).  Whether or not a person is optimistic depends more upon their individual personality than upon what is actually probable.

Another word that circles around the matter of hope is the word "wish," but it too is different from hope.  The word "wish" often conveys a pie-in-the-sky type of wanting, as in when we speak of "wishful thinking."  Young children, before blowing out the candles on their birthday cakes, are told to "make a wish!"  The adults know, however, that at an early age, a child's wishing can be imagining things that are totally improbable.

The 19th-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote of a "passion for what is possible."  But what is possible in the future?  The better I can predict and even affect what might possibly come about in the future, the less often my hopes will be dashed, and the more often I will have the encouraging satisfaction of my hopes being fulfilled.  To borrow a metaphor sometimes used in the Taoist faith-tradition:  When woodcarvers create sculptures, their efforts will go better if they work with the natural grain of the wood.  Is there similarly a "grain" in the wood of life -- in the nature of things -- that I would be better off working with rather than resisting?

Certainly, if I wish the sun will rise in the sky tomorrow, my wish will be granted -- even if I am no longer alive to see it myself!  Even before modern science, astronomers had mapped out the movements of the sun, moon, and planets more precisely than any clocks they possessed.  The sun's rising tomorrow is not only possible but virtually assured.  That is not the case, however, with what will happen tomorrow in human societies.  There are too many factors involved in any single society to have an absolute assurance about what will happen.  There are even too many factors involved in one individual human life.

These reflections of mine on hope and the future have concentrated mostly upon thinking about the nature of hope by itself.  But in the Bible -- which so frequently exhorts people not to give up hope -- hope is not usually treated as a quality in and of itself.  Hope in the Christian tradition has been considered to be part of a triad of human spiritual qualities:  The other two qualities of the triad are faith and love.  That triad is rooted most explicitly in a New Testament passage in I Corinthians in which Paul writes:

"And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three;

 and the greatest of these is love."

-- 1 Corinthians 13:13 (NRSV)

Hope can become something even further away from wishing when it is blended with love.  When blended with love, hope can become transformed into something much larger than concern about my individual well-being and whether I can control or predict the future to my own advantage.  Blended with love, hope can become an ennobling way of life.

One of the trickiest questions revolving around hope is:  Can our hoping itself actively affect the future? The theologian Jürgen Moltmann (who wrote a book titled Theology of Hope) tackled that question.  He answered "yes" to it in this way:

"Biblical texts understand hope as a positive, divine power of life.

 It is the expectation of a good future....

  Consequently, hope...does not detach the human spirit from the present through delusions,  but rather the opposite;

 it pulls the promised future into the present."

And as I try to become more loving (and not lose hope), maybe a walk in the early morning sun will help me.  Maybe it will help me feel the constancy of a hidden grain in the nature of things.  Maybe even a grain within our human lives.

~ ~ ~

(What do you hope for?)

(The Pope quotation is from An Essay on Man, l. 95.)
(The Kierkegaard quotation is from Fear and Trembling.)
(The Moltmann quotation is from New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology,
 ed. by Donald W. Musser & Joseph L. Price, © 2003, pp. 249-250.)