Hope

When times get hard, hope becomes an issue. Barack Obama tapped into this in his campaign: hope, possibility, release from the past. These are politically powerful words, but they are also Christian words. With faith and love, hope stands at the centre of St Paul’s account of the spiritual life (1 Cor 13:13).

But what can we hope for? Doesn’t the world, in the end, defeat hope? As we get older, don’t we live more from memory than from hope?

Christian hope is not holy optimism (properly caricatured in Life of Brian by “Always look on the bright side.”) It is not the assertion that, against all the odds, things will somehow come right; that God will fix things for us. Optimism can, and will, be defeated by events. But hope cannot be defeated.

How can we know that? Some words of Vaclav Havel may help: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” So hope has less to do with events than with the meaning of events. If bad things can be held within a frame of meaning, then there is hope.

But what if we can’t see any meaning? What if we are faced with pure pain and raw destruction? What frame of meaning could the prisoners of Auschwitz look to?

At such points we have a choice, the choice faced by Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, when he knew that, by all usual standards, he was finished, and only torture and death remained. There was no frame of meaning. He could, quite reasonably, have despaired. Instead he trusted in a meaning that he couldn’t see, that wasn’t within his power. “Nevertheless, your will, not mine…”

Paradoxically, hope embraces the worst, whereas optimism denies it. For that reason, Christian hope is difficult; rather than an easy confidence in God as the insurer of last resort, it is most real when (as for Jesus) God seems to be doing nothing at all. It goes with the hard recognition, very alien in our culture, that we don’t make the meaning of our lives. It is inseparable from faith; and faith is inseparable from love, because, in the end, we only trust what we love. So, whatever our losses, these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.