What is hope?
It is a presentiment that imagination is more real
And reality less real than it looks. ~ Rubem Alves

So much is in the bud. ~ Denise Levertov

As stated in my reflection “Pensées  – Advent Pondering 2,” Advent is a season in which hope plays a major role. And during Christmas, which is a season, not a day, we recall and participate in a story that alludes to the culmination of hope. Yet, so constitutive is hope to life and living that it is never out of season.

From a Christian perspective, the nativity of hope is G-d.

More than an emotion, more than a feeling, hope is a core conviction rooted in “the hidden ground of love” (Merton). This Love, which is a nickname for the Ineffable One we too casually call God, is the source, flow, and endless end toward which all life tends. Hope is what it is because it trusts that this Love is The One Reliable, the only real Reality, the original, ongoing, and omegic Truth, the only there there now and in The Final Culmination [when we will see and know “what once had glory has lost its glory because of a greater glory” (2 Cor. 3:10).]

Hope is an integral expression of an enacted theology that claims Love is the end all and be all of all reality. It is the one undying truth. That it is enacted, and need be, reveals that it is a human reality, responsibility, and reciprocity integral to human living and never divorced from either the struggles and joys of life or the action of grace.

Hope is a prophetic act not merely wishful thinking. It is courageous and audacious, but not naïve. “Good” or “bad”, it sees what is and knows that there is more than meets the eye, that nothing we see or sense or experience is the total reality or the final truth. The renowned Brazilian intellectual Rubem Alves (1933-2014) who was an innovative educator, seminal thinker and implementer of liberation theology, psychotherapist, poet, and prophet described hope as “a presentiment that imagination is more real / And reality less real than it looks.”

Understood theologically, while the incarnation discloses what God is like, of equal importance is that it reveals to us in and through the words and deeds of Jesus what it means to be fully human. The way to be a Christ-one is to become human, to become who we already are in God, as Merton says. And one of the effects of hope is that it humanizes us. Hope serves to humanize our community and our world. Alves writes, hope is “what it takes to make and keep life human in the world.” As it humanizes, it sanctifies, simultaneously orienting us toward the Divine and that which is most humane.

There are two primary assumptions about hope I’d like to call into question. The first is that hope is only active when life seems hopeless. The presence of hope is not dependent upon the presence of despair any more than love is absent and inactive unless confronted with indifference or hate, or any more than peace is stillborn or inactive unless or until faced with violence and war. Like love and peace, hope is not merely the antithesis of something. In this case, it is not just the antidote to doubt, disappointment, futility, or hopelessness but instead is a substantive and enlivening reality that exists in its own right. Also, hope does not retire once a sense of pessimism, despair, or hopelessness go away, or once injustice and oppression or violence are transfigured into life and well-being.

The second assumption, a variation of the first, is that hope is focused solely on the future. Granted, hope visibly and tangibly becomes itself when the presence or possibility of life is threatened, hidden, or in doubt. It is true that hope is the impetus and sustaining force that yearns for springtime when stripped bare during a long winter, that longs for justice in the midst of injustice, peace instead of senseless violence and ceaseless war, courage in the face of fear, kindness to replace cruelty, greed to give way to generosity, callousness to be transformed into compassion, divisiveness and vindictiveness to be overcome by reconciliation and forgiveness, addiction to be displaced by freedom, wounds to be healed, and the day when all tears of mourning will become tears of joy. So, yes, hope is perhaps most necessary and most daunting when imagining alternative possibilities when life is difficult, suffering intense, the light hidden, and we are walking (often alone) through the valley of the shadow of death.

That being said, hope is the inclination towards life within all organisms. Infused with divine life, humans are made for living. We are biophiliacs, lovers of life, who when we are most ourselves, when we are who we are in the creative intention of divine love, when we are at our optimal functioning, naturally stretch and reach for life abundant, for connection, for kinship, for fecundity.

In short, hope is not dependent upon despair for its existence nor does it only manifest itself in the face of an unrealized future. Hope is more a teleological reality than a temporal one. It is not the future it desires as much as it is the fruition of what it is. Just as the infant inside its mother’s womb yearns to be born and then to grow and develop, just as the acorn knows there is an oak hidden within it that innately aspires to be an expansive regal tree, just as we pray and work for the realization of the dream of God to come to be – “your kingdom (basileia — reign) come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” – so we hope for the fullness of hope which is realized in abundant life whose signs are freedom, peace, well-being, reverence, communion, just relationships, joy, praise, and love.

Hope is not so much a personal quality as it is a God-given capacity and a subterranean conviction that we must incarnate and practice. Hope is both an expression of and a response to life. It’s commitment and trajectory is always toward the flourishing of life. It is the inherent desire for and daily commitment to the fullness of life as seen in the humility and insistence of a bud in winter as the snow melts, or as seen in a pregnant woman’s interlocked hands around her stomach as she feels the kicking of the growing life within her, or as signaled in the widower’s capacity to move forward after the death of his spouse, or manifested in the refusal to look away from the ignominy of human cruelty, or as embodied in Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus, or in the courage of a lone Chinese man armed with nothing more than his shopping bag who decided to take a stand and stand in front of a row of tanks in Tianneman Square. Hope, indeed, shows us where to stand and why.

Hope is both something we carry within us (Romans 8:25) and something that carries us along, sustains us, holds us. Again, whether rich or poor, in sickness or in health, in sorrow or joy, living in the face of death or dying in the face of life, constrained by unfairness or freed by justice, there is no season when hope is not available, necessary, present, or active. It is the conviction, both when life seems blessed and when all evidence is to the contrary, that G-d is “making all things new” (Rev. 21:5). To be a person of hope is to deliberately participate in this making new that is the immediate and ongoing work of the Spirit. The purpose of hope is to encourage and enliven. Any act of hope, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, I believe, is a fractal of hope that ultimately is oriented toward beatitude and doxology, that is, toward the awareness and awe of all blessings which are born of love and the praise of which love alone is worthy.