William Johnson Everett
The invitation to write something about hope lodged itself between two books
I was perusing at the time. The first was Hope for the Earth, by Ernst Conradie,
a theologian friend in South Africa who has written extensively on ecology issues.
In its early pages Conradie walks us out into the void where we realize that
our own galaxy is a small part of a universe that is either drifting toward
the dark and cold entropy of infinitely dispersed matter or a fiery re-fusion
of all matter into a new Big Bang. Even before that, as a recent TV documentary
vividly explained, our Milky Way will intersect the Andromeda galaxy in a "google"
years (10 to the hundreth power). What a fireworks that will be! In any event,
our lonely experiment in life will end up vaporized or frozen. What, then, does
hope mean in such an astronomical context? What is a reasonable hope in such
a universe? If hope is about our attitude toward the future, what does the future
of our universe mean for our hope?
Far from the frostbite of these numbing conundrums I was also reading The Classic Slave Narratives compiled by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and his colleagues at the Dubois Institute at Harvard University. In the riveting stories by Frederick Douglass and Linda Brent I found a kind of response to galactic hopelessness. Slavery in the Americas was an indescribably brutal imprisonment that corrupted all who were caught in its toils. For human beings to have survived such relentless destruction is almost unimaginable. Yet unknown numbers did not lose hope of finding their freedom. What led them forward against the lash, the rape, the lynch mob, the empty plate, and drafty hovel was not so much a vision of freedom for themselves but their bonds of love and devotion to friends, family, and children. It was not their probable future but their actual loves that formed their hope. For their sake they pressed on toward their liberation.
The narratives of cosmic evolution and human liberation combine to drive home the awareness that hope is not so much about the future as it is about the nature of our faithfulness to those whom we love. For their sakes we persevere. For their sakes we struggle for a better life. Thus, the classic theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are not three unconnected values but each implies the other. Hope is constituted by the faithfulness we have toward our loves, just as our love is constituted by what we hope in faithfulness for the ones we love.
Hope, therefore, is not an individualistic virtue I seek for myself and my future welfare, but a relational virtue that is realized in the way I remain faithful and loving toward the beings around me. This is especially important to remember, since so much discussion about hope is about what I may hope for beyond my physical death or more immediate symptoms of my weakness and finitude. Hope, however, is created in the way I love and remain faithful to my loves.
Hope is already present in caring for one who is sick. Hope is already present in the act of planting and tending an oak seedling. Or helping a struggling child learn to read. Or having a child in a violent world. These individual acts of loving faithfulness do not mean that we shall attain some final visionary goal, for that is not the proper object of our hope. Our willingness to give up striving for that elusive future perfection requires a special kind of faithful love to our Creator, in whom the full mystery about the future resides. As Conradie says later in his rich explorations, "Christian hope is ultimately based in God's faithfulness. It simply expresses the trust that my life and the future of the universe will somehow, beyond death and destruction, be taken up into God's nurturing, creative and corrective love…" We ourselves are invited, indeed called, by this Creator to love this planet and its creatures as faithfully as we can. In that resides our hope.
From Holy Ground (Newsletter), 9:1 (July 2002), p. 2.
*