In preparing to write about hope, I did an online search for quotes about hope. The majority of quotes represented a kind of Christian faith that I really don’t understand. They seemed to equate hope with faith in Jesus as a personal savior. There were other quotes from a rationalist perspective that warned against false hope. Some of these quotes referred to hope as a lie. There were others, the minority, from inspirational writers who claimed that it was critical to live with hope, to find hope in life. But none of these quotes explained what it meant to hope.
How can we understand hope?
I spent many years of my early adult life working with people with serious illnesses. There were people who had been left with significant disabilities after accidents, those facing life with degenerative conditions, and those with terminal diagnoses. It wasn’t long before I could see the difference between denial and hope.
I remember a woman I met around 1982 when I was a hospital chaplain. She was diagnosed with a brain tumor that was inoperable. Over the course of about a year, she was regularly admitted to the hospital for treatment. When I first met her, she was warm, pleasant, and very happy. I was fully aware of the reason for her hospitalization. I knew that she and her family were informed about the brain tumor that was growing rapidly. But when I’d speak with her, she’d tell me that she didn’t know why she was in the hospital. “I feel fine,” she’d say. “They are just making a fuss over nothing.” She continued to say that there was nothing wrong even as she lost her hair due to treatments. In time she also lost her memory and developed dementia because of tumor growth. Eventually, she began losing control of her body. Because of dementia, she was very confused and didn’t understand what was happening to her. It was frightening for her. Some family members tried to explain her diagnosis and treatment, while others tried to reassure her that she would be alright. Following her initial denial and eventual confusion, followed by mixed messages about the realities of her diagnosis and assurances that she would be fine, she couldn’t come to any kind of acceptance. While her experience was unique to her, I’ve seen these kinds of situations many times. It’s not unusual that people can’t accept what’s happening to them for many complex reasons.
Hope is far different from denial and confusion. People who live with hope are aware of the realities around them. Those realities may be related to health issues, poverty, marginalization like sexism, racism, or homophobia, or even the realities of climate change. Hope enables an individual to live with a sense of possibilities. It’s far different from denial. Living in hope means that one fully knows that the situation is dire, but that somehow, in some way, something positive will occur.
To live with hope is to believe that there are possibilities for the future that I can’t envision right now. It’s not a belief in magic, but openness to something occurring in the future that’s not within sight right now. Having hope is rooted in understanding that nothing in life is permanent and that the situations of our lives are always changing.
Hope makes a great deal of sense. Life by its nature is characterized by ambiguity. The circumstances we experience are neither good nor bad. Events happen. Some days are sunny while other days are filled with storm clouds. Hope looks past the ambiguities of life with a kind of anticipation that there is something good and worthwhile to come, no matter whether the sun is shining or the storms are hitting hard. Such hope doesn’t have a goal that a single event will happen. Instead, hope it a kind of trust in life’s ultimate goodness.
When I think of hope, I am drawn to the mystic writer of 14th Century England we know today as Julian of Norwich. We actually don’t know this woman’s name. She lived in a one room cell built onto the side of the church of St. Julian, so we now call her by the name of the church. Living in the time of the Black Death when up to 200 million people died, some scholars believe that Julian lost her husband and children to the plague. In her grief, she became a recluse. In the course of a serious illness in which those around her assumed she was dying, Julian had a series of visions. From those visions, she experienced the voice of the Divine saying, “All shall be well. All shall be well. In all matter of things, all shall be well.”
Julian experienced hardship that few of us can imagine. She knew the realities of death, loss, and immense tragedy. While she didn’t have a solution, she had hope: that all would be well. That hope enabled her to anticipate that something good would come out of the despair around her. Her words continue to echo through the centuries inspiring us to hope.
In the dark and difficult days of life, is there hope? Hope is a kind of trust that the story of our lives isn’t over but that something more will come. Because I trust that the sun will rise tomorrow bringing new possibilities, I choose to have hope. Yes, there is something good about life. It’s up to you and me to anticipate that goodness in the living of our lives. In the end, that’s how I understand hope.
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