A FEW HOPEFUL WORDS ON HOPE, I HOPE

The other day a friend accused me of optimism. This didn’t sit well. We were talking (ponderously) about the future of religion, and I said the church will outlast every dire trend. The church rose against all odds from the start, stirred to life by Jesus’ resurrection – an impossibility that nevertheless happened. Predictions about the terminal decline of faith are predictable: they never pan out.

My friend said that sounds way too optimistic. I protested: it’s not optimism but hope. Is there a difference? Optimism looks compulsively on the bright side, expecting every happy outcome, sometimes despite evidence. Hope is an attitude about the long haul: God will prevail no matter how much we mess it up in the meantime.

By now, optimism has been linked to benefits of health. Optimists certainly are more fun than glum fatalists. But a ginned-up optimism can become nothing more than dangerous wishful thinking, a bad misreading of human nature. In 2007, upbeat consumerism was blind to the toxic facts of housing bubbles and subprime mortgages. The Great Recession was the inexcusable result.

We’re optimistic that technology will come to our rescue on various fronts. But tech’s revolutionaries underestimated the web’s dark side, the predatory disinformation and cyberattacks. Utopian dreams relied on a frictionless, wide-eyed, one-dimensional view of complex human nature. Now we’re living out the consequences, with A.I. on the march.

Hope makes room for a skeptical view of human conduct – a doctrine of sin, it used to be called – while expecting the cosmic story eventually to turn out right. It’s not a passive waiting game. “Active” hope, says eco-philosopher Joanna Macy, draws on our inner strengths and power of choice: We have a say in personal change and social reform. Active hope doesn’t depend on optimism. It admits the terrible brokenness of the times. But it shows a “readiness to discover the size and strength of our hearts, our quickness of mind, our steadiness of purpose,” she says with co-author Chris Johnstone in their 2012 book Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy.

In Christian terms, these strengths are gifts from a Creator. They accompany people into the risky, unknown, providential future. “God has the power to give you a kind of inner equilibrium through your pain,” said Martin Luther King Jr. Because of the risen Jesus, hope believes God will ultimately heal creation. This belief has the power to dissipate anxiety and unleash creativity to get on with the work. Divine messages filter through the real world, where the Resurrection happened if it happened at all.

Is that hopelessly optimistic? I’d call it hopeful.

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