(As many of you may know, our Wee Mama is away for Advent, and she's asked me to do some editing/posting for Anglican Kossacks during her absence. And since Hope is the traditional theme for the Sunday of Advent, what better topic for a first Advent-themed post? Please -- join in with your own thoughts in the comment area!)
Hope. It's in short supply these days, both here on Daily Kos and everywhere in our world. Or so it often feels, anyway. From Ferguson to the rampant greed that marks the post-Thanksgiving commercial shopping season in our society, from the aftermath of the November elections to the looming threat of climate change, I think many of us have been feeling pretty bleak lately. With all the poverty, violence, discrimination, hatred, anger and despair in the world, how can we retain even the smallest shred of hope? What does hope even
mean, under these circumstances?
It's at times like this that I'm reminded of Sam's words of encouragement to Frodo in The Two Towers, as they climbed into the shadowed land of Mordor: "Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a darker danger than ours." There have been many times in human history when it seemed almost impossible to hold out hope that anything of good might be preserved -- when it seemed like death and slaughter, or famine and disease, or a faceless, soulless regime, must destroy the last remnants of humanity, and darkness forever triumph. I cannot imagine the courage it must have taken, for example, to live through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Black Death, or the purges of Stalinist Russia. And yet, somehow, humanity survived. Hope was never lost.
Madeleine L'Engle -- one of my favorite authors -- sums this up well in one of her poems:
This is no time for a child to be born,
With the earth betrayed by war & hate
And a nova lighting the sky to warn
That time runs out & the sun burns late.
That was no time for a child to be born,
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;
Honour & truth were trampled by scorn–
Yet here did the Saviour make his home.
When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on the planet earth,
And by greed & pride the sky is torn–
Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.
Mark Hertsgaard, in his essay
The Green Dream, writes: "...The most important lesson I learned during my global travels was the difference between optimism and hope, and that lesson continues to sustain me. Optimism is the belief that things will turn out well: but sad to say, the objective facts give little reason to expect that humanity will avoid environmental suicide. Hope, on the other hand, is an active, determined conviction that is rooted in the spirit, chosen by the heart, and guided by the mind." [1]
Advent, or the Christian faith in general, can be the basis for a facile, lazy optimism: Jesus will come back and solve all our problems for us, therefore everything will turn out all right without any work on our part. Or it can be the basis for a strong, courageous, creative hope: God is on our side in our struggle against hatred, discrimination, greed and destruction. We are not condemned to fight alone. Rather, as the birth of Christ shows, God cares enough about us -- about humanity -- to come and fight right along beside us, and to be born and even die as one of us as part of this struggle. And this gives me enormous hope.
Now to open it up for some discussion: what about you? What gives you hope?
[1] From The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in A Time of Fear, edited by Paul Rogat Loeb