On Radical Hope

Where is our true hope against hope but on the boundary of death and life? We all live nearer to death then we may realize, and yet also we are nearer to life. MG 

To hope for what is clearly impossible is downright folly. Yet clearly there are situations in which to hope is foolish yet not to hope is cynicism, or maybe cowardice. A father standing at the bedside of his fatally ill child hopes on when all hope is gone. 

He has no objective grounds for expecting his child's recovery; he knows that he is dying, yet he cannot and will not abandon him to the grave. To be devoid of hope in such circumstances would show a want of fidelity, a lack of courage, a taint of inhumanity that would mark the man as lacking some kind of integrity. 

On the other hand, to hope in the sense of expectation, to suppose that it were reasonable to believe that his son could recover, would show a want of clear thinking, an unwillingness to face facts. 

No, this father hopes against hope as we say, aware that all hope is gone yet unwilling to capitulate before death's assault on the boy who claims his heart in love. Like Abraham, when hope is gone, he hopes on in faith, in fidelity; and his hope is an affirmation which cannot otherwise be spoken: "This dying child is my son — forever."

In hope a person thus affirms what the circumstances of his life cannot support: his confidence that his life is grounded in the power that gives continuing and enduring meaning to his present in spite of the fact that all hope is gone. 

So, his son dies, his beliefs and his ex­pectations are shattered, his friends are politely sympathetic but totally unable to stand with him in the intensity of his grief and emptiness. Death, doubt, deceit — these three can rob us of every reason for wanting to live; but one may yet hope on.

His hope doesn't alter the circumstances of his life; it can't raise his child from the dead, nor restore his broken convictions, nor give him friends with courage and humanity. It wins for him only himself — naked, it may be, defenseless, humbled, stripped of any assurance about tomorrow, immobilized in the still powerful memory of yesterday's disasters—but himself able to affirm his life in spite of the overwhelming powers that threaten it.

Hope, you see, like everything Christian, is a trifle mad. One hopes in spite of the folly of it, certain that what one hopes for cannot come to pass, yet confident that, in spite of this, one's hope will be fulfilled. Another dares to hope for shalom in a world incurably stricken by the scourge of racism and hatred and war. 

Foolish? Obviously. But not so to hope is to flunk out of life in cowardice. A person, desperate in the realization of inner weakness and dishonesty, dares to hope that he will become the person he dreams of being, in spite of the fact that he knows his will to be totally in bondage to these attitudes. 

And precisely in the folly of such hope, in this mad defiance of reasonable expectation something of the grandeur of man is visible. 

Otherwise hope never rises higher than a careful and cautious calculation of probabilities, in which one becomes wise about what the circumstances of his life will allow, what chances he can afford to take, how binding a commitment he can safely make, how honest he can be in saying to this person or that what is in his heart. It's safer that way; but the price of security is the loss of hope — the loss of the courage to hope on when all hope is gone...

Faith is courage: the courage to accept the miracle of God's presence when all hope is gone.

Steve Hartshorne