The sustaining of hope in dark times

As a scholar in theology and a person who believes in a loving and creative life force at the centre of all things, I nevertheless respectfully place my perspective alongside those of others who may come from a totally different understanding of reality.

Hope is, in itself, an act of faith - not, of course, faith which is necessarily religious. It can equally be what I would call a foundational expectation of joy. To live with hope is to be fully alive and to give up hope is the entry into death. Hope rises in the human spirit and challenges what is with the dream of what might be.

I have had enough tough journeys in my own life to know that any superficial approach to the inviting of the dream of joy is an offence and a betrayal of those who enter the grave and costly struggles for universal hope. Hope is often hard-won. Its cost is sometimes life itself.

I want to suggest that the diminishing of hope is fundamentally about the undermining of ethical life in general. Oddly enough, I don’t think that hope is dependent on people doing the right thing all the time - obviously none of us do that. It is about doing our best and genuinely accepting responsibility when we make mistakes.

Hope thrives on encouraging reference points in the lives of others and our capacity to trust those who lead us. It is rebuilt when integrity rises up before us and reminds us of who we can be and who we sometimes have been.

It is an irony that, as we are surrounded by incessant talk of “Australian values”, we are demonstrating such a paucity of ordinary human values in our corporate, political and social life - both here and globally. Mary Zournazi, editor of the book Hope (Pluto Press 2002), in my view, rightly says, “The success of right-wing governments ... lies in reworking hope in a negative frame. Hope masquerades as a vision, where the passion and insecurity felt by people become part of a call for national unity and identity. ... It is a kind of future nostalgia, a ‘fantastic hope’ charged by a static vision of life and the exclusion of difference.”

I would also suggest that genuine hope is automatically diminished when we define ourselves as good and others as evil. We enter the most dangerous territory of all, in fundamentalism - that which engages us with an absence of doubt.

Having said that, I want to now discuss five main strategies for the restoration of hope:

Determined perseverance with analysis

The incessant spin in our environment creates, what I would call, a superficial virtual reality. This “reality” is founded on brief grabs of ill-considered information and propaganda, which usually advantages the speaker or writer rather than inviting analysis. It regularly dismisses alternative views with stereotypical labelling of their authors and without any genuine discussion of the ideas presented.

To take just one issue - why do we not hear responsible people pointing out that we, of the so-called “west”, do not require of ourselves and our friends what we so self-righteously demand of other countries? Now that our friends are well-armed, these countries virtuously sign non-proliferation treaties and act as though others like Iran and North Korea are shocking and aggressive when they want to have the same destructive toys we and our friends have.

One of the ways in which we might raise the possibility of our so-called enemies contributing to hope is by acting towards them with honesty and integrity.

We hold world trade negotiations as though we are doing good works for the world when they are primarily for our own benefit.

Analysis is not, of course, just about informing people. It is about inviting them to think deeply and critically about life, to search for the truth and to discover together better ways forward. It is to equip people to take their rightful place in the democratic processes and to take their part in the better formation of universal community.

In my experience, stories often communicate analysis in ways that dense writing does not and also they are more likely to break through barriers of prejudice and ignorance.

Faithfulness and passion matters

A lack of hope is often about one’s perspective on universal life. You have a go at changing something and nothing happens. You feel as though you may as well give up.

As a theologian, I believe that it is very helpful to have what is known in theological terms, as an eschatological view of life - whether you put a god in there or not. This is about perceiving oneself as a small, but unique, speck in the continuum of universal life - stretching endlessly into the past and into the future. In this perspective, you only need to do your bit faithfully because you are not God or a god.

I have found it helpful to ask oneself what is the issue about which you care most and then focus on that for faithful and persistent action. If we take on the whole world, it naturally overwhelms us. Faithfulness is, indeed, about persistence. When people see your name under several letters to editors, they assume that you are someone who gets her letters published. In fact, I probably get only about one in five of those I write published.

Every little offering you make to good and truth, even if you can see no reward for your work in the building of universal community, is part of a grander whole - so you need never feel that you have achieved nothing.

Living as if trust is possible

One of the things which Jesus Christ said was that we are “to become as little children” if we are to enter the reign of heaven. I used to ponder the meaning of this, until my own life was threatened by hate and violence, both literally and metaphorically. What I found was that, as I moved in a dangerous environment, I began to look distrustfully around me and took fewer risks with relationships. In other words, I had lost that openness to life which the trust of a child demonstrates.

Of course, sadly, the child gradually finds that trust is betrayed and adult attitudes of wariness and self-protection expand as the years pass, usually in proportion to the number of betrayals. However, I want to daringly suggest that a sign of hope, and the creation of more hope, comes from an adult who quite intentionally decides to live as though trust is possible. This is a refusal to collude with those who betray trust.

It is a somewhat perilous way to live and most people, including myself, rarely stick to it all the time. However, to live as though others could be trusted is to invite endless new possibilities and to receive many unexpected gifts. You have to hold onto everyone else as you go because you live with fewer defences, but it is worth it in my experience, and it adds to hope in those around you as well as in yourself.

Constantly restoring ourselves

It is tiring as well as inspiring to live as though hope is possible. Those of us who lived through dry years of social activism learn the hard way that one’s spirit will need regular renewal. However you understand your own inner life, it is as vulnerable as the rest of you. We will each, if we search, find the sources which strengthen our spirit and there is no one blue-print for doing that.

If I refer to universal, rather than human community, in this paper, it is because I suspect that hope is a universal goal and is fed by the universe itself, if we will care for it and respect it. Music and poetry, drama and art are, I believe, a never-to-be underestimated resource which is built into the universe for our survival and which are never luxuries.

Some of us will have our hearts lifted as we look at a mountain, others as they stand beside the sea. I am personally restored by walking into the city and simply mingling among its people and marvelling at its skyscrapers.

Ethical and just life is always about building harmony and community in universal life. Because that is the goal, universal life will feed our spirits on the way if we will hold open to its gifts. The loss of life in every form on our planet is not just about our physical survival but about our survival in body, heart, mind and spirit.

Walking towards the deathly forces

What lies at the very centre of my faith, and underlies my hope, is a paradigm and a paradox. Obviously Jesus Christ lived out this paradigm but you will find it over and over in the ancient stories of many cultures and religions.

I could as easily tell you the story of “The Tears of Lady Meng” - an ancient story from Taiwan. Lady Meng cared for the poor and oppressed around her. In the end, she became a threat to the oppressive forces and one day they seized her and carried her to the river bank. The suffering people watched in horror and despair as she was thrown into the deep waters. As they watched, they saw her go down into the waters and then she swam away as a beautiful silver fish. They knew that her love and life would never be defeated.

It is my absolute conviction that the pathway to hope and life is via the deathly things in human existence. You walk towards them with determination, holding onto everyone else as you go and, as you enter those destructive environments and engage with courage with the powers which wait for you there, you find with surprise that this very struggle is the pathway through to a grander life.

You will undoubtedly be wounded on the way and some people may even die, but I believe that there is no other road to genuine hope for us all. In the end, the road to hope is always the road which leads straight towards the powers which would remove that hope.

There once was a young woman from the Philippines. She is an icon of hope for me. I met her at a conference in 1977 when the struggle against the Marcos regime was at its height. She was about 22-years-old, a recent graduate in social work and had just conducted a workshop on her work of supporting the families of political prisoners in Manila. As she sat down beside me she said, "Dorothy, I think those words may cost me my life and I don't really want to die". She paused and thought for a moment, then said "But I have to live!" She was arrested by the military on her return to Manila and her body was tortured and found in a mass grave some months later. Her name was Jessica Sales and she did indeed live more than most of us, even though she died.

Every time we walk with courage towards the barriers which separate us from each other and those who create them - the barriers of racism, sexism, heterosexism, of class, culture, exploitation, injustice, lies, violence, abuse and lack of compassion, we will find on the other side of them a great hope. It will be a glimpse of a different universe and there is no price too high to pay for that.

If you want encouragement on you journey towards hope, in my experience, it is often the poorest and most oppressed people who will give it to you. In their laughter among the pain and their sheer delight in the smallest of survival gifts around them, in their hope in the face of what seems like impossible odds, is the resource which restores the hope of people like ourselves.