Interfaith Insight - 2022
Permanent link for "Can we hope in this New Year?" by Doug Kindschi on January 4, 2022
Are you optimistic about 2022? Will it be better than 2021 or 2020?
We hoped for the end to the coronavirus last year about this time and
things began to open up. We went to restaurants and public events.
Places of worship restored in-person gathering and travel increased.
But then we learned about Delta and Omicron, not just Greek
letters but new variants that spread more rapidly. Travel restrictions
did not stop it from becoming worldwide and hospitals again were
filled to capacity. We learned more about the threat of the variants,
which seem to be more infectious than previous versions. Will this be
a never-ending challenge to our health and our health systems?
But as 2021 came to an end we also learned of the death of
Archbishop Tutu. He had gone through not just a couple of years of
challenge, but decades of oppression during apartheid in South Africa.
Through it all he frequently said, “I have never been an optimist. I
am a prisoner of hope.” He recognized that hope emerges not out of
optimism, but out of faith and action.
In a similar way, evangelical leader and social activist Jim
Wallis would say, “Hope means believing in spite of the evidence and
then watching the evidence change.”
But the evidence doesn’t just change on its own; hope requires
action. It isn’t just a feeling or having an optimistic attitude.
“Rather, hope is a decision,” Wallis writes, “a choice we make because
of this thing we call faith.” He said it is the most important thing
the faith community can offer to the world.
In this new year, it is the choice we make to be vaccinated, to
wear a mask indoors, to do what we can not just for ourselves but for
others and the community. From the faith perspective, it is our
response to the commandment to “love your neighbor.”
Writing in the Christian Century, publisher Peter Marty noted
that hope is very different from optimism; it is not just wishing that
things would be different or better.
“Wishing is a flat and powerless venture,” Marty goes on. “I may
wish upon a shooting star, or wish for a brand new car. But so what?
What does that wishing add up to? Hope goes so much deeper, requiring
risk and assuming responsibility.”
The Christian Century also featured an article by theology
professor Charles R. Pinches on “How to live in hope.” He writes,
“When we speak of hope in connection with love and faith, we are
placing it among the three theological virtues. … The theological
virtue called hope is linked to action or movement. Hope is a good
habit by which we move forward toward a future good that is both
possible and difficult to attain. … Difficulty is a part of the
definition of hope. This makes the phrase ‘difficult hope’ redundant.”
Pinches notes that the term used for life without hope is
“despair,” and Aquinas calls despair the greatest sin. In St. Paul’s
letter to the Corinthians, he extols “faith, hope, and love … and the
greatest of these is love.” (I Corinthians 13:13) Why then does
Aquinas consider the opposite of hope more important than hate, the
opposite of the greatest virtue of love? In the absence of faith, I
can still act. In the absence of love, even in the midst of hate, I
can act and reverse my thinking and restore love. But in the absence
of hope, I am paralyzed and nothing can be accomplished -- not even
love or faith.
Marty also writes of another hero of the apartheid struggle,
Nelson Mandela. In the later part of his 27-year imprisonment, he was
visited by his daughter and his new granddaughter who had still not
been named. Mandela gave her the name Zaziwe, an African word for
hope. Answering the question “Why?” he later wrote, “During all my
years in prison, hope never left me.” Marty then concludes, “Hope is
what sustains us when we’re not ready to give up on God beaming light
into our darkness.”
As people of faith, as well as anyone seeking the common good,
let us fight against despair, both personal and in our communities.
Even when the evidence is not clear, we make the decision to act and
to live in hope. Let us renew our hope and, in the difficult task of
working together, take the necessary action to restore our sense of
well-being and do what is right for the common good.
Posted on Permanent link for "Can we hope in this New Year?" by Doug Kindschi on January 4, 2022.