What is hope?

Nancy Quigley writes: I was talking to a friend last week about hope and the balance and necessity of maintaining a portion of hope in the midst of reality. Finding this balance in a way that is honest might be very difficult when helping a friend face a terminal illness. And it can be challenging in times such as these, when we have lost patience with facing yet another Covid surge and we are so discouraged with our present political divide and the deep division in our country about education and masks and voting rights. Is there still a place for hope?

Someone sent this poem to me early in the new year. The author, Rubem Alves, was a Brazilian theologian, philosopher, educator, writer and psychoanalyst. He was also one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology and also wrote poetry. This poem is called, "What is Hope?"

Hope is the hunch
that the overwhelming brutality of facts
that oppress and repress us
is not the last word.

It is the suspicion that reality is more complex
than the realists want us to believe -
that the frontiers of the possible
 are not determined by the limits of the actual -
and in a miraculous and unexplained way,
life is opening up creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection.

But the two – suffering and hope –
must live from each other.
Suffering without hope
produces resentment and despair.
 But, hope without suffering
creates illusions, naivete and drunkenness.

So let us plant dates –
even though we who plant them will never eat them.

We must live by the love of what we will never see.
That is the secret discipline.

It is the refusal to let our creative act
be dissolved by our need for immediate sense experience
and it is a struggled commitment
to the future of our grandchildren.

Such disciplined hope is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints,
the courage to die for the future they envisage.
They make their own bodies
the seed of their highest hopes.   

-Rubem Alves