Near the beginning of my undergraduate studies, I had the opportunity to go on a study tour to the Holy Land. We visited many churches, archaeological sites, and museums in both Palestine and Israel. We also talked with many people—Jewish, Muslim, and Christian—to learn about their lives. On one hand, it was an incredibly hopeful experience learning about the peacemaking efforts of organizations such as Wi’am (The Palestinian Conflict Transformation Centre) and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. On the other hand, I struggled with feelings of despair after hearing story after story about the struggle of living under the occupation.
The Wi’am Centre in Bethlehem is located just meters away from the separation wall. Giant, foreboding concrete slabs and barbed wire shadow a small garden and children’s playground. Palestinian children play and laugh here, in spite of the soldiers with guns sitting up in the guard tower at the top of the wall. On this side of the wall, people have covered its surface in colourful graffiti messages of hope, visions of peace, and condemnation of the occupation. I was struck by one message written in dripping yellow spray paint that read: “Know Hope?” This play on words captured for me the tension between the seduction of despair and the necessity of hope—a tension that is wrestled with throughout the Scriptures. You only have to read through the Psalms or the Prophets to find examples of the push and pull between desolation and consolation.
When I consider our wounded world—the genocide in Gaza, the erosion of our ability to know what is real and true, and the climate crisis, to name just a few of these wounds—I am tempted to believe that despair is the correct response. I sometimes wonder: Where is God in all of this? Where is the church? Why bother even caring anymore? On the surface, despair does seem to be a reasonable human reaction to the stressful and real existential threats currently unfolding.
There are, however, two big shortcomings to the response of despair. First, it is not helpful, and second, it is not true, or at least, not the whole truth. In situations of upheaval, where the future is unknown, despair provides us with answers of a sort. Despair tells us that our efforts don’t matter, that it’s too late, that the problems are insoluble. And this is convenient for us. If we believe this to be true, we are absolved of any motivation to take action.
The writer Rebecca Solnit says despair is a luxury that those facing fire and flood cannot afford. She writes, “For those of us whose lives are already easy, giving up means making life even easier, at least in terms of effort. For the directly impacted, it means surrendering to devastation. Giving up on their behalf is not solidarity.” This is why I say that hope is a necessity. I’m not talking about the version of hope that seems to mean a warm, fuzzy feeling. Nor do I mean that hope requires ignoring the pain of the world, or believing that everything will turn out in the end. The Palestinian Christian director of Wi’am, Zoughbi Zoughbi, wrote in his Christmas message last year, “Hope… is not naïve optimism or despairing pessimism: it is an active, nonviolent and shared struggle for justice and peace.” Hope is a practice—it is something that we do, not a thing to possess, but a way of being, rooted in the goodness of life.
I am reminded of the story at the beginning of Mark chapter 2 where Jesus heals a paralyzed man. In this story, Jesus has been walking the countryside, casting out demons and healing the sick. When he returns to his home in Capernaum, many people crowd around him in a home to hear him speak. Four determined and loving friends, having heard of his miraculous ministry, decide to bring a paralyzed man to see Jesus. Finding the way inside blocked by others, they take to the roof and dig through it in order to lower their friend towards Jesus. I can just imagine how much courage and hope they must have embodied in order to get their friend to Jesus. There was no way for them to know whether the actions they took would result in healing for their friend, yet they did it anyway, because hope moves us forward in the world. It requires an imagination for what could be, and the will to work towards that vision, even if we don’t know whether we’ll be successful.
The people in this story belonged to a long tradition of hope, as we Christians do today. Our tradition tells stories of an exodus from a military superpower and the resurrection of life from death by execution. It tells us of a God who creates, redeems, and restores. These stories and promises help to ground our hope in God’s character and give us imagination for what life could be. The reality is, we don’t know what the future will hold! We don’t know when or how exactly God will bring about God’s promise of restoration. But hope, as Rebecca Solnit puts it, “locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.”
In my life, I find that hope is worked out day by day as a practice. For me, feeding the birds is a practice of hope. A few weeks ago, I finally remembered to fill up the bird feeders outside my dining room window, and the birds have started to arrive. Predictably, the resident gang of house sparrows have been the first to arrive, but then a downy woodpecker discovered the suet. I am filled with wonder! Hope reminds me that I don’t have to choose between my joy and my sorrow for the world. One doesn’t cancel out the other. In fact, it is precisely because I love and find joy in creation that my heart breaks when I learn that prairie birds are declining faster than birds in other habitats. Despite this heartbreak, I find that the world is still beautiful. It is still worthy of my care and attention. Loving the world means being willing to let it break your heart. This is what opens the door to solidarity and new ways of living that challenge business as usual. Our practices of hope are a resistance to the death-dealing powers that want to keep us overwhelmed and unable to take action.
Eco philosopher David Orr has famously said, “Hope is a verb with its shirtsleeves rolled up.” If we embody hope as a practice, rooted in the conviction that this life is beautiful and worthy of our care, protection, and joy, then it becomes realized when we work together to make that life possible for all people and places.
