into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5:5). In the words of the classical statement of Christian faith, we no longer live but Christ lives in us.
* * *
To have faith is to have hope. Yet this statement is often taken to mean hoping for the end times when all will be made new. Hope, however, is a lived reality in the life of faith, here and now. It is not easy to hope in a world that appears increasingly to be on the cusp of implosion. While I was writing this book, the United Nations hosted yet another large gathering to debate what can be done about climate change. The world’s economy is in dire straits. Hunger, violence and disease are decimating the lives of millions on our continent. What does it mean to hope in today’s world?
Through the countless dark moments of apartheid I had hope. I believed it would end and that justice and equality would eventually prevail. I devoured the banned writings of Steve Biko and Nelson Mandela; I chose to oppose the injustice of apartheid mainly through Christian institutions. I found a home in the Christian Institute, the Institute for Contextual Theology and later in the secular Black Sash. At no time did I feel completely without hope. Right would prevail. I learnt the power of political and social analysis; I embraced liberation theologies and I focused on the connections between oppressive modes, such as sexism, racism and homophobia. Those times shaped my story – a story of hybridity because of my mixed cultural origins, and a growing sense of marginalisation in parts of my own community, contrasted with a deepening involvement with the story of Jesus of Nazareth and what it meant in my context. I hoped because of him. And I learnt about what hope is and is not.
I learnt that to hope is never to surrender our power to imagine a better world, that present unjust arrangements are provisional and precarious, and do not require acceptance. I also leant to be cautious about a false sense of fulfilment that believes that all is well, that promises have been kept and gifts received. If we so believe, we merely hold on mutely to what we have and lose our desire for something better. Just keeping life manageable on our terms is not hope. I saw that refusing to bow to such civility is an act of hope, for it is not satisfied with crumbs. I learnt that to lament injustice is an expression of hope for it calls God to account and rests on the unshakable belief that God will act.
To my surprise, I find that today there are times when I struggle to hope. Racism in many guises continues to flourish, inequality in our country becomes more entrenched as the gap widens between those who have and those who do not. Violent crime casts a dark shadow over the lives of all South Africans. Crude materialism permeates our society: it is encouraged in our media, visible in the lives of our leaders, and imitated in the desires of the young. I want to hope for a better world for my grandchildren. I know that there is no faith without hope. Chastened, I find that I once again need to remember in whom I hope, what I learnt about hope in the “bad old days” and how to live with hope, no matter the circumstances. Emily Dickinson wrote:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches on the soul,
And sings the tune without the word,
And never stops at all.
The song remains. Hope does not stop. True hope is the oxygen of faith. So I remind myself that:
Hope is not optimism. It is not that blithe sense that all will end well (alles sal regkom), because human progress is guaranteed. In the face of dreadful human need and the ever-increasing fragility of the earth, the belief in human progress is at best insubstantial. Neither is hope vested in naïve, upbeat, popular ideologies, which, according to Eagleton, “[…] tend to mistake a hubristic cult of can-do-ery for the virtue of hope”. Hope is not magic, or living “as if”, or projecting what we hope for onto some nebulous future.
Hope is not vested in some future victory. We must guard against the unattractive nature of Christian triumphalism as embodied in the apocalyptic that abandons historical realities while trumpeting exclusive insights into how God will in future break into history to bring about God’s purposes. This kind of triumphalism is no more than a pie-in-the-sky-when-I-die exclusive claim that all will be well with me one day, rather than Julian of Norwich’s universal vision that “All will be well, all manner of things will be well”. Theologian Flora Keshgegian comments: “Once-and-for-all thinking privileges the end over the means; it turns visions into utopias, transforms imagination into wish fulfilment and hope into the eternal embodiment of desire.” This so-called hope robs us of our ability to understand the workings of power entangled in structural injustice, and our roles in perpetuating what is wrong now. It prevents us from coming to grips with our fallibility and the fragility of our world. It chokes true lived hope.
Hope is to be lived. The way I hope should be the way I live. To live out my hope is to try to make that which I hope for come about – sooner rather than later. Not surprisingly, hope is usually associated with the future. Christian hope is too often garbed in language about the end times – we hope in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Certainly hope has future dimensions. We do hope in a future with God, we hold to the coming vision of the fullness of God’s reign on earth. Hope is both present and future. Brazilian theologian and philosopher Ruben Alves says: “Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is to dance it.” I am afraid that I cannot comprehend hope beyond history. I do hope that this world will be redeemed, but my dance of faith happens now. The hope that I find is a hope anchored in the history and presence of the person who at the same time is my hope for the future of all creation.
Hope is risky. It has no guarantees. German Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann speaks of “the experiment of hope” because it can lead to disappointment, danger, as well as surprise. “Hope is an experiment with God, with oneself, and with history,” he writes. Twenty years ago I wrote:
To choose life is to choose risk. As disappointment follows disappointment, we risk losing our vision, we are tempted to despair. The challenge is to dare to hope, and in this daring to wrestle with all that seeks to deprive us of hope or disempower us. Wrestling is risky. Our strength may fail us or we may emerge wounded and scarred. Reminding ourselves that God’s creation was the greatest risk ever taken, we as partners in this venture will have to risk in order to claim our rightful place as agents of history, seeking liberation for the groaning creation.
I have no reason to add anything more today.
Hope recognises the tragic in history. This book describes the blessing of being able to deal with the incongruities of life with humour. This does not mean that I do not honour the tragic in life. Hope must recognise the tragic in history to avoid blind optimism. No happy endings are ensured. History repeats itself with a monotony that would be boring were it not so tragic. The tragic demands that we remember. We acknowledge absence and loss, pain and fear, and that nothing present on earth is either past or finished. We live with the ambiguity of hope: hope for a better life and the stark reality of shattered hopes. When roads fork we are forced to make choices and have no way of knowing what will follow. Tragedy cannot be avoided. God’s presence is found in the compassion that prevents suffering from having the last word, and in resilience that continues unabated. This active hope refuses to be defeated. To inhabit hope despite woeful circumstances is to offer a counter-story that dares us to become involved in making that which we hope for come about.
Hope is learning to wait. Hope requires patience and endurance, and is the opposite of resignation. Hope is expectant, open to being surprised, and willing to ride out the long wait. It is fuelled by a passion for the possible that is realistic because hope cannot be assuaged by instant gratification. Samuel Beckett’s well-known play Waiting for Godot is about two characters who wait endlessly and in vain for Godot to appear. The play depicts the meaninglessness of life. Expectant waiting, unlike waiting for Godot, dares to remind us of the One in whom we hope, of promises made, of assurances given, of unending love and mercy. There
