Hope
Some of our most common words come from we don’t know where, though we might make a wild guess now and then — boy, dog, and today’s word, hope. I’d say that so long as a boy’s got his dog, he and the dog have hope, but what would that mean? Maybe that they can catch something good to eat, or find their way back home, or do a number on the robber who’s got the kid tied up in the barn; in general, you hope that something good may still happen, even though your belly is grumbling, or the day is far gone, or the robber has a gun. But hey, a good dog is a match for a bad man on most days, anyhow!
A dear friend of mine told me long ago that hope wasn’t the same as optimism, and I saw right off that he was correct, and in fact, optimism is the slick-talker with the gold tooth and a bridge to sell, as far from hope as a confidence scheme is from faith. Herman Melville’s Confidence-Man on the Mississippi steamboat never talks about faith in God, but about confidence, usually confidence in your fellow man. That’s while he’s about to rob you blind. So what then is hope? I like the way Charles Peguy portrays her in his poem, The Portal to the Mystery of Hope. Faith and Charity are Hope’s elder sisters, and you’d think that either one of them would be the leader of the three, but no, the “leader” is Hope, who is just a little girl, a child, and she doesn’t think things out in advance — she can’t, but it’s well that she can’t, and she wouldn’t want to, either. She has all the simple trust and high-heartedness of a child, and her sisters Faith and Charity follow where she goes.
For almost 200 years, some people in the west have tried to replace hope with optimism, not for persons but for the whole human race. We were getting better and smarter all the time, and if we were only brave enough or determined enough, or cruel enough, we could force things and have paradise on earth, right now. Just think of all the paradises on earth the optimistic man has built! The Soviet Union, Mao’s China — many another, too, though not as big and bloody. The thing about optimism is that it comes up against two inevitable realities: sin and death. And that’s where hope comes in. We don’t hope in man. We hope in God. Why, Abraham had to hope against hope when he climbed the mountain with his boy Isaac on that dim morning — that’s where we get the phrase from, or where we first find it in English, in the 1300’s, in a translation of Genesis. And think again about that little girl. Why can the child hope? Because she knows she is in the hands of her Father, no matter what happens. We don’t have to be like jittery traders in stock, our hearts skipping a beat when the shares go south, as all earthly things eventually will do, since nothing here can last. We can be like that child.
What if your hope is dim? That’s the old word for despair: wanhope, a fine and suggestive word — imagine somebody with a pale face and a weak heart. But let your hope be like the little girl in Peguy’s poem. It’s as the apostle Paul says: “In hope we are saved.”
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The ultimate hope is simple. It is to enter The Kingdom.
Our ultimate hope is so simple. It is to enter The Kingdom.