Hope is my imagined future approaching me. As I recognize its presence, I realize I invited it and I will be responsible for giving it shape. Yet the way of its path is a mystery. It is sometimes accompanied by an angel, ancestors, or a host of others who inhabit the future of the future. Sometimes, it arrives from its journey with surprising speed, sometimes deeply exhausted, sometimes defeated, always defiant. To my wonder, hope has no qualms about starting over from scratch. This is its creative essence. Hope inspires the capacity to play, write, and sing the future into reality. That is my hope. What about yours?
I know that there are those who have suffered deeply from hope’s absence. Without hope, even the present seems futile. I have to ask, what evil force can so diminish hope’s being? When someone says they have no hope, I realize that I have the privilege of never having been told that I cannot hope. In that moment, I set my hope aside so that instead, I can be present for its absence in others, as hope patiently awaits recognition for what it makes possible. Once awakened, it can be a call through powerful despair.
The genius of hope is its abundance and its capacity to regenerate itself, sometimes with nothing more than an in-breath. As do its companions, faith and love, hope’s being radiates a warm attractive field while tightening our social bonds.
As a mystery, hope can serve as a meditation. It can also be a prayer, which I offer in service to others’ hopes. As I write this, the emerging images land as words, which I hope are true to my experience. This hope is companioned by a second one: I hope that language is a bridge connecting us and, in the crossing, becomes an offering to the spiritual world. For those who have crossed the threshold, our hopes inspire their future. The deed of hope, like any action we take in the world, has long effects across time, space, and even incarnations. So, hope shapes the world, is part of its ethos and destiny, and then, transformed as gift, becomes a part of shaping our future. As such, this gift is a foundational and generative energy that is the wellspring of will and elemental to wellbeing. I do not take hope lightly, and yet it is becoming light.
Illustration Gilda Bartel
