Hope ...

Hope …


In a previous post “Further out of view … further out of mind …” I talked about my ongoing struggle to find meaningful ways to live in hope instead of fear.

Margaret Somerville, in her recent book “The Ethical Imagination: Journeys for the human spirit.” (Anansi Press, 2006) in a chapter titled “Past Virtues for a Future World: Holding our humanness on trust.” (pages 199 to 248) mentions hope as one of the “human qualities that I believe will be essential in taking ethical paths into our human future. ”

The five “old virtues” Margaret Somerville considers essential are “trust, courage, compassion, generosity and hope”(p 208).

This ethicist articulates the pain and harm experienced when others dash our hopes as we try to bring safety, security, support and justice into our children’s, and other mothers and children lives after experiencing domestic violence, and then systemic and judicial abuse.


See the following excerpts from pages 235 to 239.


P 235
“Because hope is linked to the future, it’s linked to potentiality. For this reason, the ethics of potentiality and the idea that it can be ethically wrong to deliberately negate potential are relevant to the discussion of hope. We can describe hope as a sense of possibility – the sense that our best dreams, no matter how short term they might be, are open to fulfilment. Helping others to find hope requires imagination and creativity on the part of individuals, institutions, and societies; our enemies in this enterprise are apathy, boredom, inactivity, and nihilism. I believe acting in ways that cause such a loss of passion should be viewed as an ethical “mortal sin.”


P 237

“Hope and the search for meaning in life are linked, in that each helps us find the other. … They are also linked in that the absence of either has the same impact on us: without meaning or without hope, we believe we cannot go on living.

Robert F. Kennedy linked hope and justice, saying:

Each time a person stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, they send forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, these ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
(Kennedy, Robert F. “A Tiny Ripple of Hope.” Day of Affirmation Address at Cape Town University. Delivered June 6, 1966 Cape Town, South Africa. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rfk-capetown.htm.)


P 238 - 239
“… I have written elsewhere that hope is the oxygen of the human spirit: without it, our human spirit dies: with it, we can survive appalling suffering and surmount incredible obstacles. A statement attributed to Saint Augustine might explain why hope functions in this way. He said, “Hope has two lovely daughters: anger and courage. Anger so that what must not be may not be; courage so that would should be can be.” Those emotions cause us to engage with the world and doing so nourishes our human spirit – life and what we do with it matters to us and others, that is, we find meaning. Reciprocally, we must have a sense of the human spirit if we are to have the capacity to find hope. The issue is, how can we nurture that capacity?

I understand evolutionary biologist and futurist Elisabet Sahtouris to be addressing this question when she writes:

Recognizing our responsibility and opportunity for creating our reality is the only way I see for making the shift from fear to love – from a world of scarcity and greed to one of abundance in which all people are empowered to fulfil their needs in sustainable ways. To achieve this, we must break through long cultural conditioning on our lack of power, our willingness to accept, and thus co-create, economic and political inequities that disempower people, currency systems that promote these inequities and anything else preventing the full expression of human potential in sustainable ways.” (Sahtouris, Elisabet. “Humanity 3000 Participant Statement. ‘ Foundation for the Future. http// www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/humanity3000.html)

“Sahtouris is speaking from an altruistic point of view, but even if we were to adopt a selfish point of view, creating the possibility of hope for others may be the best – or perhaps the only – way to find hope for ourselves, especially if we are to leave a legacy of hope for our children and their children.

Hope for one’s children has been a primary experience for most people across the generations.”

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Take care ... take heart .... Merinda