The Best is yet to come?

I try to be a person of hope. But what makes it hard, is not even the hopelessness of the world; it is more often people's refusal to be hopeful. Hope - it seems to me - runs so deep within the Christian tradition, that I cannot understand the resistance to it; and I don't want to put it down simply to my relative youthful naivety! (Are 31-year olds "youthful"?!) After all, the resistance to hope comes in two forms, one naive, the other more understandable. The naive form may look like hope, but it is false hope, which is almost equivalent to no hope; it is that naive insistance that "all will be well", which particularly manifests itself in terms of "pie in the sky when you die", an unwillingness to grapple with the hopelessness of the world because of a greater belief in something more beautiful waiting for us. It is naive, because it overlooks - even suppresses - some of the messiness of the real world. It is hopeless, because it does not allow for the possibility of deep transformation here and now; it only imagines that the current state of things will not have the last word, without urging people to believe they can help transform them. The other form of resistance to hope is more understandable, because it is borne out of struggle and pain; older people speaking to younger people call it "life experience", that which tells us idealism loses its sharpness in the furnace of a harsh world. But to give up on hope because of experience, is to miss the point: hope may well be the smaller, weaker 'presence' within any harsh experience, but its very presence is sufficient to take on the invincible power of slavery, apartheid, racism and sexism. To believe the best is genuinely yet to come, we must therefore dare to root out and transform both that false hope which says good things come about if we just carry on doing what we do - no, hope demands change, now! And we must dare to root out and transform that pessimism infected by doom-and-gloom, or by cheap fears fuelled by cynical media, which says there's no point trying - no, hope demands commitment to new possibilities, lived as though they will have the last word over their resistance.