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.

Christians listen to others

Perhaps I'm wrong (it's a real possibility!) but this seems to get to the heart of a serious current issue: I believe that, as well as being defined in terms of what they say about their own faith, Christians ought to be known for the quality of their commitment to hear what others say. So when a woman complained that I had not given a "Christian" talk because I had explained some basic features of Islam to a church group, my response should have been (if I had dared to be truly honest) that enabling Christians to "listen to other voices" is genuinely Christian! It seems, though, that the media has done well: Muslims have been suucessfully defined as the wicked Other, the "race" (as this woman put it) which is to be legitimately feared. And of course, we should not dare to learn about the things we fear, because that might challenge the legitimacy of our fear! It is better, obviously, that the world be divided into knowns and unknowns, black and white, good and bad, because then we know where we are. However, is this Christian? Well, yes and no! The black-and-white thread of Christian faith, which can be traced even to Jesus, certainly nurtures a duality: but what is the nature of that duality? It is not "them" and "us", as in "religious others" and "our own kind", but - if we are to trust the traditions of Jesus - is rather more frequently a duality between the Powers-that-be and their victims, between religious/political/economic powers and those who suffer due to them. For Jesus made concerted efforts to re-integrated "the others", lepers and Samaritans and children feared because of their "dangerousness". Which brings me to the "no" - the duality of Jesus, which admittedly allows for a certain kind of dangerous division, is also the denial of other dualities; for we who are insiders are all-too-easily on the outside, and outsiders often display more grace. To follow in his footsteps therefore means openness to the other - within and beyond. Full stop.