I hope. 


Another valuable lesson in semantics and discovering that I too can be a utopian thinker. 

I often glean inspiration for my various thoughts and attempts at meaningful writing from sermons at church. Today's sermon–on the first Sunday of Advent–not only interested me because my pastor, Dr. Pentz, not only played the semantics card, but he also played to the recent menagerie of ideas floating throughout my head. This time, those ideas were namely those concerning the status of humanity, a weighty subject, to be sure.

If you've read my Superman entry on this site from the day after Thanksgiving, you may be wondering what suddenly turned me into such an utopian idealist, someone who has fallen into the trap of believing that humankind can surpass its current limitations and somehow reach its full potential. After all, aren't I the one who has opined about the coming conflict between the US and China; how our country's political leadership has an entirely dire deficit of intellectual and moral capital; and how American Christians barely know (and much less practice) genuine Christianity any more? Granted, I've been lazy this season and haven't posted too much on those topics, but still, you would get the sense that I consider myself a pessimistic realist, a man who doesn't quite believe that human nature is all that inherently good. After all, doesn't this Richard character take some of his heroes from the class of men who forged his country's initial government with a sort of pessimistic attitude toward the very institutions that they were creating? They saw government as a force that needed to be constrained by checks and balances so that tyranny could be, at the very least, inhibited. Over 200 years on, they've done well for politicos from a different era.

But I digress.

For me, to view human nature is to see a glass that is half-empty, and draining rapidly. So why, then, do I still have all of this hope for my fellow man?

Throughout much of my life I've been full of lots of hope. Some of it has been realized "hope": studying for an exam, "hoping" for an 'A' and receiving an 'A'. Some of it has been a completely unfounded sense of "hope," independent of context and circumstance. But those two types of "hope," as Dr. Pentz articulated so well yesterday morning, are completely different.

There is the type of hope that I can have at the beginning of an orchestra season when I hear my ensemble's first rehearsal. If it is a good rehearsal, I can tell my section that I have "high hopes" for the year, but really I am not actually hoping, but I am expecting based on what I had heard. I expect that we will play well based on the context of a good rehearsal (or vice-versa).

Genuine hope is based on so much more faith than expectation for the future. In fact, although we only use one word for events yet to come–future–the Latin from which it is derived means something quite different than an expectation for coming times. Futura, in Latin, is based on circumstance and empirical, deductive reasoning and speaks to a finite time period with certain or near-certain results.

Contrast futura with the other Latin word relating to the future: adventus. Adventus anticipates the arrival of an event or series of events based purely on faith–on hope. Feeling the advent of (or hoping for) something such as world peace is wholly independent of present circumstances. In fact, as Dr. Pentz said, true hope is strongest and most telling when circumstances are worst and the futura future looks dim.

No one knew when the Messiah would come. But people hoped for it, and many still do.

On that same vain, no one knows when (or if) humanity will reach its full potential for good, but many people, including myself, hope for it.

Thus it is valuable to hope and dream for the apparently impossible. Hope gives humanity a better outlook than would be provided were we to simply analyze the relatively sorry state of human affairs and anticipate a particular future. Hope keeps us going and inhibits mass existential crises of the paralyzing kind. To place rational thought together with lofty ideals is one of the ways in which God made humanity in His own image: He gave us the ability to choose between good and evil, hoping that, as a whole, we would choose the latter. (Whether or not God finds the need to hope is quite another discussion indeed.)

So do I really see the glass of humanity as being half-empty? Perhaps it's sufficient to see that the glass is there, and that while things may not always look very rosy, I can hope for the advent of a brighter era.

My dad's firm's old slogan was "Making Dreams Into Reality." His clients' dreams weren't of the sort that a positive humanologist would seek, nor were they truly hopeful dreams. But his slogan does carry in it one last kernel of necessity that is needed so that the hopeful man's dreams can be realized: the need for action to transform a general idea into a result.

Slowly, deliberately and practically are all strategies by which we can transform our race...unless, of course, we can walk on water.

Until then, never lose hope. 

Posted: Mon - November 28, 2005 at 01:08 AM          

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