Hope

The illustration shows a woman holding a candle sitting in the darkness, with blue, cloud-like shapes surrounding her on the edges.

Illustration by Lauren Wright-Pittman 

ACROSS THE UNITED STATES, people will soon be preparing for Thanksgiving. We’ll name what we’re grateful for and then, in an ironic turn, let “Black Friday” convince us we need more. “Cyber Monday” will catch all the credit cards that made it, un-maxed, through the weekend. “Giving Tuesday” lets us pay the virtue toll to keep spending guilt-free on the yet-to-be-named following Wednesday. Whew! The consumerist drive in November and December makes the temporality of liturgical living difficult. But let’s try. November marks the end of both Ordinary Time and the church year. Ordinary Time is the day-in, day-out rhythm of everyday life as we await Christ’s second coming. In these final weeks, we’re not quite waiting on Christ, then — as we do during Advent — so much as we’re preparing ourselves to wait.

Come Advent, the scripture readings will be filled with anticipatory hope. But, as the old church year ends, the passages are full of anxiety and dread. The Hebrew Bible selections spotlight the escalating threat of the coming judgment. Paul’s letters pour out end times panic. Or, as songster Leonard Cohen put it, “Everybody knows it’s coming apart.” In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus forces us to ponder which side we are on. It’s not easy to sit with all this. I want to skip over to Advent hope (or even Christmas joy). But I invite us to hospice the old year’s death throes before welcoming new life at the stable door.

JR. Forasteros 8-02-2023
Philomena (played by Dame Judi Dench) and Sixsmith (played by Steve Coogan) sit next to each other in a waiting room. Philomena is wearing a black jacket with a flower-patterned scarf. Sixsmith is wearing a dark brown jacket and blue jeans.

From Philomena

THE BEST CHRISTIAN MOVIE you’ve never seen (even though it was Oscar-nominated for best picture!) turns 10 this year. That movie is Philomena, adapted from The Lost Child of Philomena Lee: A Mother, Her Son and A Fifty-Year Search, by British journalist Martin Sixsmith. The film stars Dame Judi Dench as the titular mother and Steve Coogan as Sixsmith. While the book primarily focuses on Philomena’s son Michael Hess, the film more closely traces the mother’s story. As a pregnant teenager, Philomena was abandoned to a convent of nuns who forced young women to work without pay and sold their children to wealthy Americans looking to adopt.

On her son’s 50th birthday, Philomena weeps, clutching the only pictures she has of him. Despite her efforts, she has never been able to learn his fate. When Sixsmith, a disgraced journalist, learns of Philomena’s plight, he agrees to help her. What began as a distraction from his own troubles soon shifts to captivation. Despite Philomena’s assurances that the sisters of the convent have done their best to care for the women and children in their charge, Sixsmith uncovers a devilish conspiracy of silence.

Yvonne Su 10-31-2022
The cover of 'Lapvona' featuring a tied-up lamb by Otessa Moshfegh.

Lapvona, by Ottessa Moshfegh / Penguin

WHAT IS A devout village to believe in during a time of famine and plague? Ottessa Moshfegh presents a story devoid of hope and redemption in her latest novel Lapvona, proving that in dire times, believing is not a want but a need.

Moshfegh has a flare for brutality (Eileen and Death in Her Hands). With Lapvona, Moshfegh has crafted a medieval fantasy in the vein of Game of Thrones. It reads like a fairy-tale epic for adults, with its cast of fringe characters and fable-esque sequence of events. But this fantasy is far more depraved: As religious as the villagers are, there is no redemption to be found in this village.

T. Denise Anderson 9-30-2022
Illustration of an hourglass on a teal background; top of the hourglass holds a red/white/blue dem. donkey, rep. elephant, and flag; these dissolve into sand in the bottom of the hourglass. Three people surround the glass, staring at the flag.

Illustration by Ewan White

WE ARE APPROACHING the end of the liturgical year, and the texts have a thread of anticipation running through them. We are deep into the promises conveyed by the prophets and the eschatological vision cast by Jesus. The texts are inviting us to prepare ourselves for something — but what, exactly?

The last Sunday in November, in many traditions, is the Advent Sunday of hope. In biblical Greek, the verb is elpizō (“hope”), which means to wait for salvation with both joy and full confidence. When we hope, we wait not out of boredom or a lack of options but in full confidence that what we are waiting for will arrive. This is the same word used in Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” The word “assurance” here can also be translated as “foundation,” as in that of a house. Faith is what anchors our hope into the ground and allows it to stand upright. Faith also often requires that we act before we see. Our hope is first materialized in our faith before it is ever materialized in our reality. Hope pushes us to walk, move, and live as if what we’ve hoped for has already arrived.

Perhaps this moment calls to us to build foundations for the futures we need in defiance of our present realities. Our texts dare us to live into new possibilities, even as our current condition offers far fewer promises.

Jim Rice 9-01-2022
Raised hands lift up banners with cartoon-style clouds on a sky-blue background with a bright yellow sun in the center. Behin the banners, blue-gray cartoon clouds are shadowed on a dark gray background

Illustration by Adrián Astorgano

WHY THE RECENT surge in union activity? The nationwide shortage of workers is one factor, to be sure, as is the COVID pandemic. But another contagion might be even more important: Hope. “You see it most clearly with the Starbucks campaign where they won those initial two victories, and it was like a switch going off for people: ‘We can do this!’” labor attorney Alex van Schaick told Sojourners. “There was a contagion effect, in a positive sense. Hope is contagious — I think that’s really true.” Clayton Sinyai, executive director of the Catholic Labor Network, agreed that the confidence and resolve of workers is making a dramatic difference. “It seemed for a long time that employers had gotten so skilled at manipulating the union election process that a lot of people had become very discouraged about trying to form unions,” Sinyai said. “Now we’re seeing a generation of workers who are not taking no for an answer.”

Christina Colón 12-29-2021
California firefighter fighting Caldor Fire

A firefighter works as the Caldor Fire burns in Grizzly Flats, California, Aug. 22, 2021. REUTERS/Fred Greaves TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

“We are hungry for renewal,” Valarie Kaur wrote in the January 2021 issue of Sojourners. “Sound government is necessary but not sufficient to heal and transition America. Only we the people can bring our communities together, tend to our wounds, and do the labor of reckoning, reimagining, and remaking our nation, block by block, heart to heart.”

Olivia Bardo 12-08-2021

At its core, the Christmas story is radical. Christ enters the world in the form of a marginalized infant — a story about finding hope amid brokenness by pushing forward into the darkness. We cannot find the true light of Christmas without understanding what it means to be in the dark, opening our eyes to the injustices in our neighborhoods.

Jayne Marie Smith 10-21-2021

Vanessa Martinez Soltero is an activist bridging her Christian faith and Indigenous traditions to sustain herself and community.

Julie Vassilatos 1-27-2021
The cover of "Darkness is as Light."

WE ARE LIVING in dark times. A perfectly timed and distinctive new devotional, Darkness is as Light, wrestles with the dark, and from its many entries emerges a clear chronicle of the real power and meaning of God’s grace for us even—especially—in the dark.

The book consists of nine sections of eight entries each, beginning with a poem by Tennessee poet Allison Boyd Justus. Meditations by 22 authors are based on scriptural texts and grouped by theme: provision, sweetness, healing, death, balm, help, trial, consolation, and closeness. Graphic artist David Moses created striking cover art and illustrations for each section.

These are self-consciously women’s words based on women’s experiences. In her introduction, publisher and editor Summer Kinard draws connections from these modern meditations to ancient women mystics and a kind of Gothic spiritual ethos. There are occasional visions recounted in these pages, and a miracle or two, but mainly we see the range of women’s lived experiences, met every step of the way by grace. The grace of Christ shared with shunned St. Photine, the woman at the well. Ravages of bipolar disorder. Sexual abuse. Food insecurity, homelessness, inability to pay the rent. Leaving an abusive spouse. Caretaking for a chronically ill spouse. Sheltering from an abusive parent. Loss of a child. Unexpected surgeries. The exhaustion of mothering five young children.

Jim Rice 1-26-2021
Illustration of someone's feet as they walk out a door.

Illustration by Darcy Muenchrath

THE TROUBLING events of Jan. 6 helped many realize that we can never take for granted the staples of democracy, including the peaceful transfer of power. The violent uprising, spurred by the outgoing president, offered sobering reminders that our society’s most deep-seated pathologies are very much with us. The new administration promises not only relief from the traumatic outrages of the last four years, but also the prospect of seriously engaging urgent issues, from the pandemic and racialized policing to climate change and the crisis of poverty.

Rohadi Nagassar 5-28-2020

Lament, much like our understanding of salvation, ties my suffering with those around me. Christian traditions too distant from experiences of collective marginalization will have trouble penning laments about deliverance from shared sorrow. We need practices of solidarity that reveal those who are unseen in our world starting with the cries in our worship, followed by the witness in our deeds. Yet laments that do not incorporate the collective experience fail to produce practices that could help us survive in spaces of vulnerability and communal loss.

Photo by Kyle Ellefson on Unsplash

How do we maintain hope when our earth is brutalized daily by the climate disasters brought on by human greed, denial, and consumption?

Walter Brueggemann 5-31-2019

WHEN WE ARE contained in the world that is immediately in front of us, we will inescapably end in despair. The inventory of despair-producers is well known: The failure of public institutions; the collapse of moral consensus; the failure of political nerve; growing economic inequity; and the pervasiveness of top-down violence against the vulnerable.

The good news of the gospel is that we need not be contained within that immediate world, and “hopers” refuse to be so contained: Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1

Jim Wallis 4-23-2019

WITH THE COMING of spring and warm weather, my thoughts turned, as they always do, to the importance of the game of baseball in my family and the valuable lessons I’ve taken from it. We have a sign outside our home: “We interrupt this family for baseball season.” It reflects how much baseball means to our whole family and how much time and space it takes up in our day-to-day lives for much of the year.

Some of my most rewarding years as a father were the 11 years (and 22 seasons) that I coached my sons, Luke and Jack, in Little League Baseball. Though that time is past, baseball still very much connects our family as my sons have moved through school, with my oldest continuing to play baseball at Haverford College.

Jim Wallis 4-18-2019

Smoke rises around the altar in front of the cross inside the Notre Dame Cathedral as a fire continues to burn in Paris, France, April 16, 2019. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer/Pool

Holy Week for Christians represents a dramatic movement from pain to hope. We deeply feel and lament the pain Jesus Christ endured for us, but we also feel our personal pain and the world’s pain. Then we rejoice as that pain gives way to the eternal hope that is always available to us through the resurrection—a hope that is not just for ourselves but for the world. We say “Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!” with a joy that surpasses understanding.

Aaron E. Sanchez 2-12-2019

Photo by Yousef Al Nasser on Unsplash

“For us America is our own country, and it’s all the same: hopeless,” the general told his solider.

General Simón Bolívar had lost faith. The great Liberator of Latin America who fought for independence from Spain, with a vision of a continent united as a single nation would never happen. His men wore the wounds of the revolutions his words inspired and only the frail old man at the end of his life knew how worthless they had been. Political and social change was impossible. He had known the cause was lost for years and kept fighting out of despair, with no dream of any meaningful end.

Cari Willis 11-27-2018

As I’m reading this scripture with my friend on death row, he asks me to repeat the scripture again and takes my Bible to look at it himself. When you are on the row, it is almost a requirement to build up walls all around you so that you ensure that you are not inflicted with even more pain and suffering — death row is enough. He talks about all of the walls that he has built up over the years. He has become a fortified city. He wants to break free. He wants the walls to come tumbling down. But he worries what will happen if he is that vulnerable. So he looks at me and says, “I am glad God writes my name on his palm even though I have all of these walls around me.” “Me too,” I say. 

Jim Wallis 10-23-2018

ON THE DAY Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by the Senate to a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, I tweeted this: “Today was a day of protest, rage, mourning, lament. Tomorrow we go on by going deeper, and learn that hope is not a feeling, but a decision—based on whatever we call faith. Stay strong and take care of each other.”

The nation is in trauma, with many women and people of color in particular being retraumatized almost every day. But Advent is upon us, and the message of that liturgical season never changes. Advent is a season of waiting for the coming of Christ. Christ will come again, and not just ultimately but time and time again, in all kinds of unexpected ways.

So, in Advent, we wait—expectantly—for Jesus Christ to come again in our personal and our public lives. That is our hope, based not on optimism but on faith.

The situation we face in Donald Trump’s autocratic impulses and actions is indeed a constitutional crisis, the severity of which will depend, in part, on whether our institutions and structures, in the wake of the midterm elections, will hold the executive accountable, or not.

This is also a moral crisis regarding whether our “better angels,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, or our worst demons, as Donald Trump seems to evoke every day, will finally triumph. As they say, the jury is still out on that. Trump has opened a Pandora’s box of white racial and male resentment, fear, and hatred, and those forces are not going back into the box, despite election results. The battle between our better angels and our worst demons will be the spiritual battle of our political life for the unforeseeable future.

Kierra Jackson 7-30-2018

IN HER LATEST BOOK, Birthing Hope: Giving Fear to the Light, Rachel Marie Stone spiritually illuminates a painstaking, sometimes isolating, and often highly medicalized event in the life of a woman. In uncovering her own journey giving birth, Stone invites us to question our understandings of pain and passage, deliverance and rebirth, illness and privilege, and theology’s long-complicated relationship to science. Stone uses her new memoir to inspire readers to comb through scripture and rediscover God as midwife.

Throughout the book, Stone includes passages from Isaiah, which “imagines God as birthing mother and midwife more than any other biblical book.” Stone notes, “Christians across the spectrum of cultural, theological, and political points of view seem equally to neglect biblical images of God as a laboring woman.” Chapter by chapter, Stone writes of labor and birth from a variety of vantage points that affirm the God closely linked to childbirth: Teenage Mary, struggling with morning sickness and at the end of her third trimester, pushing the Christ through her birth canal and into the world. A Malawian woman who must walk many miles home with her newborn strapped to her back mere hours after birthing. The Christian understanding of “being born again” as forgiveness, a fresh beginning, and as entering “into the womb of God to be born again.” Each perspective expands the reader’s understanding of rebirth through God.

 

Grace Ji-Sun Kim 4-30-2018

South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un raise their hands at the truce village of Panmunjom inside the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas, South Korea, April 27, 2018. Korea Summit Press Pool/Pool via Reuters

Even though many view this summit with cynicism, it is an important step towards any possibility of peace on the Korean peninsula. The summit was historic because Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in met for the first time and agreed to end the Korean War. They also agreed on the Panmunjom declaration which seeks a denuclearization of the peninsula. Russia, China and Japan have also welcomed the agreement.