This past Pentecost, my pastor announced the imminent transformation of the world, with the elimination of all oppression. \u00a0I\u2019d call it \u201cskylight\u201d hope\u2014the light that comes from above, into the domes of our minds, reminding us of God\u2019s ultimate sovereignty over history.\u00a0 Biblically, it is rooted in the Magnificat and in the \u201cnew heaven and a new earth\u201d of Revelation 21, among other places.\u00a0 It has a firm place in Christian faith, although I personally have never found it terribly helpful.\u00a0 The promised imminent transformation never seems to arrive.<\/p>\n
Then there is another kind of this-worldly hope which I find more promising.\u00a0 I call it \u2018grounded\u2019 hope for it is anchored in the present, rather than tethered to the future.\u00a0 The fullest account I have seen appears in Fred Bird\u2019s The Generative Power of Hope<\/em>.\u00a0 Bird is a retired but active professor of political science and religious ethics in Canada.\u00a0 His voluminous work on business ethics and international economic development has exposed him to the very practical questions of how to keep pressing for reform in the face of endless obstacles: inertia, short-sightedness, intolerance, resistance, environmental disaster\u2014the list goes on.\u00a0 And he has addressed these challenges in case after well-researched case.<\/p>\n So how does an actively engaged reformer generate and sustain hope, given the nest of \u201cwicked\u201d interconnected and stubborn problems that we face?\u00a0 The Generative Power of Hope<\/em> explains such persistence.\u00a0 In chapter 3, the core of his argument, he offers a detailed vision.\u00a0 \u201cHope is a virtue oriented to acting in the present\u201d (25).\u00a0 It feeds upon what we see and do, incrementally, and so is nourished as we anticipate possibilities for action and carry through.<\/p>\n What does grounded hope look like?\u00a0 Following Aristotle, Bird locates the virtue of hope as a \u2018mean\u2019 or middle point between the extremes of despair and wishful thinking, between confusion and fanaticism (25). \u00a0Such hope has four features.\u00a0 First, it requires intentional cultivation, starting with a frank acknowledgment of how bad things really are\u2014in contrast to \u201cfalse prophets who seek to rally people around unrealistic possibilities\u201d(35). \u00a0Here Bird embraces what ethicists call \u2018realism\u2019\u2014the willingness to face up to problems without sentimental illusion about how easily they can be resolved.\u00a0 A second aspect of grounded hope is a posture of gratitude, \u201cwhich helps us to see the gifts among the givens\u201d and thus to keep feelings of resentment at bay (37).\u00a0 Third, hope involves imagining: \u201cseeking out and considering alternatives\u201d rather than remaining stuck in the present rut.\u00a0 Finally, hope involves living with, rather than suppressing, fear of failure and other tensions, and it involves sustained commitment (38-39).<\/p>\n All well and good, but how does such hope become grounded in the individual?\u00a0 Bird devotes chapter 4 to the personal and social dimensions of hope.\u00a0 Writing as a social scientist, he discusses four \u201cfactors\u201d of personality \u201ccorrelated\u201d with a posture of hopefulness: self-worth, a sense of vocation, patience and flexibility (45).\u00a0 He carefully outlines how cultivating each is possible, producing a fine bundle of features to absorb through practice.\u00a0 The attainment of virtue, after all, requires effort, as any Aristotle-influenced ethicist will tell you.\u00a0\u00a0 But it also involves and even requires loving relationships, to which Bird offers a brief reflection on the relationship between faith, hope and love (52-54).<\/p>\n Bird\u2019s muscular version of hope may sound like works-righteousness to Lutherans dependent upon divine grace for personal and social rescue.\u00a0 But it is not.\u00a0 It points not to\u00a0 justification or even sanctification.\u00a0 Rather, the task of grounded hope is to work on God\u2019s creation which needs rescue–not ourselves, already rescued by grace.\u00a0 Our hope is oriented to the near and far horizon of the earth, rather than up to the heavenly hereafter, or any other form of divine rescue from outside.\u00a0 I doubt there is any daylight between Bird\u2019s vision and what Martin Luther wrote about being liberated to serve the neighbor in On Christian Liberty.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n The rest of the book reports on how hope already has found practical expression, in a systematic way.\u00a0 Here Bird\u2019s reach is extraordinary.\u00a0 He exhibits his customary passion for detail which here extends in many exploratory directions, in order to persuade the reader that grounded hope is real, and can be sustained.\u00a0 He starts with exemplary individuals (Gandhi, Saul Alinsky, Vaclav Havel in chapter 5), widens to social reform efforts (chapter 6), then devotes two chapters to history (chapters 8, 9), and then finally seven chapters to the \u201cCrises of our Times\u201d (chapters 10-16).<\/p>\n Bird\u2019s argument is a wake-up call to those of us whose enthusiasms for reform have cratered in light of domestic and international crises, where we have regressed into despair or wishful thinking.\u00a0 But we should not give up.\u00a0 Grounded hope \u201crealistically anticipates possibilities and helps us to address present challenges when the future is uncertain and unknown\u201d (3).\u00a0 It is nourished as we are actively engaged rather than when we fall back on divine providence to rescue us from our failed optimisms.\u00a0\u00a0 To borrow a metaphor from the kitchen, hope is the yeast in an actively rising dough, rather than the icing on a pre-made cake of deliverance.<\/p>\n Still, his book is not simply a call to action.\u00a0 And it is not particularly theological.\u00a0 Rather, it is a dense scholarly account\u2014the kind of book best read in short bursts for the insights, organized ideas and helpful vocabulary which Bird packs into each page. \u00a0So if you engage this book out of a need to educate yourself about the dimensions and history of hope in action, you will find his work a handy reference for everything you need to know about how resistance can be sustained against injustice, oppression and other forms of human folly.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This past Pentecost, my pastor announced the imminent transformation of the world, with the elimination of all oppression. \u00a0I\u2019d call it \u201cskylight\u201d hope\u2014the light that comes from above, into the domes of our minds, reminding us of God\u2019s ultimate sovereignty over history.\u00a0 Biblically, it is rooted in the Magnificat and in the \u201cnew heaven and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-christian-living"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n