The following article first appeared on Think Christian
G.
K Chesterton once wrote, “Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is
no virtue at all... As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere
flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins
to be a strength.”[1]
At first glance, the statement appears to be a bit of paradoxical nonsense-
another attempt for the brilliant English philosopher and writer to make us
scratch our chins. As a Christian, Chesterton was pointing towards an
explicitly eternal vision of hope, a vision that should open our eyes to the
deepest realities of the human experience on display before us all, unveiling itself
in real world events currently dominating the headlines.
Last
week the Prime Minister of Malaysia faced an anxious crowd of reporters and
flashing cameras in order to relay the grim news that “flight 370 went down
somewhere over the Indian Ocean.” The statement exploded in the ears of family
members and friends of the victims who cried, wailed, spewed angry accusations,
and even attempted physical harm to security guards on hand. In the end those
who lost loved ones asserted that the Malaysian government and military were “the
true murderers.”
Meanwhile,
thousands of miles away, in Darrington, WA excessive rains loosened the soil on
a steep hillside covered with residential homes. When the mountain could hold
it no longer, it unleashed a landslide onto unsuspecting residents below. The
potential to find survivors under the 15 feet of debris was unlikely; yet, even
into day nine of the cleanup, first responders and teams of volunteers were
referring to it as “a search and rescue initiative.”
Both
stories have highlighted the centrality of hope to our human experience; why we
will hold onto it despite all odds and react with anger towards those who dash
it. This is precisely why Chesterton refers to hope as a virtue. And
furthermore, why he suggests that true hope does not emerge until things are hopeless.
Chesterton argues that for many, hope is a reasonable hope, a hope placed in
assumptions that are undergirded by potentially logical certainties. It is not
until these possibilities are removed and everyone else has abandoned their
belief in a “good ending” that hope finally arises as a legitimate virtue –“it
is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength.”
Stripped
of a tangible reason to tie their mast to anything remotely realistic, a
deeper, more profound, stronger hope emerges. Indeed as Chesterton later
argues, “Exactly at the instance when hope ceases to be reasonable, it begins
to be useful.”[2]
The
power of hope- Chesterton’s brand of hope- is a virtue on par with few others.
It is the hope that has kept men and woman breathing through the darkest days
of their lives amidst war, holocausts, abuse, natural disasters, famines, civil
wars, genocide, apartheid, mental illness, and miscarriages. It is the promise
of tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, the promise of the next day.
The
power of hope is the eternity written on the souls of humanity that yearns for
something more, something better, something that lies just on the other side of
this tragedy, that accident, our losses and our longings. It is the deepest
promise echoing in the caverns of every chest reminding us constantly “this is
not all that there is.” The story goes on. So we hope, we believe and we press
into the echo, reminding one another, indeed, the story is not over.
