Hope

by the Revd Canon Dr William Lamb

Advent is a season of hope. The Christian tradition teaches us that there are three theological virtues: faith, hope and charity. Like all virtues, they have their corresponding vices: faith may fall into credulity, charity into sentimentalism, and hope into self-delusion. We see these vices writ large on social media - as people fall prey to the temptation to offer opinions unsullied by the facts. But the season of Advent invites us to embrace a more disciplined vision of the world and of ourselves.

The theological virtues of faith, hope and love, are all ways of learning how to live with uncertainty. In one of his great philosophical works The Grammar of Assent, John Henry Newman sought to demonstrate that faith was a perfectly natural and rational human activity. He argued that faith was integral to the act of knowing and in making any human judgement. Most of us make judgements all the time. We decide on various courses of action. We cannot always predict the outcome. Newmans helps us to see that the point at which we say ‘Yes’ in determining a course of actions or assenting to a proposition, often comes before the point at which we have a full grasp of everything that there is to know. There are sometimes gaps in our knowledge and understanding: known unknowns, unknown unknowns. However neat the logic of a syllogism, the reality is that none of us every begin at the beginning. Things are uncertain and yet we decide. We offer a judgement. This can be true whether we say ‘Yes’ to a proposal of marriage, or put a cross on a ballot paper, or ‘like’ a tweet.

Newman was talking about faith. But I wonder if his insight can help us to recognise something of the character of hope. There is a proper reticence about hope. It does not profess to know the future. It is not like optimism or pessimism. Like faith and love, hope is ultimately a practice, which demands patience and persistence, the persistence which refuses to allow our hearts to be defined or diminished by the reality of human sin or overwhelmed by our fears, anxieties and insecurities. In its ’not yet’, in its ’nevertheless’, hope opens up a space for us to imagine another future, a future which is illuminated by the story of Jesus Christ. I pray that in this season of Advent and in spite of the turmoil of the world we live in, we may renew our acquaintance with the virtue of hope.