Hope, mixed with gratitude, should be 2019 aim
Today, we acknowledge the death of the old year and ref lect on the past 364 days. Gratitude is in order, yes, for all that has transpired and for all that the new year will bring. But in addition to gratitude we also need hope as we prepare to step out again and begin another pilgrimage around the sun.
Hope is my word for 2019. Hope has never been in the forefront for me, and maybe that’s because I thought of hope as a weak word.
I’ve always liked joy or gratitude better. But now, aware of the many hard issues in front of us — politically, economically, environmentally — I’m choosing hope as my focus in the coming year.
I thank the brilliant writer and activist Rebecca Solnit for nudging me toward hope. Solnit lives and writes at the center of domestic and global issues, and she’s on the front line of resistance. She faces down the horrors of our world, while being scholarly about the root causes of problems, and she’s hopeful.
Solnit is not an optimist. She calls out the false certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Instead she locates hope in the unknown. “If we don’t know a certain outcome of a situation then there could be a different outcome — if we, and maybe hundreds or thousands more of us, act.” Hence, hope.
A favorite quote of mine comes from former Czech president and playwright, Vaclav Havel: “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
That, it turns out, is close to what Thomas Aquinas meant when he wrote about hope. Aquinas, a Dominican friar and later a saint, studied all of the virtues — prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude, faith, hope, and charity — and he said, “Hope is located in the will.” By which he meant that hope is a choice; we can decide to have hope.
Because he located hope in the will, Aquinas said that there are two sins against hope. The first is despair — having no hope — and the second sin against hope is “presumption” — taking the stance, “I know all about this” or “I can do this myself.” Both despair and presumption shield us from any willingness to learn, to question, or to act.
Sounding a little bit like Aquinas, Solnit says, “Hope is something you earn through study and action, and through resisting the ease of despair.”
Hope is, in fact, a prerequisite for political action. It is hope that takes us to the march, that makes us pick up the phone, and that leads us to speak out.
Writer Maria Popova says, “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naivete.”
Despair, on the other hand, is easy, and even lazy. It is the quitter’s stance.
How do we get to hope then? We strengthen hope by practicing gratitude, my old favorite word. Gratitude enables us to enact hope. Gratitude teaches the will to choose hope.
Look at what Swiss philosopher Henri Frederic Amiel has to say: “At bottom, everything depends upon the presence or absence of one single element in the soul — hope.”
So, I’m prepared to enter 2019 with hope. I will practice gratitude as much as I can. I will strengthen my will to be hopeful in the coming year, and I will act. As we heard last week, it is with “a thrill of hope the weary world rejoices.”
Me too. I will myself toward hope.