Surprised by the man on the borrowed donkey: Ordinary Blessings. Denise Ackermann
and precarious, and do not require acceptance. I also leant to be cautious about a false sense of fulfilment that believes that all is well, that promises have been kept and gifts received. If we so believe, we merely hold on mutely to what we have and lose our desire for something better. Just keeping life manageable on our terms is not hope. I saw that refusing to bow to such civility is an act of hope, for it is not satisfied with crumbs. I learnt that to lament injustice is an expression of hope for it calls God to account and rests on the unshakable belief that God will act.
To my surprise, I find that today there are times when I struggle to hope. Racism in many guises continues to flourish, inequality in our country becomes more entrenched as the gap widens between those who have and those who do not. Violent crime casts a dark shadow over the lives of all South Africans. Crude materialism permeates our society: it is encouraged in our media, visible in the lives of our leaders, and imitated in the desires of the young. I want to hope for a better world for my grandchildren. I know that there is no faith without hope. Chastened, I find that I once again need to remember in whom I hope, what I learnt about hope in the “bad old days” and how to live with hope, no matter the circumstances. Emily Dickinson wrote:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches on the soul,
And sings the tune without the word,
And never stops at all.
The song remains. Hope does not stop. True hope is the oxygen of faith. So I remind myself that:
Hope is not optimism. It is not that blithe sense that all will end well (alles sal regkom), because human progress is guaranteed. In the face of dreadful human need and the ever-increasing fragility of the earth, the belief in human progress is at best insubstantial. Neither is hope vested in naïve, upbeat, popular ideologies, which, according to Eagleton, “[…] tend to mistake a hubristic cult of can-do-ery for the virtue of hope”. Hope is not magic, or living “as if”, or projecting what we hope for onto some nebulous future.
Hope is not vested in some future victory. We must guard against the unattractive nature of Christian triumphalism as embodied in the apocalyptic that abandons historical realities while trumpeting exclusive insights into how God will in future break into history to bring about God’s purposes. This kind of triumphalism is no more than a pie-in-the-sky-when-I-die exclusive claim that all will be well with me one day, rather than Julian of Norwich’s universal vision that “All will be well, all manner of things will be well”. Theologian Flora Keshgegian comments: “Once-and-for-all thinking privileges the end over the means; it turns visions into utopias, transforms imagination into wish fulfilment and hope into the eternal embodiment of desire.” This so-called hope robs us of our ability to understand the workings of power entangled in structural injustice, and our roles in perpetuating what is wrong now. It prevents us from coming to grips with our fallibility and the fragility of our world. It chokes true lived hope.
Hope is to be lived. The way I hope should be the way I live. To live out my hope is to try to make that which I hope for come about – sooner rather than later. Not surprisingly, hope is usually associated with the future. Christian hope is too often garbed in language about the end times – we hope in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Certainly hope has future dimensions. We do hope in a future with God, we hold to the coming vision of the fullness of God’s reign on earth. Hope is both present and future. Brazilian theologian and philosopher Ruben Alves says: “Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is to dance it.” I am afraid that I cannot comprehend hope beyond history. I do hope that this world will be redeemed, but my dance of faith happens now. The hope that I find is a hope anchored in the history and presence of the person who at the same time is my hope for the future of all creation.
Hope is risky. It has no guarantees. German Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann speaks of “the experiment of hope” because it can lead to disappointment, danger, as well as surprise. “Hope is an experiment with God, with oneself, and with history,” he writes. Twenty years ago I wrote:
To choose life is to choose risk. As disappointment follows disappointment, we risk losing our vision, we are tempted to despair. The challenge is to dare to hope, and in this daring to wrestle with all that seeks to deprive us of hope or disempower us. Wrestling is risky. Our strength may fail us or we may emerge wounded and scarred. Reminding ourselves that God’s creation was the greatest risk ever taken, we as partners in this venture will have to risk in order to claim our rightful place as agents of history, seeking liberation for the groaning creation.
I have no reason to add anything more today.
Hope recognises the tragic in history. This book describes the blessing of being able to deal with the incongruities of life with humour. This does not mean that I do not honour the tragic in life. Hope must recognise the tragic in history to avoid blind optimism. No happy endings are ensured. History repeats itself with a monotony that would be boring were it not so tragic. The tragic demands that we remember. We acknowledge absence and loss, pain and fear, and that nothing present on earth is either past or finished. We live with the ambiguity of hope: hope for a better life and the stark reality of shattered hopes. When roads fork we are forced to make choices and have no way of knowing what will follow. Tragedy cannot be avoided. God’s presence is found in the compassion that prevents suffering from having the last word, and in resilience that continues unabated. This active hope refuses to be defeated. To inhabit hope despite woeful circumstances is to offer a counter-story that dares us to become involved in making that which we hope for come about.
Hope is learning to wait. Hope requires patience and endurance, and is the opposite of resignation. Hope is expectant, open to being surprised, and willing to ride out the long wait. It is fuelled by a passion for the possible that is realistic because hope cannot be assuaged by instant gratification. Samuel Beckett’s well-known play Waiting for Godot is about two characters who wait endlessly and in vain for Godot to appear. The play depicts the meaninglessness of life. Expectant waiting, unlike waiting for Godot, dares to remind us of the One in whom we hope, of promises made, of assurances given, of unending love and mercy. There is an element of resistance in our waiting because it resists the void of hopelessness, and the derision of a world that wants instant answers.
Hope is nurtured by prayer and community. Prayer is our greatest tool for holding onto hope. Conversing with God about our hopes, lamenting before God about those that are shattered, confessing impatience and moments of hopelessness, petitioning for what seems impossible, and meditating on God’s faithfulness are Spirit-led moments that nurture hope. Whether our prayers are part of our rituals or whether they are spontaneous, whether they are uttered in solitary silence or among a group of believers, they ground our hopes and strengthen our faith in the God who made us. My hope is also sustained and shared within the community of faith. It is nurtured in communal relationships and our common faith in God who acts in history.
God is the ground of our hope. I know in whom I vest my hope. I trust in the God whose truth is found in the man on the borrowed donkey. Eagleton affirms the role of trust: “The virtue of hope for Christianity equally involves a kind of certainty: it is a matter of an assured trust, not of keeping one’s fingers crossed.” My trust is not in some abstract God in the heavens pulling strings on which we dangle as puppets, or some judge doling out favours to the faithful, but a living God who is present in human history and whose divine energy continues to woo us into the fullness of life, now and beyond. Our story with God has no end because it is a story of unending grace.
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I have been surprised by the paradox of grace in the life of faith – it is both ordinary and extraordinary. The word “ordinary” here means “in the order of things”; it does not mean something mundane or unimportant. The Oxford Shorter Dictionary uses the words “regular and usual” to qualify what is ordinary. These words accurately describe what is meant by “ordinary grace” – it is in the order of things, because it is a commonplace reality, flooding the world, there for all, from the beginning of time. But, because paradox runs throughout every attempt to speak about God’s presence and care for this world, grace is also extraordinary. It is extraordinary because it cannot be earned, it is unmerited and utterly abundant,