What does it really mean to have hope? There are so many examples of spurious hope around in our society, that it can be hard to identify the meaning of real Christian hope. I used to think that one of the things which distinguished our political parties from one another was their degree of optimism, but now I’m not so sure. The more optimistic you are about human nature the less interventionist will be your public policies. The more optimistic you are the more you will allow the free market to prevail; the more optimistic you are the more you will leave it to parents, teachers, nurses, doctors, scientists, and businessmen to regulate and arrange their own lives. The more optimistic you are the more you will complain about the nanny state, and its restriction of the people’s choices.
But what exactly is optimism and to what extent does it contain real hope? Sometimes an optimistic outlook can be a cloak to actual despair. There’s nothing we can do except put on a brave face. Or else optimism can be a cloak to something more sinister; if you reassure everyone that everything’s all right, you may induce a degree of complacency in people so that they become oblivious to the fact that you are actually changing things to enhance your own power. Or maybe optimism is a secular perversion of faith a belief that everything is for the best along a line of continuous progress things can only get better, solutions will always emerge, human beings will always be able to save themselves from potential disaster. So the refusal of certain governments to face up to the reality of climate change, or the danger of excessive reliance on nuclear power could be interpreted as a kind of secular faith based on totally misguided optimism. And so by contrast pessimism becomes the ultimate sin, just as despair used to be the great Christian sin. Suggest that human beings are less generous, less competent, less community minded than the optimists believe and you will be dismissed as a cynic, a conspiracy theorist, a misanthrope. Pessimism is the modern heresy. Yet when disaster strikes optimism can easily give way to panic.
So much for optimism but what then is real hope. The psalmist can sometimes sound like the ultimate optimist. In this evening’s psalm the world is literally collapsing around him. Chaos is come again. The mountains are shaken, the sky is falling, the waters beneath the earth have escaped their bounds, political order has collapsed, and yet God is still a very present help in trouble. God is still our refuge. The difference I suppose between this kind of hope and a more worldly optimism is that it can look disaster in the face; it can imagine the worst. It takes sin seriously. Christian hope is based on the fact that we take sin and our potential for sin seriously and yet we do not despair. To despair is to believe that human sin and failure is stronger than God’s grace and healing forgiveness. We can know the worst and yet believe the best. All have fallen short of the glory of God and yet in that glory we can still hope.
To hope, said St Bonaventure is to fly. To hope is to stretch our wings and rise up to the true height of our being in God. We lift our eyes to perceive all the dimensions of our reality. We lift our hearts to the ever greater possibilities of love. To hope, said St Thomas, is to pray. Prayer is the language of hope. However, low you may feel, however defeated we may find ourselves, however meaningless the words of our prayers may seem, yet to go on praying is to express hope at a deeper level than anything we may think or feel. Prayer is what spans the gulf between suffering and hope; we confront our suffering without illusion but also without despair. And so we pray.
And perhaps finally to make music is also an expression of hope. We experience our world as fragmentary, full of contradiction and complexity. To make music is to express the hope that things ultimately make sense; that there is a pattern, a meaning, a shape to be uncovered, however deep we have to go to find it. Just recently we have seen in BBC 2’s three part film of the life of Beethoven, how as his deafness increased and his personal relations became ever more fraught and complex, so some of his greatest creations come in the form of fugues, the most rigorous and controlled of all musical forms; the last movement of the Hammerklavier sonata, the end of the creed in the Missa Solemnis, the Grosse Fugue in the last quartet; these fugal subjects are pounded out, across the whole range of human voice or key board or strings, they threaten to fall apart, to get lost in their complexity, to go beyond the capacity of the performer to perform them, and yet in the end the pattern is complete, the form is realised, and hope in an ultimate resolution is never abandoned. In the end music too gives us hope, because it presents to us as Milton saw, the undisturbed song of pure concent, the possibility that we may indeed, for all our sin and failure, keep in tune with heaven.
Stephen Tucker