Realistic Hope (John Carr)

I have been reflecting on the September 23 throne speech and the Prime Minister’s press conference on the same day – also on the conversation during the first segment of CBC’s The Current on September 4 with three public health experts.

Essentially, they said the same thing. We need to find ways of being in this for the long haul. And the Prime Minister asserted, and the public health experts confirmed, the second wave of the COVID-19 virus has begun.

We need to find ways of living with a “new normal” – not an old normal which is not going to return. To encourage longing for the old normal is, it seems to me, to hold out false hope – and might even be a form of idolatry.

It is important to find realistic hope in times such as these – times in which our world is suffering greatly from a pandemic, major flooding, tropical storms, and fire storms.

Jurgen Moltmann has come to be known as the “theologian of hope.” Interned as a German POW in Britain during most of World War Two and for a couple of years thereafter, he became a pastor and subsequently a theological professor.

Moltmann puts it this way:  “Eschatology means the doctrine of the Christian hope, which embraces both the object hoped for and also the hope inspired by it. From first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present. The eschatological is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which everything in it is set, the glow that suffuses everything here in the dawn of an expected new day.” See the following URL for more detail.

https://curatingtheology.org/blog/2019/5/13/jurgen-moltmann-on-the-relationship-between-hope-and-reality

Hope is realistic when it is grounded in a sense of purpose – of knowing who we are in our relationship with God, with each other in the human family, and with the universe.

It seems to me, then, that finding new ways of being is not just a temporary task precipitated by crises – but an ongoing one. It is not an act of desperation but, rather, is a realistic and hope-filled endeavour.

John C. Carr, ThM, PhD, DD (HC)
Retired Pastoral Psychotherapist& Educator