By Betsy Gonwa, 
With all the destruction that is going on in the world, it has been difficult to have hope. “Don’t subject yourself to it,” someone suggested. “Don’t watch those images on the news.” Well, that’s one way of dealing with it. But sometimes the state of the world arrives at my doorstep, or in my inbox. Sometimes it is in my face and sometimes I am alone facing it. And I don’t always want to look away. I want to hold it all with compassion.
Sometimes I feel hopeless. I even feel myself heading toward despair. I know this is not the road God wants me to go down. But everything weighs on me, the melting polar ice caps, the oceans full of floating plastic, the racism and poverty and injustices, the violence. And now the war in Ukraine.
At a retreat in February, one of the presenter’s topics was sin and evil. Ugh! It was one of those times when I wanted to look away. Thankfully I was able to meet with a spiritual director. I told him about my lack of hope and how I wished I could be more optimistic. He mostly listened, but also shared some words of wisdom. “There is a difference between hope and optimism,” he said. He also said, “Faith, hope and charity are theological virtues because God is in them.” This gave me a bit to chew on.
In the silence of my room, I was reminded of a quote about hope. It begins with “Hope is a state of mind, not of the world.” I found it, and read it in its entirety. Eight powerful sentences. Over the next weeks, I read it again and again. I printed it out and set it in a visible spot in my study. I have been committing parts of it to memory. I shared it in a phone conversation with a friend, and I even shared it with a medical assistant who was taking my height, weight and blood pressure.
Indeed, since rediscovering Vaclav Havel’s words, my state of mind has shifted to hope! I have noticed other words that inspire hope in me, and started a list of hopeful quotations. So far my list includes the words of Martin Luther King, John Philip Newell, Suu Kyi, and Chaim Potok.
It is not only these words that inspire me, but the people who spoke them and wrote them. So, as my list expands, I am not only collecting words, but I am assembling a community of people. It is a community of people who remained oriented toward hope when the state of the world seemed hopeless, a community that supports me in my desire to hope, a community of which I want to be a part.
My list of quotations is like a rack of life preservers available to me for the times when I am already treading water and feel like I am being pushed under again.
What about you? Do you have someone with whom you can share your despair? Do you have a way to re-orient your state of mind toward hope?
The eight sentences:
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.
Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is.
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, Chapter 5, (1986; tr 1990 Knopf).
