Faith Will

By RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR

Hope is that quality of character which carries us even through the worst moments of crisis: it wells up, as though from some deep reservoir, at times when a cruel and unbearable world seems to have robbed us of every motivation to go on living.

The work of hope extends beyond simply extinguishing suffering; hope is also an active principle. It sustains belief. By offering us the dreams and visions that will guide us through the present, hope also gives us the power to project alternative realities. It permits us to insist that the world can be transformed; that it can be conceived differently.

As the distinguished Czech writer and statesman, Vaclav Havel, puts it: “Hope 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.” Havel also reckons that hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but rather the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. The more adverse the circumstances, in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper our hope. In Havel’s view, hope is that which gives us the desire to live and to experiment continually with reality.

Perhaps, it was Shakespeare who described the nature of hope most succinctly when he wrote: “O! Who can hold a fire in his hand/By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?/Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite/By bare imagination of a feast?/Or wallow naked in December snow/By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?/O no! the apprehension of the good/Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.”

Hope represents the triumph of the constructive imagination over existential anxieties, over the “machinations of fear,” as Ernst Bloch memorably describes the phenomenon in “The Principle Of Hope.” He notes that hope is not an escape, but a mandate for us to look “in the world itself for what can help the world,” Bloch continues: “Nobody has ever lived without daydreams, but it is a question of knowing them deeper and deeper and in this way keeping them trained unerringly, usefully, on what is right.” Bloch advises us, therefore, to nurture our daydreams and let them grow fuller, since we would then enrich the sober gaze of our everyday lives: we would not clog ourselves with meaningless detail, but clarify our vision by encounter with the range and plenitude of life.

Philosophy is right to contend that hope is not a simple emotion confined to the individual self -- it becomes meaningful only when it expresses a long-range goal that encompasses the fortunes of all creatures. Hope characterises the will to live, to love, and, most importantly, to thrive. In short, it is a refusal to give up on the best in people, a refusal to deny the possibility of one’s own evolution, and that of the people one loves. Hope allows us to explore the relationship between the envisioned and the possible; it allows us to project ourselves creatively into the world.

As a first step towards the positive exercise of hope, it is important for all of us to make our goals a part of some larger and more inclusive project. Because, if we restrict ourselves to our own narrow goals, we will severely limit our growth. A long-range goal always makes for a “win-win” situation: it is one that has something positive to offer everybody, without the self gaining at the expense of others.

All possible goals are more or less attainable, when inspired by love for the miracle of life. This ideal of hope is enshrined in such traditional epics as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Iliad and the Odyssey. These are celebrations of strength and hope that embrace the world with its beauty and its terror. And, notwithstanding the tribulations that the protagonists of the epics undergo -- be it Sita, Rama, the Pandavas, or Odysseus -- they strive to maintain their integrity and goodness, their sense of purpose, their dignified resolve to confront experience, and overcome the obstacles placed in their path.

In so doing, the characters in the epics affirm the value of hope; of standing up to what people call reality. In its simplest form, hope is a path to the realisation of our deepest, imaginative and most compassionate dreams.

It is the reaffirmation of our faith in the ability to live in harmony with ourselves, with one another, and with the Universe.