By Brad Sinclair

One of St. Paul's most famous epistles is I Corinthians 13:13 in which he notes that there are three things, faith, hope and love and love he concludes is the greatest of the three. I am not about to disagree with our esteemed Saint but by declaring one of the three greatest he inadvertently lessens the weight of the other two items on his list. I am sure that if St. Paul were here today he would suggest that all three of those things are worth our attention and I expect we might also learn from him what he thought about the inextricable web that binds those three qualities together. I would like to spend a little time on hope.

Similar to the evolution of the word love, hope has become a trite and catch-all phrase in modern English.
"I hope it doesn't rain today." This is a common use of the word.
A hope chest is an old tradition whereby a young woman would store things away in preparation for her marriage.
"The child prayed hopefully." The word is used as an adverb.
"Hopefully, we will catch the train on time." The word is used to qualify a whole sentence.
"Growing a cactus outside in the Arctic is hopeless." The negative form of the word can take on a meaning of impossibility.
Hopeless can also take on a sense of despair. "The fight against brain cancer is a hopeless cause."
Hope can be used as a name - a surname or a given name.

If you trace the etymology of the word it passes through several languages, modern and ancient alike. You pass through Old English, Middle Low German, Middle High German, German, Dutch, Middle Dutch, Old Low German, and Old Norse. If you follow all of those definitions you find the original definition means to leap with expectation. Throughout all of the etymology and into modern usage, hope retains a positive connotation. Our literal meaning today suggests expectation and desire combined at the prospect of a certain thing to come. Those things are virtually always positive or good. You won't often hear people saying, "I am full of hope at the thought of an earthquake." On the contrary a person would be filled with fear or dread but not filled with hope.

Hope therefore carries with it a sense of the uncontrollable, the unexpected or the unknown but it is an uncontrollable phenomenon on the positive side of the ledger. It is no surprise then that we find so many books on the subject of spirituality with the word hope in the title. Hope in some ways becomes synonymous with the nature of the divine. When all else fails, i.e., all of the human attempts or the attempts under our control, one can always call on the divine, i.e., hope. Indeed as a child I often heard the common phrase, "There's always hope," when things seemed darkest. Hope was some kind of a warm woolen mantle we could throw over our shoulders when the cold and cruel winds of the world chilled us to our bones.

The world of humanities is filled with references to hope. I count no less than 77 films, 15 made for television films and 11 television series with the word hope in the title. That does not even begin to cover the visual projects about hope that do not include it in the title. I recently watched "The Shawshank Redemption" for the umpteenth time. Morgan Freeman's character - who goes by the name Red - warns his friend and fellow prisoner Andy - played by Tim Robbins - that hope is a dangerous thing - especially when you live in a prison. Presumably he was talking about the distance one can fall from the heights of expectation to the depths of an unfulfilled expectation or, as the original definition would suggest, what happens when you leap with expectation only to fall short.

What then, does hope mean to a Christian? The rules for faith and love are relatively clear. "Love one another as I have loved you," are the words of Jesus. Scholars have written copious volumes on the meaning and direction that these words offer. They might be challenging but they are clear. The word faith comes from the Latin word fides wherein we get the word fidelity. There is a sense of remaining true to God. This is a relatively common notion for virtually all religious structures, i.e., Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and, of course, Christianity. In the Old Testament we read that God is a jealous God who will not tolerate the worship of other Gods or false idols. The Jews are literally warned to stay faithful. Virtually every branch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam flows from the original position that their God and their God alone is the one true God so don't even think about looking around at other Gods or trouble will beset you. Christianity - particularly Catholic Christianity presents a challenge with the notion of a three-personed God, i.e., the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is a source of great discord for many non-Christian religions, some even suggesting that we Christians worship three Gods. Christianity conveniently side-steps the trinity issue by calling it a mystery. Nevertheless, we are called as Christians to worship one God in three persons and one God only. The rules are a bit contentious but as was the case for love, they are relatively straightforward.

So, I repeat, what does hope mean to a Christian? We have rules about love and faith but I don't see a lot of rules for hope. This is particularly odd given that hope is one of the three virtues that Paul defined in I Corinthians 13:13. Did he forget about it? I don't know. Is he assuming something from his own tradition that we might have lost since then? I don't know.

For some reason I have very rarely if ever heard a homily about hope. In my experience, the subject is so scarce at the pulpit that I can only recall one homily and it was delivered at a funeral. A friend of our family - call her Mary - had finally passed away after what seemed to be years of torture and pain at the hands of cancer. I do not mean to dwell on the particulars of Mary's sickness but a little detail gives a sense of how grave her situation really was. At one point she had a coughing fit that was so severe it shattered her leg. Mary's bones had grown so feeble that the shaking of a coughing fit literally caused them to break into pieces. In spite of this pain, and as I say it went on for several years, the priest at her funeral spoke about a conversation they had a few days before she finally succumbed. She said to him, "You know, I just can't imagine a life without hope."

Mary had no reason to be hopeful. She knew that she was going to die and that it was really coming quickly now. Was she hoping for a miracle? Was she hoping for a deferral - perhaps a few more days? If you knew Mary then you knew that wasn't why she lived in hope. It was those words in the funeral homily of Mary that made me wonder about hope. What is it? I struggled and wrestled and came up with a blank or I came up with a cornball melody that says "The sun'll come up tomorrow." Then quite by accident I began to think that if you don't know what something is, perhaps you can make some ground by considering what it isn't. This led me to wonder about the opposite of hope. I think the opposite is captured in the word despair.

I won't go through all of the etymology on the word despair but suffice it to say that it comes from the latin phrase to lose hope. If you accept a working definition of hope as that sense of expectation of something yet to happen - particularly something on the positive side of the ledger - then to lose hope is to lose that sense of expectation and to believe that the end is upon us and there is no chance of any good thing further happening (once again with a particular focus on the positive side of the ledger). I can only imagine that feeling from time to time and I have even succumbed to it myself. I suspect it comes upon us most of the time in association with the death of a spouse, a child, a parent, a sibling or a friend. God forbid but if I suddenly lost my wife or my children I would instinctively intuit that the end is near. It would likely be beyond my intellectual capacity to imagine that life could go on. Fortunately, that hasn't happened and God willing it won't happen in the near future but even if it did, I know that eventually I would begin to pick up the pieces and reassemble some sort of a life. Living without hope or losing hope - or living in despair as it were seems to me the greatest sin. It is to live in the denial of an afterlife or the existence of God precisely when it seems to matter the most. I know it's easy for me, never having faced a seriously traumatic experience, to talk about the importance of hope but I do believe it is why we, as human beings and creatures of God, are given the capacity to hope.

I can just hear the intellectual cynics chuckling into their sleeves. 'Add another optimist to the list,' they might say. Perhaps one of the most articulate and ultimate sneers comes through Samuel Beckett's twentieth century drama Waiting for Godot. Beckett depicts a couple of fellows who sit around waiting for their friend Godot to arrive. Of course Godot never does arrive and Beckett is making sport of the human capacity to wait and hope. Beckett and a large number of intellectual cynics get a great laugh out of this capacity. 'Look at the little children waiting for nothing to happen. Isn't it funny?'

I mentioned earlier that hope is one of the more frequent subjects of the artistic world. 77 feature films, 15 made for television films and 11 television series all containing the word hope.

Countless novels, short stories, poems and at least one homily cover the subject. I'd like to close however with a short description from the film The Shawshank Redemption that I think captures the essence of hope, it's rightful place in the human experience and consequently it's rightful place in St. Paul's list of three virtues.

Near the end of The Shawshank Redemption Andy describes to Red a small town in Mexico where he wants to go and buy a small hotel. He tells Red an elaborate dream that includes the purchase of an old boat that Andy will repair and use to take his guests out on the blue Pacific. He invites Red to be a part of the dream by offering him a job at the hotel. The fulfilment of Andy's dream requires of course that he escape from prison. Red, having already warned Andy about the danger of hope in an earlier scene echoes a similar fear again where he warns Andy about the dangers of such a dream. In short the dream is sure to eat him up and Red does not allow himself such liberties. I may spoil the film for some of you now - if you haven't already seen it - but shortly after this conversation Andy does escape from prison in a biblically dramatic scene that is literally drenched with the essence of spiritual redemption. It's a scene that really needs to be seen to be appreciated and I won't even pretend to describe it for you. A couple of years following Andy's escape Red is released from prison on parole. Life is not easy for Red outside the prison. There is a very compelling moment where Red's boss tells him that he does not need to ask permission to urinate. As a narrator Red says, 'It's a terrible thing to live in fear.' I've chosen to read between the lines and I believe that Red is talking about the fear that arises out of a sense of despair - a sense of lost hope. In any case Red begins to recover his sense of hope and even allows himself to dream again. Through a series of circumstances too long and complicated to tell now he begins his own pilgrimage to meet up with his friend Andy in Mexico. On the way he narrates his feelings and expectations - each one punctuated with the word hope. I hope I don't have trouble crossing the border. I hope to meet my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific ocean is as blue as it has been in my dreams.I hope.

The final words of the film are the simple message, 'I hope.' It took me a while to get there but I finally recalled the words of Mary's funeral homily, "You know, I just can't imagine a life without hope." I came to believe that hope is a required characteristic if we are to live as humans. Without it we are not really human. I choose to live as a human. French philosopher Rene Descarte once declared, "I think, therefore I am." I cannot help but read such a declaration as one of the ultimate ego trips. How any one could have so much confi-
dence in the power of the human intellect as to declare it the reason for being is beyond me. It is this ego, however, that I believe allows intellectuals to chuckle into their sleeves about that human quality known as hope. Indeed, I can already hear the intellectuals laughing at me as I write these words. The screenplay for the film The Shawshank Redemption is originally based on a Stephen King novella. If there is a twentieth century writer who has taken it on the intellectual chin more often than Stephen King I would like to know who it is. He is consistently used as a bench mark by intellectuals when they want to describe a low point in literary evolution. It is this kind of intellectual snobbery that I find most disappointing. I am not a big fan of Stephen King. I've only ever read a couple of his stories and one of them was the Shawshank Redemption. He had a good idea - perhaps even a sacred idea - that he didn't really finish. Frank Darabont the screen writer and director saw something, however, and he took it to a higher level. I thank God that he did. One never knows where the seed of God will take root - maybe even in a Stephen King story.

"I think, therefore I am?" Cynics and skeptics please step aside.

I hope therefore I am.