Hope is a means of accessing reality, of getting at it, seeing the hopefulness at its center without occluding or deflecting or otherwise avoiding the depth of pain, injustice, and wrongness in the world. Hope sees all that is there, the bad as well as the good, but realizes that a hasty acquiescence to what is immediately apparent is not realism, but one more form of the false consolation of complacency. Hope is surprising—indeed, it is the capacity to be joyfully surprised. In this way hope is readily called transcendent, and even, in a way, “otherworldly.”
“The capacity to be joyfully surprised”—now that is an intriguing definition of hope. It seems that most political projects currently on offer, Christian or otherwise, do nothing to cultivate this capacity. My mind goes to Jesus' use of parables, often to teach about the kingdom of heaven. A consistent feature of the parables is that things will turn out in some quite unexpected ways, for outsiders and insiders alike. Might one purpose of such teaching be to open up imaginative space for just this kind of capacity?