Opinion

Jarlath Kearney: Don't believe anyone who tells you hope is dead. Hope cannot be killed

Dr Martin Luther King: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope”
Dr Martin Luther King: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope” Dr Martin Luther King: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope”

I saw a newspaper column last week highlighting the failure of politics. The headline declared: “Death of hope”. It happened to be in the Philadelphia Inquirer about US pro-gun candidate selection. But it’s the sort of headline we see too regularly these days.

Fortunately it’s wrong. Don’t believe any person or entity telling you that hope can die. No matter what the circumstances, regardless of politics. Hope never dies. It is indestructible.

It cannot be killed, crushed, ground, destroyed, annihilated or extinguished. That’s because hope rises from deep inside the spirit of humanity.

And our primary collective humane responsibility involves mutually building reservoirs for hope, and love, and dignity - notwithstanding all of our individual faults or other distractions.

The weakness in some critiques is that they are too eager to impose conclusions rather than invite conversations, so they frequently overuse words without understanding meaning.

Very often, those proclaiming the demise of hope in any situation actually mean a failure of expectation. And while hope and expectation are related, they have important differences.

Dr Martin Luther King highlighted the distinction in his famous edict: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

Infinite hope grows from within an individual’s internal spirit. Hope is an inner flame of enlightenment that humanity has the capacity to do better and be better. It is a limitless gift, a moral morale, that we can generously and infinitely restore into the font of another’s heart – just like dignity.

Hope needs nothing more than one person choosing that it will come alive, with a value that is immeasurable. Hope is something that sleeps within our dreams, wrapping around our fragile hearts, and whispering into our consciousness that we can keep going, that we can do better, individually and collectively, to change the circumstances around us. Hope rises internally.

Finite expectation is different. It is created through the external world. Expectation is a mechanical analysis, a measurement or goal of what outcomes we believe could occur based on certain facts and circumstance.

Expectation sits alongside targets and delivery, demands and requirements. It’s a condition that is directly connected with circumstances that are changed in association with others. Expectation nearly always relies on others’ actions before its achievement can be measured or assessed. Expectation arises externally.

Of course it is perfectly legitimate (and often appropriate) for anyone to make an analysis – political, social, economic - that ‘expectations’ have not been met in any given situation.

But it is factually impossible to claim that hope can ever die or will ever perish. It cannot. It will not. Because it is a continuum concept, a constant. It lives organically within our spiritual ‘deep time’. It is not contingent upon the dates of a calendar, or the delivery of governments, or the behaviour of anyone but ourselves.

There are people who, in the very darkest days of life, when ready to drown and drift away in an overwhelming sea of utter despair, have clung desperately to nothing more than a tiny internal buoy of heartfelt hope to stay afloat. These are the people who know just how life-giving and life-affirming it is to build up the basis of internal hope within any society or situation – even where all other external expectations seem to have disappointed or disappeared.

Hope is not up for debate. It is not going to be washed away. We must constantly defend humanity’s hope from a culture of hopelessly negative cynicism. Otherwise all of the policies and politics, economics and environmentalism, critiques and media, religion and academia, become wasted empty vessels - merely actions without meaning, like a marriage without love.

So the next time someone tells you – in any aspect of life – that hope has been destroyed, remind them to pick their words and their meanings more carefully.

And if you want to know what hope really looks like, it exists far beyond the rhetorical inspiration of great speeches, the constructed notions of columnists, or the organised expectations of political life or government policies.

Hope is like an always rising sunrise, ever so gently revealing its blinding and powerful wonder in the simplest, smallest of ways, and often in the saddest of times through the hardest of hurts.

Like it did, once again, ten days ago, as I witnessed an elderly heartbroken mother grieving the sudden death of her beautiful son and wading through the rivered tears of her old soul to summon up unparalleled hope as she reminded everyone that our lives are short and we must do our best to make the world a better place. Hope never dies.