Day 93 - Optimism with a broken heart

How hopeful do you feel about our nation and our world today? As I write this, political parties across England, Scotland and Wales are coming to terms with their success or disappointment at the ballot box. Some hopes have been dashed, others raised. More widely in our world, it is hard to watch the continuing dramas in the Middle East, Ukraine and other places without a weary and depressing sense of inevitability. It is not easy to keep a spirit of hope for our world with so much worry, suffering and uncertainty around us.

But, as we are frequently reminded in the Bible, we do have hope; not in earthly or temporal things but hope in God. The word hope appears 180 times in the Bible; 83 in the New Testament alone. Hope, along with faith and love, are the pillars of our relationship with our heavenly Father. David wrote these words in the psalms – in fact he liked them so much he wrote them three times!

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Saviour and my God. (Psalm 42 v5 & v11, Psalm 43 v5)

David would frequently remind himself of the hope he has in the Lord – never more so than during times of great personal suffering.

But how do we carry this hope into our messy and turbulent world? At this time of Pentecost, when we recall, celebrate and reaffirm the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church, how can our hope in the risen Lord help us give hope to others as we live in, and witness to, our world?

The songwriter, musician and writer Nick Cave, no stranger to personal tragedy in his own life, has given his own definition of hope. He wrote: “Hope is optimism with a broken heart”. To understand his optimism, he wrote:

“The luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.”

But what about the “broken heart”? In our lives, we can, and should, be hopeful for our world, celebrate its beauty and goodness, and hope for a better future. But at the same time, our witness should not ignore or hide from those experiences which shape that hope – our messiness and busyness, our joys and tragedies. These things are all part of our walk with God. They should inform our hope but not overwhelm it.

If we are to be changemakers in our communities and in our world, we need to be people of hope, but not a hope founded on blind optimism with our fingers metaphorically crossed. Neither should our hope ignore the uniqueness of our personal witness and testimony. Rather, our hope should be fired by a sense of optimism and informed and coloured by the richness of our personal journey, with all its light and shade.

As Nelson Mandela once wrote: "May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears." This Pentecost, may our choices reflect our hope in our Lord, and may the light of that hope be filtered through, and enriched by, the prism of our broken hearts.

Philip Clarke