Hope is not a pre-requisite

We’ve had a few future-oriented events at ECLAS, most recently a senior leader conference on Science and New Creation. Thinking about the future almost inevitably leads to conversations about hope for a better one. But times have felt difficult lately. I’ve dealt with illness in the family, and then there’s the state of higher education and global conflict all weighing heavily on me. It feels like I am constantly bracing for the next piece of bad news from home, or the next headline reporting death and destruction. Hope feels in short supply.

As I was checking in with myself this morning, I was reminded of a talk I attended at the Edinburgh Book Festival last summer with author Ta-Nehisi Coates. During the Q&A, a white woman in the audience stood up and asked: where do you see hope? And, more pointedly, where can the rest of us find it? It was a question asked often, Coates said, and one he always answered the same way. He doesn’t operate on hope; he operates despite a lack of it.

To underline his point, he invoked his enslaved ancestors, born into a system designed to crush bodies, souls, spirits, and futures. Imagine, he said, inhabiting a world where you see enslavement in every direction. Look back, generations enslaved. Look ahead, generations enslaved. Look around, nothing but the architecture of violence and exploitation.

And yet they resisted, rebelled, fought for their own and their children’s freedom. They forged lives in a world that denied their humanity. They moved, spoke, created, and endured not because they had evidence that hope was justified, but because surrender wasn’t an option.

There is a famous line in Maya Angelou’s poem Still I Rise: “I am the dream and the hope of the slave.” Part of the power of that line, at least for me, is that it makes hope manifest.

When Coates writes, when he teaches, when he makes sense of the world’s brutalities and possibilities, he isn’t animated by a belief that everything will get better. He is animated by the insistence that he must act anyway, and to write through the noise.

I am not here making an argument about the ultimate grounds or object of hope, still less a rejection of hope in Christ. It is a critique of the idea that hope must function as emotional or motivational fuel, something we need to feel or possess before ethical action becomes possible.

That way of framing hope risks tying responsibility to optimism, and commitment to confidence about outcomes. It is the distinction between hope that rests on reassurance or progress, and hope that persists without guarantees, without evidence, and often without consolation. By contrast, some contemporary “techno-salvationist” visions of the future offer a particularly thin form of hope, grounded almost entirely in human ingenuity and anticipated success, and therefore easily exhausted by the realities of limitation, conflict, and failure.

What I am trying to hold onto here is a steadier posture, one in which action, care, and responsibility are not postponed until hope feels secure. Coates’ reframing is helpful: hope is not a prerequisite; it is a luxury. I could feel the shift in the room as he spoke, and how it landed in me. We commit to action with or without emotional fuel. We move toward the world we want to inhabit.

Over the past year, I’ve found myself caught between wanting to believe things will improve and feeling worn down by evidence to the contrary. Hope can feel fragile, as if it requires constant tending, and when it falters, I find myself flailing. So it has been unexpectedly liberating to remind myself not to rely on it. If I don’t need hope in order to move, its absence no longer has the power to paralyse me.

There was something steadying about being in the presence of someone who thinks slowly and deeply like this, and in public, someone who doesn’t rush to reassure you or make the world tidier than it is. It reminded me of some of the interviews I did with bishops during the pandemic. They warned against moving too quickly from loss to recovery, from illness to cure, and from the pain of the present day to an imagined future without it. That warning came in the midst of the suffering the pandemic caused for all of us.

To be clear, I don’t think that operating despite a lack of immediate hope is a form of resignation. I think it’s a kind of freedom. It lets us work without demanding guarantees. It lets us learn without insisting on certainty. Not relying on hope feels steadier to me. More honest. More workable. I don’t wake up every morning filled with optimism about the state of the world. But I can wake up committed to doing the next thing that moves me toward an improved, manifest future: writing, teaching, showing up for people, making small changes where I can.

This is what I took from Coates that day, a renewed sense of direction. If his ancestors could move through a world that offered them no evidence of a better future, then I can keep moving through mine. Not because I expect improvement, but because the act of moving, of choosing, creating, and insisting on better, is its own quiet rebellion.