April 23, 2025

Why is hope—both as a concept and as a reality—so elusive? In Christian thought, hope’s ethereal character can be attributed in large part—like so much else—to the apostle Paul.  “Hope,” he writes in his Letter to the Romans, “that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen?” (Rom. 8:24). Hope projects itself beyond the visible here-and-now. It works hand in hand with the other supernal virtues, faith and love, but seems more loosely tethered to stable ground. For Paul, love is foundational: it “believes all things, hopes all things,” and is the greatest of the three (1 Cor. 13:7, 13). Paul’s doppelgänger, the anonymous author of Hebrews, designates faith as the reality underlying hope, providing the evidence for things unseen (Heb. 11:1). Faith and love seem joined at the hip, heavy and substantial virtues that ground hope’s flighty otherworldliness. Reminding the Thessalonians that they “know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night,” Paul metaphorically expresses this subtle distinction when he urges his readers to “put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation” (1 Thess. 5:2, 8). Suit up! And oh, yeah—looks like you might need a hat after all. Just in case.

Of course, this is not all that the New Testament or Christian theology has to say about hope. Paul in another passage links the origin of hope to the human experience of affliction: those justified by faith boast not only in the “hope of sharing the glory of God” in the future, he claims, but also in their present “sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Rom. 5:2-4). This line of thinking, along with deep recognition of the realities of the Holocaust, inspired the constructive vision of the German Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann (1926-2024). Moltmann’s enormously influential Theology of Hope: On the Ground and Implications of a Christian Eschatology (1964; in English, 1967) urged active participation in social justice and actions of healing in the present as essential correlates of the expectation of God’s ultimate mending and transformation of the world. In drawing a connection from the experience of suffering to hope and back again to the present, Moltmann offered a more stable footing for hope in the visible world, even as he grounded it ever more firmly in God’s eschatological future.

And yet I wonder if it is merely hope’s otherworldly orientation that makes it so elusive. Could this also be due to the fact that it’s often the concept of hope—rather than the practice of hope—that seems to garner the most attention? In his essay for this colloquy, “The Humanities as a Hope Educator,” philosopher Pavlos Kontos examines hope as an intellectual faculty, form of perceptual judgment, or practical rationality. I think we can go even further in this latter direction. What if we focus not just on hope as a helmet—meant for the head—but also as a this-worldly praxis for the whole body? Not simply a capacity toward unseen realities but as itself as something substantial and quantifiable?

It’s time to bring hope back down to earth, to recover its graininess and rough edges and other textures. For this task, I seek guidance from poet Denise Levertov (1923-1997), whose poem “For the New Year, 1981” depicts hope in concrete images and adds new and needed perspective for grounding and growing it.

For the New Year, 1981

I have a small grain of hope—
one small crystal that gleams
clear colors out of transparency.

I need more.

I break off a fragment
to send to you.

Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.

Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.

Only so, by division,
will hope increase,

like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source—
clumsy and earth-covered—
of grace.

By Denise Levertov

Levertov’s poem can be read—ideally, out loud—as a grounding practice for hope. Content and sonic dimensions work together to encapsulate hope’s apparent contradictions and enable an embodied engagement, a hope-act rooted in the present. In the beginning, the metaphors of the grain and the crystal offer analogies for hope’s smallness drawn from the earth, suggesting a minuteness, but one laden with growth potential and resilience. The problem with hope is not that it is fleeting or elusive, uncertain or even potentially false, but rather this simple, hard truth: “I need more.” Like a bass line, this phrase provides the foundation for the rest of the poem, as hope increases—paradoxically—through division, fragmentation, fraction.

Breaking off and releasing a minuscule “grain of a grain” to another gives way to two prayerful pleas: “take” and “share.” The closing words of these lines—hope / shrink and fragment / grow—constitute their performance: “shrink” and “fragment” sink back into the throat, an inhalation, a taking. “Hope” and “grow” open the lips for the outbreath, the exhale, the sharing. Just as all life consists in this oppositional taking and sharing, so hope flourishes only through recurring division, in the reciprocal rhythm of receiving and release.

And thus all life began, according to the ancient story in Genesis 2, in a garden, where the Creator formed a human creature out of the humus of the earth by his own hand; animated the earth-creature, Adam, by his own outbreath; and increased humanity by dividing the earthly prototype, “like a clump of irises….clumsy and earth-covered.” Such an “unlikely source. . .of grace.” And grounds for hope.

Resources for exploration:

Scripture citations are from The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, 3^rd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Pavlos Kontos’ essay, “The Humanities as a Hope Educator,” can be accessed in “Hope: The Future of an Idea,” a colloquy for Arcade: A Digital Salon, from the Stanford Humanities Center: https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/humanities-hope-educator

Denise Levertov taught at Stanford from 1982-1993. Her poem, “For the New Year, 1981,” is taken from Candles in Babylon (New York: New Directions, 1982), 97. For discussion of her poetry, see the entry on “Denise Levertov” at the website of the Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/denise-levertov. Levertov’s papers are housed in the Stanford University Libraries: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/4083786.

Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope is discussed by Miroslav Volf in “Theologies of Hope,” a contribution to “Seeking the Light: Notes on Hope,” a themed-issue of the journal Reflections (Fall 2020), https://reflections.yale.edu/article/seeking-light-notes-hope/theologies-hope.

For an overview of Moltmann’s theology and career, see the obituary by Clay Risen, “Jürgen Moltmann, Theologian Who Confronted Auschwitz, is Dead at 98,” which appeared in the New York Times, on June 8, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/books/jurgen-moltmann-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.9E4.MbmT.6ZVJED6AjYrC&smid=url-share