I keep hearing that Hope is, well, hopeless. That to hope is perhaps a way not to engage with the activism and participation needed for the current state of our planet and our peoples. It’s too late for it all, so it’s hopeless. You know where I’m going with this. The opposite of hopeless Hope as a start. If you haven’t come across it, I recommend Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World . The data tells us that we’re in a much better state than media, social or otherwise, wants us to know. We’re actually near the peak of how bad it can be and are in the position of making a more sustainable planet - right now. There are some things we need to do first and to me, the first of them is to resurrect, or let the Divine resurrect, our hope.
The image below is an image made for a book called the Origins of the New Testament. It was done over ten years ago now, when I was in the process of being the Visual Theologian in a group of three theologians, one of the others quite internationally famous but now deceased. My hope was that the book would come to fruition with this female visual theolgian’s work would stand as a voice of a theolgian, not illustrator. This image is about the apostle Paul, who was utterly bound in the religion he knew and at the same time, caught in the life of Jesus. In the image, he is almost of a piece with the scroll of the Judaism in which he grew, yet the colour of that history swirls him up to wonder at a new light. And the light is surrounded by layers of colour. It was impossible to draw separate images; Paul is utterly bound in his past and caught completely in the shock of his present.
As are we. Caught in our past with decisions made by others, imacts on us from others, living inside of systems made without and sometimes with our permission. And the present shocks us. Amidst the political to the right shifts of awfulness, there are so many incredible things people are already doing to repair, restore and make new. Our necessary psychological response to what is happening around and to us is to decide what to do, then do it. As is quoted so often, we can’t change what happened but we can change how we respond. Let’s not get caught in the no-hoper mindset. We can see light when we look for it, so lets get together to let it shape us and move us to action.
