Isaiah 60:1-5 (NRSV)

How do you define hope?

This could be a trick question, but thinking about it will lead you to some wisdom. How do you define hope?

For many people [myself included], hope can seem like an insufficient thing. After all, look at the world. It’s easy for someone to tell another to hope when she is suffering or being discriminated against, or if she is stuck in a terrible situation. What do you tell Syrian refugees who are torn from their homes, only to be turned away by others? Should they have hope? Really?

Seems insufficient to me.

What do you tell the mother of the child who is gunned down randomly, for no reason, other than the fact that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time? Do you tell her to hope?

What about the young woman who is dying of cancer. She knows she’s terminal; the doctors say so. Do you tell her to hope?

I’m just being honest. I think sometimes we use the word and concept of hope to try to answer questions we cannot answer or to try to make us feel better about horrible situations.

So, that being said, here is what comes to my mind when I ask myself the same question:

How do I define hope?

I define hope as imagination.

Maybe that makes sense to you, maybe it doesn’t.
I define hope as imagination.

Because I’ve seen people in horrific situations exhibit an incredibly creative and healing form of imagination. They don’t just hope things will get better. They imagine what good could possibly come out of a horrific situation. They imagine whether or not anything good at all could happen.

But they are not just imagining about the future; they are imagining about this very moment. Can it be possible for the Syrian refugee to find a new life, or safety, or community? Can it be possible for the grieving mother to find joy and purpose again? Can it be possible for the terminal cancer patient to enjoy her life and positively impact others?

These kinds of questions are not superficial. Neither are they cop-outs like hope statements are sometimes. These questions are honest, messy, and real. It takes time to ask them and the process can be long and even painful. But when people ask themselves individually what they can imagine about their current situation, they are building within themselves the capacity to move forward.

The Hebrew prophets were doing the same thing, you see. Prophets like Isaiah weren’t really predicting the future, as some might claim. Neither were they sharing history or documenting what was happening in their time. Prophets were imagining what things could be like in the world. None of what they imagined was realized. Isaiah, for example, most likely written by a variety of Israelite priests, was put together over a span of years, some of them during the Babylonian exile.

In other words, we’re talking about war, and people being ripped from their homes and exiled to a foreign country. Mmmmm……

So it’s not a “hopeful” book, really. Isaiah IS an imagining book, though. The authors imagine what good could possibly come of this situation. They imagine what their reality would be like if people actually loved G-d in the way they said they did and loved others also. They imagined if justice reigned over injustice. They imagined if poor people were actually lifted up and encouraged and given food and shelter. They imagined if wars would cease and people would stop killing each other over religion, land, and power.

Yes, go ahead. Insert your John Lennon reference here.

Imagine.

And so, have you reflected on how you answer the question?

How do you define hope?

I encourage you to use your imagination. Don’t be superficial or seek easy answers. Let the question hang there for a while. Let your imagination go crazy. In this current moment, in your life, what can you imagine? How can things be joyful, peaceful, and fulfilling?