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From the earliest days of Christianity, hope was a support that offered a prospect of the future in all the storms of life.  We find the symbol of hope, the anchor, in the oldest inscriptions and drawings in the catacombs in Rome.  Even though you weren’t sure of your life, even when you were persecuted, tortured, and killed, the hope of a new existence was as an anchor you cast and that gave you trust in life that nothing and no one could take away from you.

We know the saying: When there is life, there is hope.  The first Christians would never have said that, because for them there was more hope in death than in life.  One of the early martyrs, Felicitas, said to her executioners: “Now I suffer, but when I am thrown to the wild animals, another will suffer for me, because I suffer for Him.”

As self-evident as hope was for the first followers of Christ, so doubtful is this quality for people of our time.  Where do you find hope in a world where people doubt everything?  To go back to the image of the anchor, we have lost the ground under our feet.  When we cast our anchor, there is no bottom that holds it.  We are traveling in a little boat in an endless sea, over groundless depths, through dark nights.  How many contemporaries aren’t adrift, aimlessly at the mercy of the waves, a plaything of destiny and fate?

A review of the past year shows an appalling number of wars and conflicts.  Worldwide, forty-five countries are involved in war one way or another.  The consequences are felt everywhere.  According to the United Nations, today’s conflicts are “more serious and more deeply rooted that ever before in recent history.”  Not to mention all the other threats and dangers that are besetting all of us: climate disasters, crop failures, pollution, disinformation, hate campaigns, espionage…  The list could go on and on.

Is it possible to have hope for the future in such a world?  When lies reign, fear for the future threatens to reign too.  However, whoever is afraid of the future has already lost half the future.  That threatens to become reality for many contemporaries in desperate circumstances.  But how can you draw hope from desperate circumstances?

Recently there appeared a book with the remarkable title Hopeful Pessimism, written by the philosopher Mara van der Lugt.*  A bigger contrast than this title is hard to imagine—you are either an optimist or a pessimist; you are either hopeful or desperate, but how can you be a hopeful pessimist?  The author, who made a thorough study of all the dangers that threaten us today, leaves no doubt that there are plenty of reasons to become a pessimist about the situation and future of our world.  Sometimes it drives one to despair—but also the courage born of despair can help us get out of an impossible situation.

Pessimism, says Mara van der Lugt, can have value, not as a virtue in itself, but as a way to give new meaning to old virtues in a changing world:

• Facing up to reality as it is asks for courage. At this stage it is necessary to leave all illusions behind.
• Not to turn away from this sobering reality asks for persistence.
• And yet rejecting that that is the end—that is true hope.

One of the first to express the principle of hopeful pessimism and practice it was the Czech dissident Vaçlav Havel.  During his imprisonment he wrote the now famous essay Effort to Live in Truth.  Even the word effort in the title is a gratifying relativity.  Havel indicates with this that you can’t possess the truth.  At best you can make an effort to live in truth.

After he had himself fallen to the bottom of the pit during his solitary confinement, Havel wrote: “There are times we have to sink down into the deepest hardship to understand truth, just as we also have to go down to the bottom of a pit in broad daylight to see the stars.”

It is now forty years ago that Havel wrote these words in outer circumstances we can hardly imagine, but his concept of hopeful pessimism seems as if it was written for our times when he contends: “Hope is not the same thing as optimism.  It is not the conviction that everything will be all right, but the certainty that something has meaning, regardless of its ultimate outcome.”

In brief, in our threatened world we need a different form of hope to stay on our feet than the first Christians, who gazed into the infinite and faced the future, death, with unshakable trust.  Their hope was anchored in death, not in life.  In death they recognized the victor over death.  In this connection, you might think of the paradoxical expression in the insert in the Act of Consecration for the Dead, when it speaks of “deathless life.”

For us, our contemporaries and partners in misfortune, the future is dark as the night.  It is as if we are bobbing around in a deep, stormy sea.  No bottom to cast our anchor.  We need all our steersman’s tricks to keep our ship afloat, let alone to stay on course.  We left the safe harbor of our origin long ago.  The goal of our journey seems infinitely far away—so far that we run the risk of losing sight of our destination.

How is our distant destination expressed in the Creed?  “They may hope for the overcoming of the sickness of sin, for the continuance of the human being, and for the preservation of their life destined for eternity.”  This infinitely distant future (when will we ever have overcome our sickness of sin?) is not just given to us.  It is meant for “communities whose members feel the Christ within themselves…”

The future is not reserved for soloists who live according to the principle of “everyone for himself and God for us all,” but for individuals who join together out of free will in communities, in “one church,” as the Creed expresses it.  That is the one invisible church that unites in itself all “who are aware of the health-bringing power of the Christ.”

It is for good reason that, besides the symbolism of the anchor for hope, through the ages the imagery of the ship has been used for the church.  But this imagery has been materialized, just as the original image of the one church, the ecclesia, has become a rigid dogma.  The original meaning of the Greek word ecclesia was the invisible church, which unites in its “ship” all who experience Him, all who seek Him, all who follow Him.  To use an everyday expression, we are all in the same boat.  That is the most hopeful idea for the future: we are going together.

Long ago, when the stormy sea was not yet in sight, I wrote for a group of partners in misfortune the poem below which, in spite of everything, gives me hope for the future:

We go together on one ship,

We travel to the sea.

We go together with one light:

A star is going with us.

Darkness comes to meet us

But no one goes alone.

We will do battle if we have to,

No one will be lost.

No one knows the water that awaits us,

The sea, it will embrace us.

Destiny is darker than the night,

But we, we stay together.

 

-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, December 31, 2025

 

 

* Princeton University Press 2025.