Hope as a foundation

For thinking about your country

While I’m familiar with hope as a quality applied to persons (and myself) the idea of applying it to whole nations is refreshing.

 

…[Hope] makes an individual or a group, or even a nation, producers in their own drama, and not merely actors repeating the lines set  by others or by some mysterious fate.

The Christian understanding is that hope is an essential … state of mind for all human beings…

..[Hope] makes an individual or a group, or even a nation, producers in their own drama, and not merely actors repeating the lines set by others or by some mysterious fate.

Francois-Xavier, Cardinal Nguyen van Thuan, wrote an account of more than a decade in prison in Vietnam after the Communist takeover of the south in 1974. His is a testimony of hope, despite torture, solitary confinement and a near certainty of death in prison, forgotten by the majority of the world. He was sustained by the presence of Christ, by Mass said each day with a grain of rice and enough rice wine to hold in the palm of his hand . He was sustained by the story, the narrative of hope that centre on the resurrection of Christ and his living presence with us now. He was not destroyed by circumstance, or a sense of fatalism, but neither did he have a false hope of survival, a vain optimism. The story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the  most powerful narrative shift in world history, enabling a small and scattered group of disciples full of despair to set a pattern and style of life that conquered the Roman Empire without violence.
(Reimagining Britain, pp 25, 26, 27)


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