Hope in the New Year?

Hope in the New Year?

There is something powerfully symbolic about the death of President Jimmy Carter, aged 100, at the close of 2024. Lives that span an entire century are astounding, in historical terms, and as he departs this earth, you can almost touch the question: will global politics see the like of him again? Carter was one of The Elders, (an independent group of global leaders working for peace, justice, human rights and a sustainable planet), and rightly was dubbed, ‘The president with a moral compass’. Like the Elders’ founder, Nelson Mandela, Carter was the epitome of a faith-driven statesman. He embodied and exemplified his own favourite biblical verse, Micah 6: 8, ‘to act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with God’.

As 2025 dawns, many of us dread the investiture of a US leader with a very different kind of compass. Paradoxically, he was elected by democratic processes, but has dictatorial and deeply illiberal sensibilities. I am brought to ask, with writer Cole Arthur Riley, “In a time when we have more access than ever before to the traumas of this world, how will you resist the tide of despair?” The related Benediction in her book ‘Black Liturgies’, says this, “Let beauty be your anchor…Life is monstrous on the threshold of apocalypse. The practice of beholding, this fidelity to beauty in all things…is no small form of salvation.” And she continues, “So may you fall in love again and again with the beautiful. And may that enchantment keep you from the captivity of despair and usher you into dreaming.” Dreaming brings us to the notion of hope. What can it mean in our world today? This will be something of a theme for Modern Church throughout 2025.

Zooming in from the global to the local, and to the religiously parochial, members of UK Christian denominations, especially the Church of England, may be wondering when the revelations about abuse, and collusion with it, will end. The Makin report, and subsequent revelations, remind us that obfuscation and cover-up, the closing of ranks by the powerful against the vulnerable, and the ‘protection’ of the institution for the ‘greater good’ are a contextual reality in the church. And as one of our members put it in a social media comment, “Does ‘there’s a lot of good work being done at a local level’ really cut the mustard when the men in charge have a public record of failing to act? Does some sort of long-winded explanation of church governance structures really cut it when the story involves heart-breaking testimony of the abused?” We share this deep anger, frustration and the temptation to hopelessness.

Notice, though, that Micah 6: 8 has a focus on verbs: to act, to love, to walk. In her lecture at St Paul’s Cathedral in 2024, ‘What is Hope?’, theologian Susie Snyder said this, “I think that human beings and God are involved together in creating hope, and this is because I understand God to share her power with us. We are invited to lean on God to hope for divine help in our journey of enacting hope in the world today… Hope is better understood as a verb: ‘hoping’ – a dynamic activity we’re doing, rather than a static object, or a feeling we have or don’t have.” She quotes Jurgen Moltmann (another one lost to us during 2024, after a life of almost a century), that hope causes unrest and impatience – pushing us to work wholeheartedly for love, justice and reconciliation. She continues, “We need to dwell in the reality of suffering – as Moltmann drew our attention to the ‘crucified God’ of Auschwitz. God suffers with humanity, while also promising humanity a better future through the hope of the resurrection, which he labelled a ‘theology of hope’.”

Susie Snyder argues that, whilst our social context of positive psychology and self-help encourages us to focus on ‘hope for me’, a Christian approach to hope must be about ‘hope for us’ – our lives interwoven with one another as people, creatures, and the planet. Hope needs to be “held and practised in a collective. Hope depends on relationship and connections. Hope is a dynamic, relational activity, not a possession.”

This collective understanding of hope brings us to a very different place. If hope is in the space between the reality of ‘the world as it is’ and our vision of ‘the world as it could be’, we need both to dream and to act. And the power to act comes through our connections with others, especially our connections across difference. Social justice movements across the generations and over centuries, have understood this, and there is much to inspire and educate us. Bernice Johnson Reagon, who died during 2024 at the tender age of 81, was an active participant in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s in the USA; a member of the Freedom Singers; later cultural historian in music history at the Smithsonian, and founder of the all female a cappella group, Sweet Honey in the Rock. “After a song”, Reagon recalled, “the differences between us were not so great. Somehow, making a song required an expression of that which was common to us all….This music was like an instrument, like holding a tool in your hand.”

In the introduction to the book, ‘We Who Believe in Freedom’, written in the late 1990s to celebrate twenty years of the group, Alice Walker writes of her first experience of a Sweet Honey in the Rock concert, “By the fifth song I knew why people travel hundreds of miles to attend a Sweet Honey concert…It is inoculation against poison, immunization against the disease of racist and sexist selfishness, envy, and greed…there is a voice rising clear and purposeful from the collective throat of the group…It urges us to acknowledge the suffering, yes, but to savor the beauty of life and the joy. Under this voice, the world begins to expand, and paradoxically, to grow smaller.”

May we embrace 2025 in hope, and work together to make hope happen.

Alison Webster is General Secretary of Modern Church, and Mission Theologian in Residence at Citizens UK.