Telly Rules OK?!

PAUSE FOR THOUGHT: REVEREND TERRY BIDDINGTON

I heard that the first Christmas tree of the season was seen in a Liverpool pub back on September 5th. But which of us is surprised these days. For every year Christmas seems to start ever earlier as retailers attempt to maximize profit margins and avoid losing ground to competitors. And this eagerness is matched by the hope many of us have to get the very best deals and all our gifts under the tree early as possible - so we can relax for the festivities…

But there’s surely more to the business of hoping than this!

Hope is one of the most curious and enduring aspects of human identity. We hope in all sorts of situations: for the survivors of natural disasters, for hostage situations, and for missing children. For continued employment, good health and long life. We may of course feel that our lives are already planned out, our destinies fixed, our fate already sealed, and that nothing can be altered. But when critical illness strikes and all seems lost we may, nonetheless, find ourselves ‘hoping against hope.’

We may rail against Blind Providence and make desperate promises to placate some Distant Divinity. But few, if any of us, are likely ever to cease hoping - or to believe that hope is futile.

And hoping in this way is very much how some people see prayer. For praying, like hoping, is often understood to be about getting the result we need. ‘Please: save them! Please: let me find a job! Please: help me find a place to park the car…!’

What is sometimes misunderstood, though, is the link between prayer and hope, on the one hand, and the human capacity to imagine. For hoping and praying are, in fact, about trying to imagine the future differently, even when that future is yet unknown to us.

Hope is about believing that ordinary mortals like us can draw upon a capacity (be from deep within us or else from somewhere beyond us) to imagine the world afresh, remade, and more just for all people. Hope is about daring to imagine that we might all just be able to make all things better. If we really choose to!