Having completed the "Wild Bright Hope" Lent course I feel I have been on a journey. Clichéd perhaps, but the past six weeks have been so much more than disparate group discussions. The course has become a wonderful drawing together of so many thoughts and ideas: some new, some many years old, caught rattling around in my head waiting for an outlet. It's odd really, because it's "just" a book - and not even one I initially felt particularly inspired to read. As any parent navigating complex illness will tell you - or any family carer struggling to source additional answers or support, it's often "the hope that gets you", precipitating another descent into despair, and I've written about it many times before: -
"Each time someone offers you a bit of hope your heart leaps. The adrenalin kicks in and you start to take your eye off the ball. That "ball" is coping, it's the hamster wheel of life where you know your niche and get on with it, where you understand your limitations and work within them. At whatever level, we all do this. But hope makes you look beyond, at what might be, the what-ifs, the maybes. It's dangerous territory."
In our modern society "hope" can become fear-inducing because it prompts us to embark on a journey where we dare to hope for change. Change we yearn for, change we desperately need. And what if that change fails to materialise? Unfulfilled hope can feel acutely painful.
What this book has taught me is that hope doesn't necessarily mean focussing on desired, or even defined change. Instead, hope creates the space for change, it facilitates new perspectives which enable us to grow. To grow in our thinking, our behaviour and our interactions with others. Fear is thus a barrier to hope, preventing those new perspectives which create this space for change. Hope is therefore not a definitive movement towards desired change, it is an openness to new perspectives. And the catalyst required is human connection. Liberating stuff.
