Advent is the season of hope. It is not a mistake that the first Sunday of Advent is the Sunday of hope in the traditions of the church. We live with hope the longest in this liturgical season. Peace comes next, followed by joy and love. It is a progression that has been honed through thousands of years of living with our faith. We live in a society that is, in my opinion, sadly short of hope. Not only is hope in rather short supply in a fearful society, Hope is not even understood. You can hear the word a lot on television, but often it is used in contexts that have little to do with the real meaning of hope.

Since the recent election news commentators have been quick to use the word hope in relationship to the budget negotiations in Washington, DC. “There appears to be little hope of compromise.” “Hope grows thin as fiscal cliff looms.”

Dictionary definitions of hope usually reflect an expectation of success in the pursuit of desired goals. An example would be a college freshman stating, “I hope to graduate in four years.” The problem with these definitions is that they equate worldly success with the concept. The public belief seems to be that the most hopeful people are the most successful. “Where there is a will, there is a way,” we say, but we know that it takes more than sheer will to have the ingredients of success. Some people have more opportunities than others. The “way” is easier for some than for others. And success in the eyes of the world is a poor measure of the reality of hope.

In the 1950’s as the study of psychology blossomed in the postwar United States, scientific approaches for examining hope began to appear. Mental health professionals defined hope in terms of expectancies – similar to the way dictionaries define the concept. This led to examinations of how some people appear able to achieve goals and others do not. In the 1990’s “hope theory” was little more than pathways thinking – reflections on how people achieve goals. This research did, however, produce a significant insight that religious teachers have known for millennia. Psychologists “discovered” that hopeful thinking does not appear to be based on genetic inheritance, but instead reflects on learning experiences over the course of childhood. Hope is not a trait that someone either does or does not have. Hope is learned. Hope can be taught.

The Late C.R. Snyder of the University of Kansas at Lawrence, published several works on the topic of hope. Perhaps the most popular of these books was the 2003 volume, “The Psychology of Hope,” subtitled, “You Can Get There from Here.” It is an examination of highly hopeful individuals. In contrast to much of prevailing educational theory, Snyder reminded us of a truth we have always known. Hope is born in adversity. A privileged life produces expectations of privilege and entitlement. A life of struggle produces a hopefulness that cannot be turned back. Hope is a function of struggle.

But we fear the struggles of our children. We seek to shield them from adversity. This has been especially evident in the years since the 911 attacks in 2001. Parents have tried to create protective shields around their children. They have tried to raise them away from the realities and the struggles of this harsh world. Out of the best of motivations, parents try to create a beautiful world for their children and in doing so take struggles away from them. Colleges are reporting that the phenomenon of “helicopter” parents who hover over their children and try to manage every aspect of their lives has now reached university level. Corporate human resources people report that they are regularly receiving calls from the parents of employees wanting to go over performance evaluations of their children to find out why they didn’t get a promotion.

Shielding children from struggle – protecting them from adversity – is to deny them the possibility of hope. In the church, we have known this for many generations. But it appears that we have been less than successful in teaching it well in our generation. It has been there in the Bible all along. In chapter 5 of Romans it is written: “Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame . . .” (Romans 5:3-5a)

One of the hardest, and most important, tasks of every parent is to allow suffering to enter the lives of our children. It is, perhaps, counter-intuitive. We want to shield them from all pain. We don’t want them to get hurt. But neither do we want them to grow into adults who lose heart at the first sign of struggle.

Imagine if we were to raise children that were so insistent on getting their own way that when they encountered someone who had a different opinion they became incapable of listening, and unable to imagine anything different than simply getting their own way. What if we raised children who were incapable of exploring different pathways and seeking different routes to their goals, but instead gave up at the first discovery of a blocked route?

Oh, that’s right, we already have. And too many of them have been elected to congress. Grandstanding is not hope. Living in fear is not hope.

For we know that courage, like hope, is also born in the face of adversity. And we shudder at the utter lack of courage demonstrated daily by legislators who are too afraid of offending their funding sources to do what is right for their country.

Hope, however, is stronger than these moments in our history. The hope of our people has been through seasons of incompetent and sometimes downright evil leadership. The hope of our people has endured the folly of failures of leadership. Real hope will not die even if we plunge over the fiscal cliff.

We would do well, however, to renew our teaching about hope in this season. It is not a mistake that we have been taught to live with our thoughts and prayers focused on hope for four weeks every year.

Pray for hope!

Copyright © 2012 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.