I’ve got hope on the brain this week. Talking with a few people about the seismic shift (welcomed in our view) in US politics this week, we couldn’t help but acknowledge that the shift for many voters might be simply about the price of fuel, but about corruption, brutality, meanness, and certainly not about climate change which is virtually absent from political discourse right now.

But still a good week. A hopeful week.

Brian McLaren cautions about hope, rejecting “hope-ium.” This is superficial, wistful hope that it will work out because it has to, because we wish hard enough. This can lead to compacency. He notes how blind optimism and despair both let us off the hook from action.

Vaclav Havel’s definition of true hope is “not the certainty things will turnout as we wish, [but] the conviction some things are worth doing no matter how they turn out.”

This seems a more useful way of thinking about hope. Hope as fuel, not a drug. Hope as inspiration, not complicity.

Hope as quiet calm.

I wrote this song one frosty October morning. It’s the title track off an EP of songs that I found myself singing at the time that were giving me hope…no, quiet joy and comfort. The rest of the songs on the EP were all covers of songs ranging from U2 to my musical brothers Ted Hajnasiewicz and Tom Mobry.