Some thoughts on the tension between Certainty and Hope, inspired by’s book “The Prophetic Imagination”…
“I have a dream!” said the Preacher.
A dream implies hope: hope for a better life, for redemption, or justification, or perhaps vindication. Hope is the conviction that the future holds the promise of better things to come, that the future is a better place than the present.
And the Preacher, representing a people who had endured centuries of oppression, terror, bondage, and worse, gave voice to their hopes that hot afternoon, more than 50 years ago.
“I have a dream!” he said. And yet, the hundreds of thousands who first heard those words had little else but those words.
Hope flourishes in the forgotten corners of human existence, in those places where certainty either does not exist, or where the only certainty to be had is dark and painful. Hope flourishes where human voices are not given the chance to speak, where human hands are not allowed to build a future for themselves, and quite often where those with power and wealth have done all within their power to eliminate the future.
Stop! …Say that again? Eliminate the future?
Yes.
The Here and the Hereafter 