Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands for a chance to succeed. (Vaclav Havel)
“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world” and I would add, “a ‘mind’ working in harmony with a heart.” This hope is grounded in the Spiritual, a Divinely inspired, intuitive understanding that is not based in what is so often an ersatz “joy” of the common-sense reality that most of us call home. “Joy” is very wonderful but we often fall victim to a common-sense definition of that word which is but a quest for what C.S. Lewis called, ”a quest for immediate gratification over a believed-in pattern of glory.” Hope is most real when we face the grim dirge of hopelessness when circumstances seem beyond the pale of any rational hope.
Here is one of my favorite poetic approaches to this hope/hopelessness continuum from the pen of T. S. Eliot in “East Coker,” one of “The Four Quartets”:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
(AFTERTHOUGHT—Havel was the last president of Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech Republic, serving from 1989-2003. He was an author, a playwright, and memoroist whose literary skills were used to criticize the totalitarian Communist regime that oppressed Eastern Europe.)