A Facebook troll who e-mails me once in a while challenged my claim to have rejected the ideologies and labels of the left and the right. No one labels me, and I try not to label anyone else. But a troll is a troll.

My troll’s politics – I think he likes me in his own way, he stays in touch –  are very much of grievance and anger, even revenge, and I have this feeling he’s a nice, if somewhat insecure young man. I’d love to mentor him. He got me thinking to just what my ideology really is.

He seems self-pitying to me, and I know he is because it makes him crazy to hear it. He believes he has suffered greatly at the hands of elitists like myself, and he is relishing his turn. Suffering, I told him, is relative, I hope he reads some history.

After some thought, I e-mailed him back about my own ideology.

The word that kept coming to mind was “hope.”

“Hope” is one of those words that is tossed around like confetti, especially in organized religion where the idea of hope is closely tied to faith, and a  belief in one God or another.  My idea of hope is different, it means to me a kind of faith, an attitude of the mind and way of looking at life that is based on an expectation of a good or positive outcome of events, both in my own life and the world at large.

In the Christian faith, hope means to trust in, wait for, look for, or desire something or someone, or to expect something beneficial in the future. In the Hebrew Bible, to hope is to trust, especially in God. When Jeremiah addresses God, he says “our hope is in you.”

My trust is in the essential goodness of people, which I see again and again in my life. People are good, given the chance. People are awful, given the chance. Again, a choice for me to make. Is the cup half full…? The people I know who believe people are inherently bad are not happy people that I care to be around.

I know many people who are feeling hopeless and despair right now.

As it happens, the opposite of hope is dejection, hopelessness and despair. That is not my ideology.

For me, this is an easy choice, I do not want to see the world through the prism of dejection, hopelessness and despair, I have felt all of those things in my life, and hope is much better. I am plenty cynical and windblown, and have seen lots of trouble. I am no Pollyanna, but on balance, the life I have lived has reaffirmed hope for me.

It is not even close. Politics, of all things, is not going to take that from me.

I don’t see a great deal of hope in the world beyond me, and it sometimes makes me feel myopic or naive or just insane.

Perhaps my real hope is that I am not blind and dumb, but of sound mind and realistic expectations.

The people who despair are shocked to learn their worldview is incomplete, they only speak or listen to one another, or to the nightmarish news. The people who say they are victorious now are hopeful, but there is also the feeling of anger, even vengeance in their kind of faith, in their ideology.

My Facebook troll assumes I am part of the vast conspiracy of elitism and arrogance that he is come to hate, and he was  reveling in what he thought must be my own rage and despair. “That’s how I felt all of these years. My turn.” I told him vengeance was not a political ideology that works for me, if it was wrong for him, it is wrong for everyone.

That quieted him for the moment.

I sit in my favorite pew in the Church of the Open Mind, or try to, and I am not feeling despair or dejection. Change is coming, I believe some will be good, some not, and I do not believe anyone, including me certainly, can really know what is ahead or exactly how to feel about it.

Hysteria and argument are not ideologies to me.

I told my troll friend that I am hopeful many people will come to awakenings in their own way and time, and that the ultimate outcome will be both necessary and ultimately, good.  We all seem to be finally paying attention to one another.

Along the way, we will be reminded once again that life does not move in a straight line, or worry much about our hopes and wishes. Our fears are not significant. Grace in life does not come from a lack of struggle, rather from our response to struggle and pain. Hope is, for me the purest and most Godly response.

Suffering is as much a part of life as breathing, and the meaningful life is one that rises to challenge, not one that runs or hides from it.

I am an older man, and proud of that, we older men have seen a few things in or lives and know a few things.  I cherish this time of life, it is a gift to finally know a thing or two.

And one of them is this: hope, like love, is a powerful force in the world. We are insignificant and small, our task is to live our own lives well and with meaning and purpose.

I am nothing but hopeful about that.