Hope, wrote Henri Nouwen, is the willingness to leave unanswered questions unanswered and unknown futures unknown. Hope makes one see not only the guiding hand of a God in the gentle and pleasant moments but also in the shadows of disappointment and darkness.

There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be seduced by unreality,

Life is maintained and nourished by our relationship with the truth, inside and outside of us.

I am horrified by what I see on the news and what I see and hear from my friends, many of whom seem bleak, they are worn down by violence, hatred, and lies. I used to smile when they said they couldn’t take it anymore, but I see that they were telling me the truth.

I walk away from this despair feeling sad and also isolated, but there, we part ways.

I am filled with hope, and I certainly grasp the reality around me, I was a police reporter for years in some hard places, and I saw too much, and God help me, I loved every second of it.

“I’m losing faith,” one very close friend told me after she heard the news from El Paso and Dayton.

Oh, I thought, I see that she is without hope. I can’t imagine living without hope.

I’m not a particularly optimistic person, and I’m not sure why hope is such an integral part of me. My friend talks of faith, and faith is different than hope.

Hope is an optimistic attitude of the mind based on an expectation or desire. Faith is about trusting a higher force completely and surrendering to it.

The opposite of hope is dejection, hopelessness, and despair. I have no access to wisdom or the future than anybody else in the world, I don’t anticipate paradise down the road, for me, or you.

The violence and rage are horrendous, shattering, haunting. But that doesn’t leave me hopeless, it leaves me human.

I am hopeful. I heard the call over the weekend to do something, and I am.

I love history, have read history all of my life, and I know that nothing is new, we experience nothing that has not occurred countless times before. History is my window and guide. I won’t live in the past and I can’t know the future. All I know for sure is now.

What I feel is that we are going through an inevitable and historic change, a reckoning, a sea change, an epic journey from one place to another. It is wrenching, ugly, violent, tragic.

It is change, a great and seismic change, spewing fear and confusion.

It is a necessary and inevitable change. And people in power never like to give it up, and rarely give it up without a fight.

My species, the white, western man is no longer necessary or all-powerful in the way he once was. His violence, dominance, and brutality no longer make sense in a world where almost all of the other, once dominated and marginalized species, are rising up: women, people of color, gays and lesbians, trans and Asians.

There can only be one outcome in this struggle, I only hope to be around when it is over.

All my life, I’ve valued grace and grace for me is stepping aside and making room for the next thing. I can hear their footsteps thundering in the square. I am happy to step aside; I had my turn, my time to rise up and succeed, to be powerful and listened to. That time is up, and it does not mean the end for me, but the beginning.

I am happy to make way for someone else, for something else. It wasn’t as if my generation left a perfect world behind.

Grace is not a common trait among my species; my species dreads change and hate submission even more. Anyone is fit to be in charge of me if they can treat me with dignity and respect.

The work I am doing now is ideally suited to the times. I am using the tools and skills I had to master in my other life, and they work for me now, to help others, draw people together, understand what I can’t do as well as what I can, make decisions, and look ahead.

Everything I do requires hope, from getting a dog to work with the elderly to helping a good principal save his school and help the needy.

I have some issues with faith – I’ve never met a higher power that I trust absolutely. But I’ve always had hope. Hope sustained me and got me through the darkness; hope gives me the joy that sustains me today. Joy is the fuel for tomorrow.

Hope helps me to be better. When we love, we always strive to be better than we are, wrote Paulo Coehlo, then everything around us becomes better too.

The thing about being human, according to our dutifully recorded history, is that life is almost always hard and frightening and disappointing and uncertain, and very often, violent beyond imagination. Life is also filled with joy, creativity, discovery, and romantic love, things unique to us. That is the amazing thing about us, it is true of no other species on the earth.

The story of humanity is mixed at best, it’s the story of a flawed and imperfect and incomplete people. The Kabbalah is rife with the angel’s gossip that God was horrified by what he had made when he made humans, by how they lied and killed and cheated, and he threw up his hands and fled through the universe, pursued by angry Shekinah and her cherubs and angels.

God warned that if people despoiled the earth and were dishonest and violent, he would leave and never come back, and his flawed creations would be left to fend for themselves.

It feels like that sometimes.

But I hold fast to my dreams, and I feel hope.

I remember Langston Hughes writing that if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird, that cannot fly. Emily Dickinson wrote that hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.

I think that’s the tune I mean to sing.