Hope – the thoughts of Vaclav Havel
One thing that seems to be in short supply is hope. Young people in particular seem to be struggling to find a reason to hope for a better future.
Seamus Heaney, quoting Vaclav Havel, said ‘Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well. But something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.’
In Ireland perhaps we are more familiar with Vaclav Havel as the charismatic President of the Czech Republic. But there was much more to Havel than being a politician. His first calling was to be a poet and playwright. He was incarcerated by the pro Soviet Government in Prague and spent many years in prison. He became the conscience and the spiritual beacon for his people.
The following extracts are from the book called Disturbing the Peace which contain his conversations with a Czech journalist and which deal with hope.
‘The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. . . .
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. . . .
I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are, though of course I can’t – unlike Christians, for instance — say anything about the transcendental. . . .
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 headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.
The more unpromising the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breath-taking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, that gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”
Padraic Murray