Imagination Is Resistance: Advent I Reflection on Hope

It's a tricky thing to talk about hope these days. On one hand, we don’t want to be completely without it. Giving into cynicism and fear not only feels defeatist, but in this season of Advent, it also feels unfaithful. But there is a thin line between “hope” and a blind optimism that refuses to acknowledge the grim nature of reality. For hope to be the kind of hope that our world both needs and demands, it has to be a hope that is rooted deeply in the realities of our time.

​The world is crying for a hope that has a clear eyed vision of the world as it is and yet has the courage to imagine the world that can be. 

Imagination, we’re finding more and more is a muscle that needs to be exercised. As a friend said to me recently, “everything that now is was once imagined”. Believe it or not, the world that we live in is the world that someone (or groups of someones) dreamed into existence.

Hope, then, demands better dreams, better vision, and better imagination.

But hope also demands that we do a little bit each day to remind ourselves of those better dreams and that we work a little bit each day to make those dreams a reality. So then this work of hope is the work of imagining a different future and then doing everything in our power to have the present be a little more like that imagined future. 
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It’s a tricky thing to talk about hope these days. Trickier still if that talk isn’t matched with hopeful actions.

So may this Advent be a season not just of waiting, but of building. May our hope be bold enough to imagine, and brave enough to act.

​Derrick Weston
Director of Theological Educations and Formation
Creation Justice Ministries

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