We cannot think of humanity without hope. Hope is vital to being human. Humans are indeed pilgrims of hope. This is why it feels right that Pope has given us a theme for the coming ordinary year of Jubilee ‘ Pilgrims of Hope’. There are several thinkers of Hope. Musician Ernst Bloch is credited to have deeply thought hope. Hope opens us. Humans without hope close themselves to the world and others. Hopeless-ness makes us passive and locked into nothing. Hope makes us outwardly allied and not inwardly aimed. Hope makes us belong and not withdraw from what is becoming. Existentialists tell us that we are thrown into the world that is not chosen by us. But it is hope that coverts this thrownness as a giveness that opens possibilities of being-in-the-world as Martin Heidegger would tell us. Hope , therefore, enables us to dream. Hope makes us look for a better world and leads us towards it. This is why hope is not a simple daydream. It is not escapist. It is wakeful. It wakefully anticipates and walks to a better future. Hope does not take things as they are. Hope takes things as they go. Hope take things in to the future.

All thinking is imbued with hope. There is no thinking outside hope. Philosophy, therefore is mediating hope. Thinking is a way of venturing to the beyond. But this venturing beyond does not go into vacuum. It takes the present possibilities and actualizes them in the horizon of the beyond. Hope remains in front of us not merely as a vision of the future but an energy that enables every step that we take towards that dream future. Everybody in some way lives in the future. Future contains what is feared or what is hoped for. Hence, it is vital that we choose hope. We cannot fear hope and abandon it. Fear makes us feel that our present and future is lost. This is when perhaps fear takes over our hope. Our hope then becomes an hauntology. When we feel that we have no future we begin to feel anxious. Our fear take control over us and we then embrace a haunted hope that strives to give future to a past that is viewed under the lens of what is called Hegelian wound. Salvoj Zizek points out that a wound makes us idealize the time before the wound. Hence, the time before the wound becomes sacred and all energy is then invested to give a future to that idealized past. It is a bad immediacy of the present (the wound) that anticipates a lost future and under such a sense of hopelessness, one feels that one’s secure past can become a new future.

We humans cannot work hopelessly. This is why even a deception in order to be effective has to work with flatteringly and corruptly aroused hope. This is why hope preached from every platform may not be authentic. We need critical discernment to embrace true hope. Hope that pushes us merely inwards towards an idealized past or towards an empty promise of the other world in the future is certainly somewhat inauthentic. Hope has a constitutive dimension of the present although it does not lose sight of the past. Hope does not cripple under the weight of the distressed present and the wounded past but opens an outside that is promising emancipation. This outside stays in the future but becomes a synergy that pushes us towards the promise of the future. This is why may be we have to follow the dictum of Jesus that declares: Let the dead bury their dead. It is hope that enables us to let bygone be bygones. It is hope that will enable us to forgive us and others for our/ their failures and losses of the past. The nots/ unbecomes of the past and the present are annulled by the not-yetness of the future. The unbecomeness of / the unfulfilled past and present do not bog us down since a new becoming that is coming in the future is visualized by authentic hope.

Hope always stays in the coming. We always grow in hope. Hope is always a shifting destination. Hope, therefore, is always breaking-through the given. It does have a utopic aspect. It always remains a forward dream. This is why we cannot lose sight of the future that remains in the coming. Life never really reaches a finishing line. There is always more to life. It is only hope that can see this more. Even when we may feel there is nothing new under the sun or view life as nothing but a repetition, hope offers a different and novel side of life. Life is therefore, cannot be viewed as a chain of Time-and-Again. Even in this life perceived Time-and-Again of the cynic, hope can see the novelty. Hope therefore is unending. There are no endings or closures. Hope in the coming is always in the coming opening us bigger and wider horizons of the future that we can dream and strive to actualize. It is an unclosed determineness. But the determineness of the unclosed hope is elastic and is always transcending. The hermeneutics of Hope does remain unclosed and is forever open. When we inhabit this condition of hope, we will always walk as pilgrims of hope. But we have to shun away the (dis)figures of hope induced by fear and embrace authentic hope. One of the important (Dis)figures of hope is ultimately wedded to death. It is a fear that we always anticipate and await as a limit to our life. We have, therefore, the challenge to embrace this disfigured hope. It is only then we can remain open to this hope that always stays in the coming, that we will fully become what we hoped for at the arrival of death. Hope in the coming is linked to death at many levels. Neither hope not death therefore, are a dead ends. To us they remain in the coming for now. It is at the point of death or rather when we live our death that our horizon of hope will expand, we will be sufficiently open to the hope that death will open us.