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The Intersection of Hope and Faith

Posted on December 17, 2025, tagged as

So, I was driving home the other day when I decided to take what I hoped to be a shortcut to avoid a traffic snarl. I turned down Hope Street and came to Faith Street. This stuck me as being an oddity one could probably only experience in the Deep South. I have been living here in Georgia for over forty years, and I am accustomed to the Bible Belt atmosphere which I have grown to appreciate. For this entire time, I have lived less than 2 miles from the intersection of Hope and Faith without realizing it. After mulling this over for several days, I have decided to try to make some spiritual sense of this idea.

Let’s start with hope. When we say, “I hope so,” about anything, we express a wish or desire for a good outcome. I believe the most important thing to know about hope is that it involves a choice. In the domain of spirituality, it is more challenging to be hopeful than it might be in everyday life, where what we might hope for is a good grade on an exam or good weather on a vacation. What is clear is that there is no certainty of that which we hope for. We are challenged to go beyond optimism, because optimism can quickly change into pessimism if circumstances change. Hope, it seems to me, is a heartfelt phenomenon. We must feel it deeply, more than just think it, and renew it daily.

What about faith? Faith involves having a conviction about something without hard, objective evidence to prove the belief. Hope is a choice, but spiritual faith is a gift. The choice we have regarding faith is to be open to receiving this gift. I often quote Joseph Campbell who spoke about such spiritual concepts as God and eternity as being “beyond all categories of human thought.“ If there were certainty there would be no need for faith. As our lives progress, as we have both pleasant and difficult experiences, spiritual faith typically develops slowly and quietly grows within us. Eventually, and hopefully, we find ourselves having come to our own in-depth understanding of the nature of the world in which we live. Even so, as time goes on our understanding evolves as our faith in something greater than ourselves deepens, along with our understanding and acceptance of our place within this world. We each have unique life circumstances, and therefore our journey towards faith is unique to ourselves. What we ultimately have faith in can only point towards fundamental truth, not define such truth. I have no actual specific knowledge of this fundamental universal truth, but I have faith that there is such fundamental truth, and that it is good.

For me this is enough…. more than enough, actually. What about the intersection between hope and faith? Is it possible to have one without the other? Hope without faith is better than none of either, but it can be mentally exhausting. Can one have faith without hope? This is unlikely. One thing both hope and faith have in common is that they are both a response to uncertainty. If something is certain, it is just that. No hope or faith need be involved. Both hope and faith are involved in our journey in life and together feed our souls to live our best lives; and they reinforce each other. Those of us who are hopeful in the face of uncertainty, and who have faith in love as the strongest force in the universe, are likely to derive the most satisfaction out of our lives, and to do the most good in the world. We must resist the temptation to slip into cynicism when things look bleak. We must learn to reframe problems as challenges to be faced and overcome. And we must acknowledge the need for help and be open to receiving it as we face the sometimes perilous challenges that we inevitably will face in life.