GODSTUFF

THE CONTAGIOUS AUDACITY OF HOPE: OBAMA ’08

Riding the Green Line el train to the Loop in Chicago earlier this week, the most extraordinary thing happened to interrupt the otherwise sullen monotony of my cold morning commute.

At a stop in the middle of the city’s West Side, four people boarded the train and buffeted the other passengers with a burst of joyful energy.

“OBAMA!” one of them, a smiling older woman with her hair tied back in a long ponytail and clutching a red, white and blue placard with the Illinois senator’s name on it, announced to no one in particular.

“Woo, that was really bitter cold, man,” said one of her companions, a man in his early 40s with “OBAMA ’08” pins stuck to the lapels of his down jacket. “If I didn’t love the guy so much. …”

“Obama! Ohhhhh-baaaaaaaah-maaaaaaaaaaah!” chanted another in their company, a bespectacled man with a close-cropped white beard and an “OBAMA-Yes We Can” bumper sticker stuck to his gray felt fedora.

They were volunteers for the Obama campaign who had come to Chicago from Michigan to canvass for Super Tuesday. As we rode along, passengers started talking to them and to each other, striking up friendly conversation in lieu of the de rigueur ignore-them-and-don’t-make-eye-contact posture that typifies public transportation commutes.

Two young female passengers even signed up to volunteer for the Obama campaign on the spot.

“He’s gonna win big,” the pony-tailed woman said.

“I hope so!” one of the freshly minted volunteers answered.

Hope.

Barack Obama has built his campaign around hope. “Hope-mongering,” he calls it. But hope is not a political idea. It’s a thoroughly theological one.

Speaking last month at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the church once co-pastored by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on the anniversary of the great civil rights leader’s birthday, Obama punctuated his sermon with the stirring refrain, “But I had hope.”

“I wasn’t born into money or great wealth, but I had hope!” he told the Atlanta congregation. “I needed some hope to get here. My daddy left me when I was little, but I had hope! I was raised by a single mother, but I had hope! I was given love, an education and some hope!”

In that sermon laced with “hope,” Obama called for a return to the kind of radical compassion that feeds the hungry, cares for the poor and treats the “least of these” as our own.

I would argue that Obama’s hope-mongering is, in fact, a rallying cry for radical spiritual renewal, to the kind of faith-in-action that can move mountains.

“Hope is a theologically grounded notion, and I think that perhaps is especially true as Sen. Obama uses it,” Ted Jennings, professor of biblical and constructive theology at Chicago Theological Seminary, told me. “Hope would have to be distinguished from optimism, which is simply supposing things will turn out well.

“Hope is daring to envision something that is beyond either optimism or planning. It is an articulation of a vision, and, as the Bible says, without a vision, the people perish,” Jennings said. Obama’s hope is “grounded in a notion that what God intends is justice and mercy and compassion, even if that seems, under current circumstances, to be unrealistic.”

The Catholic philosopher-theologian Thomas Aquinas defined hope as the movement toward a future, difficult yet possible good. And while in the Catholic tradition, theological hope and general or political hope are distinct, they are connected, and Obama is making that (unspoken) connection in his campaign.

“It’s a powerful religious idea that he’s sort of tied into,” said Dominic Doyle, a professor of systematic theology at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass.

“In hope, you approach God as merciful. . . . There’s something about hope that resonates really closely with being present with people in their difficulties.”

David Myers, a psychology professor at Hope College in Michigan, says the hope Obama speaks about is what “Christianity is all about,” a call to wholehearted, spiritual change.

“One thinks again of Martin Luther King Jr. — only through spiritual transformation, he said, ‘do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit,’ ” Myers said.

Of course, inviting people to that kind of hope can be politically treacherous because it invariably invites a cynical response that says hope is nice and all, but what are your plans?

“While [planning] is an important issue, that isn’t what talk of hope fundamentally does,” Jennings said. “What talk of hope fundamentally does is invite people to look up and look well beyond their current circumstances, beyond what seems to be possible or plausible, and to imagine that there is a power in the universe that is working to make something new possible.”

No matter how you parse it, that is a leap of faith.

And the Bible says, as Obama well knows, faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not yet seen.