Holding Hope Without Naivety

When thinking is polarized between optimists and pessimists, there is a third path: hope.

I’m always looking to be informed on how to make sense of the moment we’re living through. If you’ve felt overwhelmed by disinformation, misinformation, and outright lies from leaders, it’s easy to feel like surrendering. The relentless flood of stuff coming out of Washington and Alberta is so exhausting.

Cultural Exegesis

Liz Bucar

A friend sent me a link to a Substack post this week in that regard. The content is the best cultural exegesis of our times that I’ve read to date.

Liz Bucar is a professor, author, and scholar who says she “is fascinated by religion despite having no religious affiliation of my own.” She posted the following thoughts on March 10, 2026.

Bucar reflects on Rebecca Solnit’s interview with the NYT around Solnit’s new book, The Beginning Comes After the End. “For me,” Bucar says, “Solnit’s interview is one of the most theologically rich political conversations I’ve heard in years.”

I agree.

Solnit draws from Jewish, Buddhist, Islamic, and Christian values to show that four traditions, wildly different in content, all arrive at the same place: “It’s the idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an ubermensch. Maybe the community is the next hero.”

 The community is not the means to an end. The community is the point.

The Who Behind Changing The World

And then Solnit makes the stunning observation,

 “A huge amount of the important work… is done by nice ladies. And I think a lot of people with platforms, and a lot of the left, wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara or something like that. And so, the fact that nice ladies actually change the world, maybe it’s about the fact that changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war.”

Nice ladies.

More like caregiving.

Bucar says the caregiving metaphor has religious roots, and lots of them.

Caregiving

1. “In Jewish tradition, chesed is usually translated as loving-kindness but it’s really more like steadfast relational attentiveness, the quality that holds communities together not through conquest but through showing up, again and again, for the people in front of you.”

2. “In Buddhism, karuna (compassion as active practice) is one of the four brahmaviharas, the “divine abodes,” which means it’s not a feeling you hope to have, it’s a discipline you train. “

3. “In the early Christian church, diakonia (service, where we get the word deacon) was the radical distinguishing practice of the movement: caring for widows, orphans, and strangers at a time when the Roman world had no framework for that.”

4. “And in Sikhism, seva (selfless service) is so inseparable from worship that it’s been made literal and institutional in the langar, the free community kitchen attached to every gurdwara, open to anyone who walks through the door, every single day.”

 “Of course these are four very different religious traditions, but all insist that tending to people is not a distraction from the real work.”

 The part of what Solkit shares that I love the most is her take on hope: “I remain hopeful and partly as defiance.”

A Third Way That Does The Hard Work

She describes both optimism and pessimism as “forms of certainty about the future.” Pessimists assume it’s going to be terrible. Optimists assume it’ll be fine. Both claim to know what hasn’t happened yet, which lets them off the hook from actually doing anything.

Hope is something harder and more honest than either.

You’re not claiming to know how it ends.

You’re claiming that how it ends is not yet written, which means your actions still matter.

That is hope!

Faith, hope and love… the all-star trio of 1 Corinthians 13.

And her definition of hope is robust: Hope is “not a feeling you happen to have on good days. (It is) a disposition you train and deepen, especially when the immediate moment gives you every reason to abandon it.”

I agree with Bucar that Solnit gives us a way of “holding hope without naivety. A framework for understanding why the work matters even when it’s hard.”

That is a hand hold we can all use now.

Read the full post here.

What do you think? Please join the conversation and post a comment below.

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