Cherish a desire with anticipation (hope)

Last easter sunday i went to a pentecostal service in kits (at the old hollywood cinema church) and words of st Pauls Corinthians 13:13  was read out loud: "And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love" and this got me thinking, what gets second place to love?

I really enjoy spring rituals and my very talented friend invited me to join him. He was playing slap bass - in a funk flea style with a white gospel choir, rock and roll drums and an electric sitar like thing. After the awesome service, giddy from the seriously good vibes, i met a beautiful sister named Faith who like the ancient daughters of Sophia had two siblings named Hope and Charity (commonly now translated as love). So i playfully asked, 'so in your family do you take second or third place after charity?' She replied that faith was more important than hope and the people there agreed with her, because faith was how we believed in god. I didn't feel the need to argue on such a beautiful day. But it was then in that moment that it hit me, hope is a way i make life beautiful. Rather than finding hope by being faithful, my play of hope gave me something to believe in. This was my revelation on the road that day.

Wikipedia defines hope as  "having an optimistic attitude of mind based on an expectation of positive outcomes" or more poetically "to cherish a desire with anticipation". In reductionist thinking, hope is the neurotic play of imagining a 'good' world, when it is a 'bad' one, a less symptomatic psychological description might be to think of hope as a self-induced placebo with a low risk of denial. The difficulty i have with faith before hope, is denial, let me explain. Sometimes the action of faith in a god gets used to close our understanding of belief beyond reason. While equally boring, having faith in no god is equally presumptuous with the certainty that god is dead and nothing lives forever. My problem with existentialist atheism  is in this infallibility. It replaces god with self, and as such provides a similar egotistical defence mechanism against death with the same avenues of guilty denials that theism offers.

Hope, alternatively gives us the choice to look up at that which is fine even if we don't know if it might exist. It is a mechanism to motivate us to notice a living future we wish to be faithful for. Hope manages our desire with only one presumption, and that is that maybe we well might be fine, okay or well. And that for me is a more modest and honest than a pre-requirement of faith or anti-faith for a lovely life. So faith gets third or at least equal second place with hope after loves charity.

keep the peace