True or False

The theorists define our era as postmodern, saying we have long passed the age of certain enlightenment, and have awoken to an age where we must question even what light we have. This is my limited understanding, I might add, of where the weight of popular opinion seem to lay in the world, even with, perhaps especially with people of faith. I recently engaged a young man struggling to shape his world, desperate to make sense of his own existence, deeply concerned about where, or if, his world intersected with a larger, not necessarily grandiose, plan for his life. All the influential thinkers he’d stumbled across seemed to tout a life where you could be sure of nothing, where little, if anything was guaranteed, where absolutes were figments of one’s imagination.

For a short while, I ranted about the cynicism of a generation consumed with nothing but it’s own comfort, when I stopped myself mid-thought, and wondered if this very articulate, thoughtful young man had ever dared to hope. It took only nanoseconds to compute. Instead of use the one third of my visible communication equipment, my (big) mouth, I chose to listen to a soul who had obviously never dreamed of living with a positive outlook lest it should all come to naught. What a tragedy; not believing beyond today just because you wouldn’t let yourself be let down, not infusing your heart and mind with hope because it might not lead to the desired result, because after all it may just be false.

With tension mounting and a handful of awkward silences to boot, I slipped in a small dose of comic relief, reminding him that nothing arouses false hope more than the first two hours of a new diet (don’t ask me where I heard that). I brought into view all the challenges I have ever faced, let alone those of the untold millions of men and women, young and old, first world and third world, who wade through lakes of insurmountable odds for no more than a chance to face another day. All fuelled by hope…and if their hope is false, I suspect they surmise, better to live a solitary day with the courage that hope furnishes your soul, than a thousand numbed by the vagueness of a hope-less life. True or false? I say True!