Ten Ingredients for the Practice of Hope in an Era of Collapse

Cars rest on the collapsed portion of I-35W Mississippi River bridge, after the August 1^st, 2007 collapse.  (Photo: Kevin Rofidal, United States Coast Guard, Wikimedia Commons)

By Cody J. Sanders

Lately, I’ve been working to make hope mean something to me and to the communities that I serve that moves beyond wishful thinking that all will work out in the end, or a thin theological sentiment that gets us off the hook from worrying too much about what’s going on in the world.

But I don’t want to give you a theological or philosophical treatise on hope that will help you think better about the subject, but fail to address your real concerns. What I imagine those to be in an era like ours, with climate collapse looming and our political fabric being torn apart, goes something like this: What good is hope in a world on the brink of collapse, and how do we practice it?

So, I want to offer you 10 ingredients for the practice of hope in an era of collapse.

1. Hope of any use must be undomesticated from its captivity to ideas of progress and optimism.

Progress says: Things are always getting better; discoveries and inventions in science and technology will save us; history is an upward movement toward greater good. It’s not that there isn’t progress, of course. We benefit from it every time we don’t die from a minor infection (if we have access to medical care). But progress isn’t linear and, more importantly, it’s not hope.

Optimism says: Look on the bright side, keep your thinking positive, everything will be ok! And while that might be psychologically helpful for us to believe in some circumstances, it isn’t always true and, most importantly, it isn’t hope.

This de-domestication of hope from the thin ideological and emotional experiences of progress and optimism is the first step toward a re-wilding of hope – that I call feral hope.[1] But that’s still a little too philosophical. And practicing hope isn’t all about how we think about hope.

2. Hope of any use must become something we practice and not just something we either have or don’t.

   Joanna Macy describes this as active hope – something we do, rather than something we have.[2] So if you’re sitting around feeling hopeless because you can’t feel confident that things are going to work out, you’re not hopeless. You’re a realist. And realist hope looks with eyes wide open at the present realities of the world yet refuses to accept them as the final word.

   Hope is a full-bodied orientation toward a future that is yet-to-be. Nurturing a future that is trying, through struggle, to be born.

If you still care – about the ecological web of life, about democracy, about lives that are on the brink – then you’re still orienting yourself toward hope. If you’re putting your care into practice, then you are already practicing hope—whether that’s working on climate science or environmental policy issues; whether it’s organizing to protect our trans siblings from the onslaught of anti-trans legislation in the country; whether it’s working to preserve the freedom of inquiry and campus diversity of our educational institutions.

Even if you don’t necessarily believe that disaster will be averted and things will work out in the way you wish they would, your active orientation toward a future that you long to see come to fruition is the tangible evidence of your hope.

3. To practice genuine hope in this era, we must know – really know – that things may not work out as we wish they would, yet nurture our imaginations toward new possibilities anyway.

Certainty is an enemy of hope. Because if we only hope within the confines of what we already know is possible, we never reach beyond the status quo toward something that may seem impossible now. (See Romans 8:24.) And meaningfully addressing climate collapse likely falls into that category of seeming impossibility in our political moment in the world.

But hope pushes us beyond certainty over possibilities we believe are locked in and invites us to imagine new possibilities. The quickest way to slide into a place of hopelessness is to succumb to the belief that the way things are is the way they will always be.

Nurturing your imagination for otherwise possibilities[3] fuels hopeful orientations toward possibilities beyond the present status quo and keeps us nimble for the practice of hope. Transgender sci-fi writer, Charlie Jane Anders, says, “Visualizing a happier, more just world is a direct assault on the forces that are trying to break your heart.”[4] Whether that’s through reading science fiction like Anders or Octavia Butler or Kim Stanley Robinson, or by gathering every regularly with people who are imagining possibilities beyond the status quo in churches or book groups or community organizing collectives, do whatever you can to nurture your hopeful imaginations so as not to let the present status quo have the last word on what is possible in your life or in our world.

4. To practice genuine hope in this era, we must also practice grief.

It’s easy for a pastor or professor of pastoral care to say that grief is an important part of our experience of life in the world right now and that we need to make space to grieve together all that we are losing. But when a scientist says that grief is a necessary part of addressing climate change, you should really pay attention. Grief isn’t their subject matter. It’s their visceral experience of being in the midst of trying to address a climate emergency that is unfolding too fast while our collective will is developing too slowly, if at all. Here’s how human-environment relations geographer Leslie Head puts it:

The evidence is mounting that we are well past the point where climate change response can be a planned, gradual transition…We need to deal with at least the possibility of catastrophe. Yet daily life continues more or less unchanged, in varying combinations of struggle and contentment. We are in collective denial. We are grieving.[5]

Grief may not look a whole lot like hope to you, but if you’re not grieving in community all that we’re losing, including the rapidly vanishing species we share life with on this planet, then your hope is likely not rooted in the reality of the wild world in which we live. Grief keeps our hearts tender to all that is breaking while not allowing our own hearts to break completely in the process. Grief gives elasticity to hope. Grieving together is hoping together.

5. Hope is fully embodied. We are inspirited bodyminds and whatever hope we manage to practice must be nurtured with spirit, mind and body.

Hope isn’t a matter of our positive thinking. It is our full-bodied orientation toward possibilities of life in the world. And that means caring for our bodies, our minds and our spirits. Acknowledging that we are whole beings – inspirited bodyminds – and caring for the wholeness of our selves allows us practice hope with the fulness of our self: putting our bodies where they need to be – whether in the woods or on the protest line – orienting our minds toward imagination and possibility, and nurturing our spirits toward wonder shared with the wider web of life. Hope is a practice of our whole lives – body, mind, spirit – not just our heads. 

6. To practice hope, we must cultivate communities of hope. Hope is not a solo enterprise.

Loneliness is an enemy of hope. We know from myriad studies – physiological, psychological, neurological, etc. – that loneliness is harmful to our health. But loneliness and isolation are also harmful to our hoping abilities. When we become mired in loneliness, we become more cynical of others and, ironically, less satisfied with the relationships that we do have.

Loneliness is normal. We all experience it. In fact, about half of adults in the U.S. experience loneliness regularly, according to the former surgeon general.[6] But loneliness is our evolutionary mechanism that signals to our brains that we are in danger. Deeper in our evolutionary history, this meant literal bodily danger – getting separated from our community might mean being attacked by a wild animal or starving. But loneliness is still experienced by our bodies as a warning signal that flashes in our brains and says: Turn toward other people! Increase your connection to others! You need others to live!

And you need others to hope. If your hope is lacking, then focus on nurturing your relationships.

7. To practice hope within community, those communities must include the ecological web of life, not just human community.

Our lives and our fates are entirely and totally and inextricably bound up with the wider ecological web of life. There is no escape for us. The earth is our home and all that is in it is our kin. This further makes our hoping feral when it becomes undomesticated and then joins up with the wild.

Practicing hope in a world on the brink means learning to talk to trees and listen to lakes and rivers. Rushing home to spend time in the backyard with squirrels and birds because they’re companions, we’ve missed seeing all day. It’s being in relationship with other earth beings, not just admirers of them.

Most of us don’t grow up learning to communicate with our more-than-human ecological kin. So, it’ll feel funny at first. But the communicative cosmos is deeply rooted in many of our religious traditions.

Psalm 148 portrays the sun and moon and stars praising God, the sea monsters and wild animals and cattle, the creeping things and flying birds – all with voices unique to their being-ness. And for some reason, we act as if that is just metaphorical poetic language when in “reality” the celestial bodies are inert and the animals voiceless. But at the end of the Psalm, humans join the cacophonous chorus of creation with their praise – all genders and ages – and we don’t understand that as metaphor, do we?

The earth creatures – animal, vegetal and geological – have a language. It’s our work to learn to listen. Increasing the types of voices you’re listening to will also increase your ability to practice hope in a world on the brink, as we’re all woven together in this web of life.

8. To practice hope when the world feels on edge and so much of what we care about is being pushed to the brink, we must be grounded by spiritual practices.

Some might call this faith. Others, more specific name like God. But no matter the specific religious or spiritual orientation, practicing hope summons us beyond our bounded individual selves toward something that is larger than us, which sets life within an ultimate context.

And that is not “belief” in something beyond us. It is grounding ourselves in practices that move us toward something that is beyond us: Prayer; the serious study of sacred texts; singing songs of faith with others; disciplined meditation; faithful service to our community.

If you don’t have any spiritual practices – perhaps you don’t even have a faith tradition – then find some friends who do and ask them about those practices. Get them to teach you what they mean and how they practice them. Then try a few of them out for yourself over a set course of time as a spiritual experiment.

9. Hope looks and feels a lot like courage. Hope is risky, especially right now.

The risk is not hoping and being wrong – that’s just the nature of hope. We may not get what we wish for in the end. The real risk of practicing hope is that we live our lives in such a way that the hoped for reality is the reality out of which we live, and that will put our bodies in dangerous places.

It takes courage to life as if the ecological web of life matters as much our human comfort and demands that we live differently. It takes courage to stand up to the gatekeepers of the status quo in defiance, as Augsburg University recently did in signing onto the national letter to oppose government overreach into higher education and live in the reality that freedom of inquiry and classrooms of rich diversity is the reality out of which we will live, even when that vision is under dire threat.[7] We may be punished for living in a different reality than the one imposed upon us, with different values and guiding principles, but that is the beautiful danger of hopeful practice.

Hope and courage are about as close to one another as you can get.

10. Hope looks and feels a lot like love. Hope loses any point if there is nothing that we love enough to live our lives in audacious and courageous ways.

For Christians, it should be of special significance to us that the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 said, “And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love” (v. 13, NRSVue). Not hope. Not even faith! But love. Or that the writer of 1 John, when reaching for something that we could understand that could be equated with God, said, “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God…for God is love” (4:7-8, NRSVue).

So, if you feel at the end of your rope and hope is absolutely too tall an order that you can possibly manage, that’s okay. Just let go of your worry about hope for the moment and turn to others and to the ecological web of life and love it all instead.

In loving the world and all that is in it and receiving that love back in return wherever it can be found, you will taste something even greater than hope itself. In and through love, you will know God.

— Cody J. Sanders, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Congregational and Community Care Leadership at Luther Seminary in Saint Pau, MN. A version of this article was delivered as an address during Eco Week at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN, on April 25, 2025. He can be reached at csanders001@luthersem.edu.

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[1] Cody J. Sanders, “Feral Hope for Futurist Leaders,” Word & World 44(3) (2024).

[2] Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2012), 3.

[3] Ashon Crawley describes “otherwise possibility” this way: “Imagination, the practice of otherwise possibility, is not the lack of fear, it does not mean one isn’t afraid. Imagination, the practice of otherwise possibility, is the recognition of – and honoring as sacred – fear and being afraid and moving in the direction of the alternative anyway, anyhow, in spite of.” “It’s Ok to Be Afraid,” accessed April 26, 2025, https://ashoncrawley.com/its-ok-to-be-afraid/?srsltid=AfmBOorm3ZMvIEqi_wIWCNUmZYzPsI4tZrzqviP4Qir-y1i5Sft8J4ij. See also his book, Ashon Crawley, Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

[4] Charlie Jane Anders, Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories (New York: Tordotcom, 2021), 2-3.

[5] Lesley Head, Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene: Re-Conceptualising Human-Nature Relations. New York: Routledge, 2016, 1.

[6] Office of the Surgeon General, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023), 8-9. Available online at: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

[7] At the time of this writing, 14 colleges and universities in Minnesota have signed the letter. Erin Adler, “More Minnesota Colleges and Universities Sign on to National Letter Opposing ‘Unprecedented Government Overreach,’” The Minnesota Star Tribune, April 24, 2025, https://www.startribune.com/more-minnesota-colleges-and-universities-sign-on-to-national-letter-opposing-unprecedented-government-overreach/601337794

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