c. 2008 Religion News Service

CHICAGO _ Riding the El train downtown earlier this week, the most extraordinary thing happened during the otherwise sullen monotony of my cold, morning commute.

At a stop on city’s gritty 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 clutching a red-white-and-blue placard with Obama’s name on it, announced to no one in particular.

“Obama! Ohhhhh-baaaaaaaah-maaaaaaaaaaah!” chanted another of their company, a bespectacled man with an Obama bumper sticker stuck to his gray felt fedora.

They were volunteers for the Obama campaign who had come from Michigan to canvass for Super Tuesday. As we road along, passengers started talking to them and to each other. It was not the 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 woman with the sign 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 Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, 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 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!”

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.”

Thomas Aquinas defined hope as the movement toward a future (difficult yet possible) good. Theological hope and general or political hope are distinct, yet 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 of is what “Christianity is all about,” a call to whole-hearted, 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; cynics will invariably say that hope is nice and all, but what are your plans?

Jennings sees a distinction between hope and planning. “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, 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 seen.

(Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of “The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.”)

KRE/LF END FALSANI

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