Prayers for hope

Prayers for the kind of hope that holds when things are dark.

Christian hope is not optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will probably turn out fine. Hope, in the Christian sense, is the conviction that what God has promised will come, even when the present evidence runs the other way. The prayers gathered here are for hope of that kind: the hope of the dying, the hope of the imprisoned, the hope of those waiting for news that may not come, and the hope that Christ's resurrection holds out to all of them. The texts span twenty centuries and several traditions. They are unanimous on one point: hope is given, not generated.