The Role of Hope in Liberation Psychology
Meaning in the lived experience of oppression and victimization of many of the poor in the world is an important focus of liberation psychology. In the therapeutic process, hope is a strong ally of healing. At times, when faced with an individual who is deeply depressed, the hope of the therapist becomes the strongest tool to help that individual find the way out.
What about hope when all is indeed hopeless? This is an important question for liberation psychology when the plight of multitudes offers very little to hope for.
In apparently hopeless situations, the first recourse for many helpers is to resort to platitudes. This is analogous to situations when one is faced with a frend or relative who is gravely ill. Pressed to offer consolation yet confronting one's own fears, uncertainty, and sadness over the situation, one tries to console with well-worn platitudes. But -- if one wants real hope to emerge -- he or she could simply being present to the sufferer in his or her vigil. Oftentimes, in the shared space of silence and reverence, the very person facing death will gift us by allowing authentic hope to emerge, relating their experience to transcendence and mystery.
Liberation psychology assumes that hope and love are concomitant with human nature. Whether this is part of the "great deception" is not a consideration, for a decision and a commitment has already been made.
Writing from a Christian perspective, Jon Sorbino identifies an authentic hope that is part of the victim experience.* The eschatalogical linkage of the cross and resurrection of the Christ gives the Christian liberation psychologist a bias towards the "victory of justice". However, the hope Sorbino proffers from the religiouss point of view could be equally available to the nonchristian therapist willing to consider an "audacious" adherence to the validity of our deepest human aspirations.
Sobrino continues that often it is in times of crisis when hope emerges most forcefully in a community or in an individual. In the face of the immense "scandal" of injustice, there is the need to "make the hope of victims our hope". And their hope, in turn, becomes their gift to us.
"Hoping against hope"is the way we describe what happens in the face of an overwhelming situation, clinging to the possibility of making a dent somewhere, somehow in the forces mounted against us. But we are not simply "tilting at windmills". There are unseen, unorganized battalions of love, and hordes in the wings that are yet aware, who may one day align ouselves for the not-so-impossible hope.
*Sorbino, Christ the Liberator, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2001.
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