OPINION: 'Hope will find us, knocking at our armoured hearts'
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Standing 4.5m tall, the child surveys the concourse at Glasgow Central Station, arms outstretched to what is yet to be. I passed by on my way to catch a train.
The Beacon of Hope sculpture, made from layers of Scottish Sitka spruce, is one of three artworks created in Glasgow to mark the 2021 COP26 climate conference. This project encouraged Glaswegians to embrace ‘a positive, greener, exciting future of hope’ in the face of the global heating crisis.
In collectively struggling to find a way out of the ecological nightmare, so the thinking goes, human beings will perhaps learn a new mutual kindness and compassion.
There is certainly no doubt we need hope. Besides the climate emergency, so many other issues concern us: personal, national and international.
The Glasgow project aims to spark ‘conversations about where hope can be found for the future’. The hope we need, it seems to me, is Jesus-shaped. The sculpture reminded me at first glance of Jesus’s invitation: ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’
Christians believe Jesus brings us hope because he restores our broken relationship with God. That changes everything. Specifically, Jesus brings hope because he assures us of God’s love and continual presence with us, even in the very darkest of days. He strengthens our desire to show kindness and love, to work with others for the common good.
Jesus assures us that physical death is not the end, promising that finally all things will be made well, all darkness overcome. Jesus Christ does not simply speak of hope: he is our Hope.
The child sculpture on the concourse, open to wonder, reminded me of Jesus’s insistence that the kingdom of heaven is found only by those who come with a little child’s trust, imagination and awe. Not ‘There’s no God! End of!’ but a willingness to taste and see.
That day at Glasgow Central, the Beacon of Hope was hemmed in by a huge installation counting down the seconds to the Cycling World Championships. Hope’s child seemed overcome by this. Not waving but drowning. ‘Save me!’
Hurrying to Platform 14, I wondered about things in our lives which tend to extinguish hope – not least our occasional reluctance to believe that hope is possible.
In one of the poems accompanying the project, Debi Gliori alerts us to the hope which ‘will find us, knocking at our armoured hearts.’
And Sean Lìonadh using language reminiscent of biblical descriptions of the world made well, envisages a future when ‘the streets will be full again, the music, good again.’ Fools will be ‘found out’; untruths ‘drowned out’ and ‘the gentle will rule again’.
