Hope’s Work, by David Gee

Author: David Gee. Review by Frank Regan

David Gee, a long-time peace activist, wrote this book to ask if there can be a future in an age of crisis. Crisis seems to be a hallmark of our collective existence and recent history. The experience of it directs us to a turning-point. Which way to go? We have bounced from place to place and we wonder where true north lies.

In seven chapters Gee writes of hope as love, promise, freedom and disillusion. He shares vivid examples of people facing crisis in their lives, being crunched, persisting, insisting and finding at last a way forward.

When he writes of love, he asks what has worth for us, worth that can carry us beyond affection, beyond emotional uplift, to a constant commitment to society, community and self. Hope is related to a love which, paradoxically, believes in society too much to condemn it and doubts it too much to fall into step with it.

He recalls the example of conscientious objectors during world war one. A few went on to found the No-Conscription Fellowship to ‘deny the right of any government to make the slaughter of our fellows a bounden duty’.

Gee writes a chapter on faith in the guise ‘Hope Tested’. He describes a scene in Gaza in which a family is roused in the middle of the night, quickly gathers a few possessions and barrels out the back door. They huddle at a short distance to watch an Israeli tank demolish their home. An Irish peace activist was present. He stood in the rubble amid the fragments of a crushed life, everything gone: clothes, ID cards, toys, family memorabilia, paper work etc. Suddenly a small boy appears with a metal tray. On it were tea, coffee and pita bread. The home owner broke into a smile and said: ‘You are a guest of ours, please eat and drink’.

Hope is repentance. Gee tells the story of George Zabelka, Catholic military chaplain, who blessed the US B29, the Enola Gay, as it took off for Hiroshima with its nuclear payload, code-named ‘Little Boy’, carried by Enola Gay, the name of the pilot’s mum.

Years later, Zabelka confessed: ‘I watched… I knew hundreds of thousands of women and children were vaporised, incinerated, and I said nothing.’ After retiring he journeyed to Japan to beg forgiveness. Thereafter he embarked on a ministry of peace-making and was sentenced to jail on nine separate occasions.

Hope rises from a vision of the world as a tragic place. Yet it is a place where there is life, where the sun rises and love still makes the world go round. Hope has no time for Pollyanna optimism, for confidence in progress. Hope’s natural habitat is catastrophe. Anything prior is wishful thinking.

Jurgen Moltmann once wrote that hope is what distinguishes the Christian. Read David Gee’s book, full of stories from the depths of human despair and the heights of human joy, and see if you agree.

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