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The truth is that I am not an authority on hope. Until recently I didn’t even know what hope was: I thought it was something akin to a wish, a pipedream.

I was partly right. Hope is about wishing, but there’s another element involved: expectation. Expectation that what we so fervently desire can be obtained. In a nutshell, to hope is to trust in the future as if it were a fountain of opportunity. But what if your past and present are mocking reminders that, too often, the viability of hope is determined by those events beyond your comprehension and control?

We are all children of ourselves. Who we are today—our attitudes, the nature of our perception about the world, about ourselves, and the connection between them—have been produced by our responses to hope, and its shadowy counterpart, despair. The two cannot be separated. My great-grandmother was the daughter of ex-slaves. She came of age during the Great Depression. She was a cynic by necessity. Whenever someone spoke of hope she would give the same aphoristic response, “Hope in one hand and doo-doo in the other and see which hand gets fullest the fastest.” (Actually, she used a more colorful word than doo-doo.)

In retrospect, I can see that she was emphasizing the importance of spending more time actualizing our aspirations rather than vocalizing them. But, being a child, I received her words as affirming my growing suspicion that hope was no more valuable than, well…the “number two.” It was a dark epiphany.

At the age of nine I adopted a new resolution to go with my epiphany: “Expect the worst and you will never be disappointed.” This outlook on life bent my forced precocity into a warped shell—a shield I brandished like the head of Medusa, freezing all potential, all hope, into stone monuments of relinquished dreams. The solidification of this attitude was one of the final gifts I accepted from my father.

I barely knew my dad. He had spent five of the first eight years of my life in prison. Still, I loved him as if he was the world’s best father. Every day I wore with pride the leather belt and wallet he made for me in prison.

I had only seen him once since his release, but now this was Christmas and I knew that today—unlike the other times—he would not stand us up. I was certain that he would come to see my sister and me with the gifts that Santa Claus had neglected to bring to us the night before. He had promised. Each time we heard the sound of a car coming down the dirt road to my grandmother’s green cinderblock home, we would rush to the door, excitedly expecting it to be him.

Finally, after the sun dipped low behind the pine trees that bordered the soybean field in front of the house, it dawned on me. He was not coming. Not ever.

A glass I was holding slipped from my hand and shattered on the cracked linoleum of the kitchen floor—an apt metaphor for my disillusionment and loss of hope. I felt stupid for believing him and ashamed of the tears that I could not stop from falling in front of my mother.

The years that followed were even more traumatic: several murders in the family—one at the hands of another family member—attending nine different schools in three different states, being homeless, subjected to racism…life challenges that a lot of people endure and emerge victorious from. Me? It took time to recover my hope. Actually, it took receiving time.

I am 36 years old. For the last two decades of my life I have lived in the most hopeless places in the state of North Carolina—its prisons. In here the most oft-repeated axioms are “We can’t never win,” and “They do what they wanna do”—“they” being those in positions of authority.

The one trait that most criminals share is hopelessness. Hopelessness is the root of all deviant behavior. Hopelessness tells us that the future is bleak, that all we have is the present moment. If our personality can be viewed as a chain of memories, hopelessness is the broken link that keeps us from even considering that we are larger than this moment, larger than these bodies, larger than our cultural and national identities. It cuts us off from the recognition that humanity, with all of its accomplishments and failures, is embodied in each person.

My hope was restored by degrees, and I did not do it alone. It has been a group effort. Even during months and years when I had no outside contact I have always felt a part of the “inter-dependent web of existence of which we are a part.” Knowing the truth about why I am in prison, it would be easy to give up hope, embrace bitterness and become what I was portrayed to be. But studying us—humanity—I know and am convinced that the only thing that separates angels from demons is that the latter gave up hope and in doing so came to personify hopelessness and all of its fruit.

There can be no rehabilitation, no reform without hope. Learning from my peers, from the greatest minds, like Emerson and Dr. King, gives me hope. Challenging those who work to keep me in prison, without resorting to lies, and while maintaining my compassion, gives me hope. People like Chaplain Pat—who puts extra care into making sure that UUs in prison stay connected to all of you in the “free world”—give me hope and inspiration. The fact that you donate time and money to spreading and promoting our values and principles gives me hope.

Most of all, my mother’s support and friendship, her strength and resilience, gives me hope that I can live as courageously as she has in a life of brutal adversity and struggle.

Hope, to me, is the mental, emotional and spiritual equivalent of that ineffable force that holds the universe together, and which has given the universe the ability to look upon itself through our eyes, and marvel at the breadth of its diverse and infinite beauty. Hope is not merely an attitude. It is our birthright.

By Daniel A. Green, CLF Member, North Carolina.