A Glimmer of Hope

In a storm of uncertainty, anxiety, and even despair about the direction of our nation, we must not succumb to fear. “Fear is a cage that not only excludes us from happiness but also robs us of our future,” Pope Francis said in Hope (2025), addressing his congregation: “For us Christians, the future has a name, and that name is hope.”

Upon his return from the Vatican, Cardinal Suharyo shared Pope Francis’s autobiography, Hope, at the Bishop’s Residence (Saturday, May 24, 2025), as a call to us to spread a glimmer of hope to others. “Having hope does not mean being a naive optimist who ignores the tragedy of human evil. Hope is a virtue of the heart that does not shut itself in darkness, does not dwell on the past, does not falter in the present, but can see tomorrow clearly,” said Pope Francis’ wise advice.

Despite the many crimes committed by leaders against their own nation, we must grow and develop as citizens filled with hope and love for a better Indonesia. This hope is based on the belief and humble attitude to recognize the potential for goodness in fellow citizens. Every citizen has the potential for goodness to do good, no matter how small, to change Indonesia.

A better Indonesia begins with our regular practice of daily acts of kindness and love. This, according to the English romantic poet William Wordsworth in Wordsworth: Poetical Works (1966), forms the best qualities in us as human beings: “On that best portions of good man’s life: His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.”

Meaningful moments

Last Sunday, July 27, 2025, was a meaningful moment when small acts of kindness and love began to be carried out every day with one egg for the children of the Marunda Preschool, North Jakarta. Amidst the conscience anxiety about the high prevalence of stunting in children, Hong Tjhin, a volunteer from the Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation, offered the one-a-day, one-egg movement as a small act of kindness and love that reminded her of Chinese culture where eggs have played an important role for centuries as a protein supplement for children and pregnant women.

One egg a day is a small act of kindness and love for others, as we are called to do our best as fellow citizens who share a shared destiny in a republic founded to bring about shared prosperity. Amidst the increasingly heavy burdens of life, we extend and join hands to nurture hope and compassion for others, as per the Way (Dao) of the wise teacher Master Kong, Confucius (551-479 BC). “Our Master’s Way,” one of Confucius’s students recounted, “is nothing but this: doing-your-best-for-others (zhong) and consideration (shu).”

Confucius’s golden rule—do good for others—is an act of moral virtue and noble humanity that requires us to treat everyone equally and with dignity and to actively engage in compassion for others. Compassion places every human being on the same level as those who experience hardship and suffering in life, especially the poor, the weak, the destitute, stunted children, and those abandoned in orphanages and on the streets, so that every human being can experience the same bitterness of life.

“By imagination,” wrote Scottish Enlightenment theologian Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), “we place ourselves in his situation (that of another person), and we imagine ourselves enduring all the same sufferings, and we enter, as it were, into his body and, in some respects, become the same person as him.”

In the midst of the widespread misery and suffering caused by prolonged economic uncertainty, we are called to act and manifest our compassion towards others through tangible humanitarian actions, in any form and of any size. We cannot distance ourselves from the misery and suffering of the people, because, in accordance with the wise counsel of Pope Leo (2025), compassion demands that we engage actively and be willing to take risks.

The Good Samaritan is an authentic story of compassion because, as Pope Leo emphasized, he physically cared for the wounded man. Compassion, for Pope Leo, “means being willing to feel the weight of another’s suffering. Only by recognizing that we ourselves are wounded can we truly experience the true meaning of compassion for our fellow human beings.”

True happiness in life does not lie in our possession and attachment to unlimited wealth and power, but rather in our generosity to empathize with our fellow human beings.