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Children often ask disconcerting questions. On Saturday a history-loving 10 year old asked me about the impact on me of a school trip aged 14 to the dying Soviet block. By chance, this trip resulted in me being in Berlin in 1989 a few weeks after the wall fell. I realised talking to him that seeing the wall dismantled gave me a conviction I have never lost, that real social change is possible, nothing is ever as fixed as it seems, and all is fragile. Lasting change belongs not just to individuals – how much can I do alone? - but to whole communities.

An American colleague told me how profoundly she feels her students’ aspirations are shaped by coming of age in the opposite of a euphoric moment like 1989: in an era of 9/11, racial divisions, climate emergency, and pandemic. These have been lessons in the fragility of things, and of the profound connectedness of the issues we face, a set of challenges we can feel wearied by or seem to be in denial of.

These are the connected issues the G7 leaders will face when they meet. The unavoidable connections between vaccine programmes, development strategies, economic policy and climate action.

In the Christian tradition hope is often contrasted to mere optimism or positive thinking. In fact, positive thinking can prevent real hope emerging. Things will not necessarily get better just by looking on the bright side. In the scriptures hope emerges when we look reality in the face – this is what makes the Biblical prophets so unpopular. They discomfort us with reality, they name the gap between how things are and how they should be, and they help us to build a bridge beyond either despair or denial. The Biblical prophets grasp that hope is of most use precisely when it seems least available to us. As Jerusalem is laid siege and the people flee, Jeremiah madly buys a field. He will not live to see his people return to it, but it is his hopeful gift to the next generation.

The Lord’s prayer is the great Christian prayer of hope. Its sentiments are utterly concrete and small yet world-changing: it teaches through repetition that there is a faithful Creator who sustains, who helps feed a longing to build a world of love and justice, bread for today, relief of debt, forgiveness for my failures and a capacity to forgive others, a kingdom without end.

I still have my chunk of Berlin wall, my artefact of hope. The G7 generation owes to my 10 year old questioner a willingness to accept its own burden of hope, to break open a future not with cheap gestures of optimism but with an honest hope.

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