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Good Morning. My teacher Rabbi Hugo Gryn told how, when imprisoned in Auschwitz over Chanukah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, his father smeared a thread with his meagre fat ration to create a makeshift candle. Hugo chided, ‘We need those calories to stay alive!’ But his father replied, ‘Candles mean hope, and without hope we can’t survive either.’ Hope can feel like a needle in a haystack. Poverty, inflation, political turmoil, home truths about the climate, it’s hard to bear. This week is COP 27 and I keep rehearing the opening words of the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres: We’re on a highway to hell. They’re followed in my head by Dante’s ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’ But we can’t afford to abandon hope. Without it we certainly won’t make those substantive climate commitments so urgently required. But hope isn’t phantasy, it must be realistic. ‘We’ve got the same challenge now,’ a leading journalist told me, ‘Keeping hope alive while being truthful, and truth alive while being hopeful.’ It’s not easy; the collective heaviness presses down on one’s lungs. But it’s essential. That’s why the Psalmist’s words grip me: ‘Hope in God, be brave and God will strengthen your heart.’ Hope doesn’t just happen; it needs courage and God’s help. I don’t look for that God in heaven. I find God’s presence in people, in the good they do despite everything. I feel it in nature’s wonder, despite its beleaguered biodiversity. What so many people are committing to, in local groups and across faiths, gives hope: establishing collective food gardens, significantly cutting food waste, lobbying for renewable energy, clean air and water, farming sustainably, fighting for climate justice alongside imperilled communities across the world. I see such people in all walks of life and try to learn from them. ‘We work with villagers and landowners;’ a forester in Scotland told me, ‘Here’s where we’re planting next.’ ‘What gives me hope,’ said Canon Giles Goddard, who leads Faiths for the Climate, ‘is young people, people in nations at risk; they have the insight and leadership. The solutions are there: we just need to listen!’ This weekend I’m joining him on a pilgrimage of faith leaders in London, led by the Jerusalem-based Elijah Interfaith Institute, to renew our commitment to climate justice and survival. Such people radiate not just inspiration but determination. Their hope has grit; it strengthens the heart. Will their work be enough? If we all join them it just might be and in that lies our hope.