On Daring to Hope – Reflections from Las Vegas
Far from my customary shrine of reflection, the quiet, calming, breakfast nook at home, I find myself in the World this morning – in Las Vegas, of all places.
A city whose very name conjures the glittering excesses of our age—the neon shimmer of desire, the roulette wheel of luck, the strange marriage of spectacle and shadow. It is a place we might visit in search of diversion, distraction, perhaps even a flickering thrill—but seldom, I imagine, do we arrive expecting to be quietly, deeply moved.
And yet here I am, on an ordinary evening made extraordinary, seated in the dim hush before the curtain rose on Michael Jackson ONE, a Cirque du Soleil performance I had heard praised for its acrobatics and innovation, but never, not once, for its capacity to stir the soul.
From the first note—no, from the first breath of light and shadow—there was a kind of enchantment at work. Not the gaudy, overstimulated enchantment one might brace for in Las Vegas, but something gentler, almost sacramental. Dancers moved like whispers across the stage. Light fractured like stained glass through fog. And Michael’s voice—familiar and distant, like a memory echoed in cathedral stone—threaded itself between movements and moments with haunting clarity.
It struck me then, almost embarrassingly late, that beneath the persona and performance, beneath the icon and the infamy, there once lived a man with a message. A few more minutes of rumination and I remembered – I remembered how the message of the music had inspired me before. How the audacious boldness of “What about Us” confronted me years ago.
“Heal the world…” he sang—not as a slogan, not as marketing, but as invocation.
And later, “If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, and make a change.”
It is easy, in a time like ours, to let such lines drift into cliché. We’ve heard them too often, I suppose. Repeated by those who do not live them, sold in sound bites, ironed onto T-shirts, divorced from the weight they once carried. But there in the dark, surrounded by strangers, I felt those words as though they were being spoken directly to me—not from a pop star, but from something older, wiser, aching to be heard.
Start with the man in the mirror.
What a quietly devastating idea. That the transformation we crave in the world—its healing, its justice, its restoration—must begin in the hidden terrain of our own heart. Not through grand pronouncements, but through small, honest reckonings. Not through blame or posture, but through the long and difficult discipline of becoming whole.
There was, near the end of the show, a moment I shall not soon forget. The music fell away. The dancers froze, stilled like figures in a dream. And through the stillness emblazoned on the screen, in typer writer animation, a quotation I had never heard, and yet one that seemed to gather up the entire evening and press it gently into my chest:
“In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope.
In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort.
In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream.
And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe.”
Followed by his signature, a cursive rendering in live action animation – almost as if Michael had reached from the beyond to the present and was writing once again a message to the world, or perhaps, to me.
I confess, I sat there in the dark, utterly undone.
What curious courage it takes, does it not, to hope in a world such as ours? Hope has fallen out of fashion. It is seen as naïve, even irresponsible. We are encouraged to be savvy, sarcastic, suspicious. The age of irony reigns. And yet there was something almost scandalously earnest in these words—an invitation not to sentimentality, but to something braver.
To hope is not to ignore the wound. It is to bind it.
To comfort is not to avoid the anguish. It is to lean into it, to cradle what the world discards.
To dream is not to escape reality. It is to refuse the tyranny of the inevitable.
To believe is not to deny complexity. It is to plant our flag in the soil of the possible and call it holy ground.
I emerged from the theatre, into a torrential downpour of biblical proportions, I emerged changed—not in the dramatic sense, not with fanfare or flourish, but with a quiet, inward shift. A reordering. A re-centering. The world outside was the same, of course—still noisy, still electric, still whirring with the fevered pulse of nightlife. But something in me was softer. A little more still. A little more prepared to begin again. I remembered as I walked out into the pouring rain, a phrase that I oft heard in relation to the economic choices we were making in the 1990’s, “There is no alternative” (TINA). Michael Jackson reminded me there is an alternative, there always is. Will I chose it?
We do not always know where grace will find us. Sometimes it comes not in chapels or forests or long silent retreats—but in theatres on the Las Vegas Strip. Sometimes it wears sequins and moonwalks and still, somehow, it manages to carry a message that rings like psalms.
Psalms of lament, Psalms of complaint, and yes – Psalms of Hope. And so I return home not merely entertained, but reminded. Reminded that hope is not the domain of the lucky, or the privileged, or the untouched. It is, in fact, the birthright of the brokenhearted. And it is ours to tend.
So then, will you join me? Let us dare.
Let us dare to hope.
Let us dare to comfort.
Let us dare to dream.
And in this beautiful, trembling world—let us dare, still, to believe.
