The chief architect of hope for the early Christians was the Apostle Paul. An early persecutor of Christians, Paul later became a Christian, and risked his life to keep alive the faith, in the face of threats of death from the Roman authorities. He wrote continually to the churches around the Mediterranean, encouraging them to keep faith, to not give up hope. Paul believed that God's love was poured into human beings through the Holy Spirit, and that hope is grounded in that love. While Paul's formula might be a bit too Trinitarian for us, he captures something of the transcendent nature of hope.
Hope is always transcendent, beyond the present situation.
It is looking into the future. It believes that love will somehow triumph, and things will get better as a result. Yet, never, in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of Me. A person paralyzed by fear is asked to explore what would happen if their worst fears came true. Narrative therapy employs a similar technique when it asks a person to write or tell a story, imagining a successful outcome for a bad situation.