I have been reflecting upon the Christian theological virtue of Hope in the last couple of weeks. This reflection has led me to a greater level of peace than I have been experiencing for the last months – perhaps the last few years…
Christmas time is a great time to focus on the virtue of hope but the fact that I began reflecting on this virtue came more by chance than from a deliberate or thoughtful act of my will during this time (though it is likely, however, that God’s will had something to do with it). Flying back from a business trip in New York, I decided to pick up where I had left off several months ago in a little book by Father Jacques Philippe entitled Interior Freedom. By way of a side note, I highly recommend this and several other short treatises by the good Father Philippe, readily available at “fine booksellers everywhere” (not necessarily the mass retailers…). I picked up where I had left off the last time I read the book – in the middle of a chapter on the interplay between the theological virtues. Upon reading and reflection, I found I had been neglecting the virtue of hope!
After quoting St. John (1 John 3: 1-3), Father Philippe writes, “This astonishing statement is perfectly in line with the great prophetic vision of the Old Testament, where pure-hearted people are not so much those free of all faults and all wounds, as those who put all their hope in God and are certain his promises will be fulfilled.” So we can live an intense purity, a joyful lightness; even when we may feel burdened by our own shortcomings and, quite frankly, by some of the ugliness and sorrow we see in the world around us. We can still be light, you see, because God’s promise transcends this world. In fact, hope provides our sole means of maintaining joy (and we are called always to maintain our joy) in the face of the tragic acts of violence that result in the suffering most recently experienced in Newtown Connecticut but also on September 11, 2001, in the Oklahoma City bombing, in Columbine, in the too frequent acts of mass violence we have experienced in this country and around the world but also in those individual violences executed against the most innocent among us, the unborn.
As I said earlier, Christmas time is a great time to focus on Hope but in reality every feast of the Church, every celebration of the birth, life, suffering, death, resurrection of Our Lord has at its core a message of hope. Every Christian celebration (of Our Lord or of his mother or of the saints whose lives reflected his goodness) serves to increase in us this divine hope, this unwavering trust in the goodness of God and in the goodness of his will, the goodness of what he wishes for each one of us, the goodness of what he desires for those who have died in the violence of human anger or in the violence of natural disaster, the goodness he can and does bring even out of evil (whether or not we can see or comprehend it), the goodness of our ultimate end with Him…
Hope brings divine perspective to every event, act, word, thought of our lives. Hope purifies our every act, word, thought. Hope turns our focus from a preoccupation with self to a preoccupation with all that which is other than self, principally to the good envisioned by God for all souls (including our own).
As with any virtue an excellent way to increase hope, to strengthen it, is to practice it. However, hope being a theological virtue, we must count on God’s gratuitous goodness to plant this gift in us. Let us pray for this gift for ourselves and for our brothers and sisters and let us practice it without ceasing! May this virtue burn brilliantly in us, may it increase our lightness to the point that we might fly with the angels, for G. K. Chesterton once wrote that “angels fly because they take themselves lightly.”
I will work on taking myself lightly and I will work on taking world affairs lightly. That is not to say I will ignore the affairs of the world or the affairs of the public square. In my reflections on Hope, I found myself faced with the temptation to chuck the public square the direction of whose affairs I had found so disturbing in recent months. If Hope directs us to ultimate ends, I argued, why focus on the bothersome affairs of this world at all? The answer to that question, of course, is charity. Though we trust in the ultimate goodness God, we must not leave the working of good to God alone. Charity calls us to action. Lest hope lead us to rely solely on the efforts of God, charity leads us to active participation in God’s works, both temporal and supernatural. The Second Vatican Council reminds us of our role in participating with God in the perfection of that which he has placed in our care, according to the gifts He has given each of us; the Holy Spirit makes of us “free men , who are ready to put aside love of self and integrate earthly resources into human life, in order to reach out to that future day when mankind itself will become an offering accepted by God” (Gaudium et Spes, Chapter III).
So, in addition to those efforts directed toward my family, friends and work, I will continue my efforts to bring goodness and truth into the public square and my efforts to live justice and to form others in authentic Catholic social teaching. A Sensible Life will rally on, stronger than before in the sure hope of God’s goodness.
