Pray with the Pope: Why Hope is for the Brave

Intention: Let us pray that the coming Church Jubilee Year 2025 strengthens us in our faith, helping us to recognise the Risen Christ in the midst of our lives, transforming us into pilgrims of Christian hope.

Some trite sayings trivialise hope, such as: “Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have isn’t permanent.” But hope is much more than a feeling; it’s a virtue, the second Christian virtue after faith. It’s the virtue of the Christian viator, the pilgrim — not just a warm, fuzzy feeling or a generally optimistic outlook on life.

In a work entitled What is Liberty For?, the 20th-century Catholic French writer George Bernanos contrasts hope sharply with facile optimism. He wrote: “Optimism is a false hope, invoked by the lazy and the feckless. Hope is a virtue, a heroic determination of the soul, the highest form of which is the overcoming of despair.” In other words, hope is not a soft virtue and it’s not for the faint-hearted.

The focus of hope in the Jewish people is salvation history — the conviction that, whatever happens, God will work in and through history for the ultimate good of the People of the Covenant. The temptation against hope in the Old Testament is putting one’s hope and trust in idols. Hope in the true God is about being confident and secure in God, taking refuge in him, standing firm and waiting longingly for salvation.

It has been said that the challenge for Jews and Christians is to “take the risk of history”. What that means is to actively look for God’s hand in history as it unfolds, no matter how hidden this hand might seem. By contrast, the temptation is to withdraw from the events of one’s time and place because they seem so dire and Godforsaken.

The New Testament hope

In the New Testament the resurrection is central to hope, not just my own but that of “all flesh” — the conviction that ultimately all things will be restored in Christ. Great faith is needed to give us this hope. Some New Testament verbs associated with hope are to be patient, to endure, to be watchful, and to stand.

New Testament hope has sometimes been privatised and made completely other-worldly. It becomes focused on the individual’s hope of survival in the face of death. Hence Marx’s mockery about religion being the “opium of the people”. To answer Marx, theologians have proposed a more this-worldly view of hope, holding the present age and the age to come in a creative tension.

From that tension comes the struggle for faith and justice, the notion that the believer must witness to a hope in something more immediate than a future “pie in the sky”. In the Our Father we pray that “thy kingdom come” on earth as well as in heaven. Thus, hope is not Marx’s supposed “opium of the people” but rather an impulse to transform the world in light of God’s promises. And losing one’s life in this struggle paradoxically is the ultimate victory because this mirrors Jesus’ giving of his own life.

One valuable insight from the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius is the encouragement to focus on what is consoling and uplifting in our prayer and actions. To find hope, we must actively seek out the encouragement that nourishes it. We must meditate on the promises of God and raise our minds to his goodness and loving care. This should become second nature, a routine response — the opposite of the temptation to succumb to desolation.

When it becomes instinctive to seek the Lord’s consolation, that is where we will find hope.