Listen to Hope!

Listen to Hope. 

If you are married to Hope, as I am, then that is just decent human courtesy. No prizes, no insight here, just the sound ideal of treating another human being as you would wish to be treated. The thing about being married to Hope is that I think about Hope a great deal which without any better reason than her name has caused me to meditate on the virtue hope.

“Listen to hope” turns out to be generally good advice, even if you lack the luck to be married to Hope. Now the annoying (and altogether helpful!) voice of philosophy (put there by skillful teachers) challenges this happy conclusion and whispers: “Don’t listen to hope, pick the facts instead.”

That seems right until philosophy forces me to keep thinking and I realize that hope is not the same as fantasy. I can imagine a great many things, but hope requires some degree of plausibility. Hope reaches for what could be, what might be, but what is not yet.

You cannot really hope for the impossible only dream strange dreams! Hope is to dream the possible dream and leave the impossible to the mad Quixote. But also abandon the foolishness of needing near certainty before daring to believe. Hope finds a worthy object of love and then bets on love.

What is that worthy object? Saint Paul suggests that we should have “steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is true, but such answers breed cynicism if not considered carefully, becoming merely an inspirational poster or a non-answer like the fifth grader in Christian school shouting: “God! Jesus!” as the answer to any question.

In this case, however, the kid would have been right, because hope comes from love, but must have a foundation in truth. Hope in a something is never going to be good enough for steadfastness, because material things do not endure. Ideas endure, but they cannot love us back. Hope that endures finds a person that is true and steadfastly learns about that person. As anyone in love knows, you can never fully know a good person, because a good person keeps growing.

God is the eternal Being that never changes, but can be loved. As we love God, we change and so our hope, becomes faith and our faith leads to knowledge of the Divine. Yet each facet of His personality we discover can be learned anew in a deeper sense. Hope is eternal, because God is eternal and in Him we begin the hope’s eternal journey.

How can we hope to see God?

Jesus is human and God: our way of grasping what we can of the greatest possible being. He can be known, loved, and yet also is a teacher. He was, is, and always will be willing to reason with His students. The longer we hope in Him, the greater our faith, because we come to know more. Hope does not vanish as each truth about Him is gained, because there is always more. We endure, because there is no end to Him.

There is an old hymn that was a favorite of a grandparent that says: “He walks with me and he talks with me . . . ” and so He does. His wise, virtuous, and joyful words whisper hope to my tired heart and the joy we share none other has ever known.

Listen to Hope.