On Hope

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

A number of years ago in Asia, a lady came to me. She was working in a bank. She was involved in trading, derivatives, investments, that type of thing.

A new deal came up in which you could be very personally involved and make a lot of money. It was very lucrative; it was very attractive.

She had been fairly recently baptized.

But there was something about this deal that didn't seem quite right. She wanted a moral opinion, and so she came to ask.

When she described what was involved, I had to say to her, "This thing perhaps is not totally wrong, but it's not totally right either. If you want to give an example of a good Catholic in the middle of the world, perhaps it’s better that you don’t get involved in this particular deal, knowing that it was very lucrative.”

Without batting an eyelid, she said, “Okay, anyway, we're not just here to do business. We're here to get to heaven.”

I was rather impressed with that answer, and that comment. She saw that idea with Chinese clarity: we're here to get to heaven.

What a good idea to have that would guide all our actions in this world. That's what we're here for. That's what we hope in.

This meditation is about the virtue of hope.

We can often talk a lot about faith and charity, but sometimes we can forget about hope.

Hope is a very powerful virtue. It's a virtue that keeps us looking up, particularly in situations that otherwise might lead to sadness: sickness, pain, death, contradictions, problems.

Our Lord wants us to hope, and to hope in Him.

Every time that we receive the sacraments, we receive an influx of the supernatural virtue of hope. It comes with sanctifying grace.

We receive an outpouring of the virtues of faith, hope, and charity.

One of the ways that we grow in this virtue is through receiving the sacraments.

Every time that we receive the sacraments, we can ask for an increase in this virtue so that our souls may be full of hope, and so that we can transmit that hope to many other people.

St. Paul says to the Romans, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in your faith, so that in the power of the Holy Spirit you may be rich in hope” (Rom. 15:13).

Often, we desire to be rich in all sorts of things, particularly material things. But it's interesting how God beckons us to be rich in spiritual things—rich in the things that only God can give us, that this world cannot give us.

What a great thing to be “rich in hope” and to be able to spread that hope around so many other people.

Pope Francis recently talked about how there's a great emptiness in the world, a great spiritual emptiness.

We have come to fill that emptiness with the treasures of hope that God has placed in our souls.

“I have told you this,” said Our Lord, “so that my own joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete” (John 15:11).

Hope leads us to joy, because we look over, above, and beyond our immediate circumstances. It leads us to see that there is some other great force and power taking place here at work in the world, a Divine Power. It leads us to dream of all the wonderful things that God wants us to do in this world.

When we come face to face with evil, with sin—all the corruption, all the abortions, all the contraception, all the murders, all the drunkenness, all the betrayal—we know that with one Mass we can wipe out all of that.

We hope in the Mass. We hope in the Blessed Eucharist.

We hope in the Church: that just as it has lasted for twenty centuries, it will last for all eternity, as long as God wants.

We have great reasons to hope.

“Blessed be God the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” says St. Peter, “who in his great mercy has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3).

He has given us “a new birth into a living hope.”

Every time we get out of bed in the morning and we say the Morning Offering, we make an act of hope. We hope in the graces of this day. Sufficient for each day are the graces thereof.

We know God will give us enough graces to sanctify this day, to be happy this day, to see His hand behind everything that happens, to live out our life day by day, hour by hour. We hope in Him. He will get us through it.

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock, and it will be opened” (Matt. 7:7).

On many occasions in Our Lord's life, He encourages that hope.

Prayer is the language of hope. It leads us to hope in all moments, in all situations.

The good thief on Calvary looked across and he said, "Remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42).

Strange words. Your kingdom? This was a criminal being crucified like them.

But he looked across and he saw a different reality. The crown of thorns had become a royal crown. The nails in His hands had become the scepter with which He reigns. The cross of wood had become His throne.

He saw a King.

The final words of the good thief were words of hope: “Remember me.” Beautiful words for us to say from time to time.

The answer of Christ was immediate: “This day you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).

Christ didn't say: ‘Let me do an audit on your life. Let me see how much money it was that you stole. Let me get a magnifying glass and see, are you worthy of my kingdom.’

Rather, He said: “This day you will be with me in paradise.” He was rewarded for his hope.

The Psalm says, "In God alone, there is rest for my soul. From him comes my safety. He alone is my rock, my safety, my stronghold so that I stand unshaken” (Ps. 62:1-2).

It may be that at certain times in our life, God sweeps our feet from under us. He leaves us hanging there, because He wants us to look up. He wants us to learn what real hope is.

He wants to teach us not to hope in the things of this world—our health, our finances, our security—all those things that can be washed away in a moment.

The whole of the pandemic that we're going through is like a global call to hope more in God, and hope and trust less in the things of this world.

“If I should ever walk in the valley of darkness, no evil would I fear, because you are there with me, with your crook and your staff to help me” (Ps. 23:4).

St. Paul talks about being “joyful in hope, patient in tribulation” (Rom. 12:12).

That hope brings us joy and peace because we look up to greater things.

In the Letter to the Hebrews, he talks about “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1).

On many occasions in the Bible, the words “Do not be afraid" are used. It occurs something like 365 times. The frequency with which words are used in the Bible is an indication of their importance.

It means that each and every day, we are encouraged to be strong in faith and live with Christian hope, because God always fulfills His promises.

“God is not a human, that he should lie,” says the Book of Numbers, “not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?” (Num. 23:19).

Moses said to the people, "Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see what Yahweh will do to rescue you today. The Egyptians you see today, you will never see again” (Ex. 14:13).

In Isaiah, "Do not be afraid, for I am with you; do not be alarmed, for I am your God. I give you strength. Truly I help you. Truly I hold you firm with my saving right hand” (Isa. 41:10).

And in the Gospel of St. John, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. You trust in God; trust also in me” (John 14:1).

Our Lord played a practical joke on the apostles. He came to them walking on the water. They were scared out of their wits. They shouted, "It's a ghost!” (Matt. 14:22-26). It wasn't a ghost; it was just Jesus.

God may come to us in certain ways and we might have the same reaction.

But Our Lord immediately calmed them down: “Take heart! It is I. Do not be afraid” (Matt. 14:27).

All the time, Our Lord is inviting us to trust in Him.

I was coming home from saying Mass one morning and I turned on the BBC News. It talked about a certain person who had set up a cosmetic industry who had passed away.

I had seen that name written in big letters in duty-free areas of airports and many other places. It was an unusual name. I often wondered what was behind it. And here was this person explaining it.

I think the individual had come from Hungary, went to New York, set up this cosmetic empire. There was one person in the studio who was talking about the life of this person and what she had done.

There was a bit of a comedian there also who was sort of throwing cold water on things.

He said that Vaseline ointment or rub ointment is as effective in removing your pimples, your wrinkles, or your grey hair as any of the foundational creams of this particular cosmetic business. And so on and so forth.

At the end of the conversation, this comedian said, "Really, what this person did was to sell hope to people.”

It's a rather interesting description of the cosmetic industry, as though everybody needs hope. If you get home and you put it into a tube or a nice bottle and a nice color, a nice fragrance, and put a good price on it, then everybody will buy it.

Later that day, I happened to see a picture in a magazine of a lady who was very prominent in the 1960s. But now she was almost 90 and the poor lady had more wrinkles than anybody I'd ever seen.

I thought, she must have had access to all of those foundational creams, but it doesn't seem to have done her too much good.

The moral of the story is not to put our hope in human things, in the things of this world. Put our hope in God.

“Because you, God, are my strength”–Quia tu es Deus fortitudo mea, it says in Scripture (Ps. 42:2). This is the opposite of discouragement or despair and pessimism.

I heard a priest in Asia say once that young people today can be faced with a great pessimism, particularly in the area of sexual morality: ‘Don't fight against your passions. You can't win. Give in.’

They need a lot of hope and a lot of encouragement.

This virtue leads us to love where we've been placed: in this particular job, in this particular marriage, in this particular family, with this particular boss, with this particular health or financial situation.

This is where God wants me. This is where He wants me to be holy, and this is where He will give me all the graces that I need.

Therefore, we can be very contented because we place all our hope in Him.

St. Josemaría liked to say that we should “passionately love the world” (Josemaría Escrivá, Conversations, Point 113).

It's a rather interesting phrase. You don't hear about people passionately loving the world too much.

At the time when he said these words, it seemed a heresy. You were not supposed to love the world; you were supposed to escape from the world to be holy.

Notice how he put the adverb first in the sentence: “passionately loving the world.” He could have said "loving the world passionately,” but for emphasis, the adverb comes first.

If you met somebody and they told you, “I love chapati passionately,” you might be a bit surprised. Or if they said, “Passionately loving chapati” or they would say, “I love Manchester United passionately” or “Passionately loving Man U."

That's what he said about the world. We passionately love where we've been placed because that's where God wants us to be: with the difficulties and challenges of the world; the difficulties of our environment, of our profession, of our children, of our friends.

Hope leads us to love where we are. This is where I'm meant to be, this is what I've been created for. This is part of my vocation.

Therefore, hope gives a great youthfulness to the soul.

You may meet older people who are very youthful: full of vitality, full of dreams, full of enthusiasm.

If you've met certain teenagers, you might find them full of what somebody called the old age of the spirit: ‘Oh, it's too difficult.’ ‘Oh, it takes too much effort.’ ‘Oh, I don't have time, I couldn't manage that.’

Hope gives us a virtue where we look over, above, and beyond the immediate obstacles.

The reason for our hope is Christ. He has risen as He promised. The Resurrection is the greatest feast in the liturgical year. It is with this that Christ has conquered death. He has conquered sin. He has conquered the devil. He has conquered evil.

It’s the feast of hope that leads us to look to the future. We are an Easter people. We hope in Christ.

We come back to Him in the Blessed Sacrament or on the Cross, so they can fill our hearts of youth with hope even when things may seem bleak.

It seems there is a custom when a new Pope is elected that he has his portrait painted. There was one Pope to whom they assigned a modernistic painter to paint this portrait. He was full of all sorts of brush strokes, very avant-garde, very modernistic.

When it was finished, the custom is that the Pope signs it. But when the Pope came to see his painting, he could hardly recognize himself. It was so modernistic. And so, instead of writing his signature there, he wrote a phrase of Scripture which was, “Take courage! It is I. Do not be afraid” (Matt. 14:27).

Christ comes to us in all sorts of moments. Therefore, we can hope in the moments of the cross, with our priestly soul, to offer this cross to God in the knowledge that He wants us to carry it or offer it to Him, to bring some great fruit.

We can have a lot of fortitude in hope. It may be that God wants us to practice this virtue for a long time, or to be heroic in our practice of this virtue.

We are told in Psalm 2, “You are my child, this day I have begotten you” (Ps. 2:7). Regular contemplation of that phrase can lead us to a greater hope and to the reasons why God leads us into the situation of hope.

Children don't just believe in their parents. They hope in them for everything that they need, for everything that they want.

Our hope in God is very well placed because God is omnipotent, but He is also all-goodness.

The first temptation that the devil gave to Christ after His fasting for forty days and forty nights, was a temptation not to hope, not to see the hand of God behind the contradiction of being hungry.

How could God be your true Father when He allows you to be so hungry? “So turn these stones into loaves of bread.” Christ rejected the devil very quickly (Matt. 4:1-4).

Hope gives to our interior struggle a certain tenacity and firmness that faith alone cannot give.

We can hope in God in our struggle to be better, to conquer our weaknesses. It's a virtue that leads us to begin and to begin again.

Like a small child who's running to the embrace of his father but has just learned to stand on his two feet, and maybe halfway across the floor he falls, but then he gets up again. Maybe he falls again, but he gets up again.

On the way to Calvary, on the Way of the Cross, we see that Christ fell the first time. He fell the second time. He fell the third time. If those Stations are ever renamed, they could be called, “Christ got up the first time," "He got up the second time," and "He got up the third time.”

We can have great hope in our apostolate, particularly when it might seem that there is no fruit, when we try to sow seeds around us—seeds of truth, of beauty, of love, because God is love—and there's no reaction.

But we know that those seeds will bring their fruit in due time. “My chosen ones do not work in vain” (Isa. 65:23).

We have no need for discouragement in our apostolate, and to launch into the deep, to dream great dreams, to be daring.

We can hope in our efforts in our family life—the efforts we make to educate our children, to repeat things maybe 500 times, to get across certain messages or certain values that may be difficult to communicate or penetrate with those ideas.

Children don't seem to catch them. But the day will come when those seeds will go deep.

We can hope in our work, with its problems, its stresses, its tensions, its failures.

We can hope in our times of rest, with the tiredness or the problems that we may feel at the end of a busy day or the end of a long work period, that God will give us rest.

Our Sundays or our weekends will be a period of rest in order to work better or work more. With this period of rest, a lot of my troubles will pass away. The solutions will come.

Hope helps us to maintain our serenity and our optimism before any difficulties that may lie in our path—in the achievement of the goals, the ideals, that Christ has placed in our hearts.

It makes us persevere with enthusiasm, without becoming discouraged, because we see that all things, even the difficulties, “are for the good of those who love God” (Rom. 8:28).

I knew a girl once in another country who did so well in her end-of-secondary school exam that she got into Oxford. Not only that, but she got into Law at Oxford. That was in December.

In February, she developed leukemia. In July, she died, at 19 years of age.

Towards the end of that process, she was in the ICU with heart monitors, respirators, drips, tubes everywhere. The doctors told her parents that the time had come to turn off the respirator, which was not a moral problem because it was the only thing keeping the person alive. It's no difficulty to turn it off.

But the parents found it difficult to come to that decision. There was a family conference called, and I was brought in to sort of mediate.

There was a moment when I said to these parents, "What else does this world have for your daughter? ICUs and heart monitors, respirators, drips, tubes. This world has nothing else to offer your daughter. But what is waiting for her? Eternal happiness.”

I was really grateful to the Holy Spirit for that idea at that particular moment in time. I had not quite thought about it like that before.

It made me realize the great hope and joy that come from the contemplation of the eternal truths of our faith.

St. Josemaría says, “Foster in your heart the glorious hope of heaven” (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 668).

It's very good that we think about heaven, we dream about heaven, where “every tear will be wiped away” (Rev. 21:4). And that we want it for people.

When our loved ones pass on, we may be sad for a while because we're human. But then we realize the great things that have been achieved; the joy that they have in the presence of eternal beatitude; what eternal happiness means. It's a wonderful thing.

We can ask that this virtue will help us to give ourselves daringly in the marvelous task of the transformation of the world, which the Holy Father and Our Lord are placing before us.

May it lead us to discover that something divine is hidden in the ordinary work of every day, and lead us to realize that if ever we have a low period, that's not a time to make life-changing decisions. Those times will pass. We'll see things in a new light.

It's a virtue that's fundamental for people who are trying to sanctify themselves in the middle of the world, to let them see that they are there to transform this world into a situation pleasing to God.

St. Catherine of Siena said for those who believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father, then “all the way to heaven is heaven.”

Lord, help us to trust in you, in spite of our weaknesses and our sins.

In The Forge we’re told, "Lazarus rose because he heard the voice of God and immediately wanted to get out of the situation he was in. If he hadn’t wanted to move, he would just have died again. A sincere resolution: to have faith in God always; to hope in God always; to love God always…He never abandons us, even if we are rotting away as Lazarus was” (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 211).

When Lazarus heard the voice of Our Lord, he could have just turned over and said, ‘No, I don't want to respond. I'm happy where I am. Leave me in peace. I don't want to change.’ But he heard the voice of Christ and he responded.

Our Lady of Hope will wipe away our tears in this valley of tears, particularly when we invoke her as Our Hope frequently.

Mary, Queen of Hope, pray for us.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

JM