We say these weeks of Advent, in which we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus, are a time to renew hope. But what do we mean by hope? In the everyday sense of the word, hope is often linked to optimism, a positive anticipation of the future. Hope in this ordinary sense typically has an object, a desire for a positive outcome or a better situation. It is oriented to specific needs. We pray that someone will survive an illness or recover from surgery. We pray for an end to war in the Ukraine, for a safe journey, or for thewell-being of loved ones, and countless other intentions.
Sometimes we get what we want – but many times we don’t. Praying harder doesn’t guarantee the outcome we seek. So, what happens when we don’t get what we want? At worst it can lead some to question their faith. At best it leads us to attribute the outcome to God’s inscrutable will. Hope of this sort, a yearning for what is not, seems pointless.
The Buddhists among whom I live would say that this sense of hope, as a longing for what we do not have, or for a positive future over which we have no control, is just another form of attachment – which Buddhism defines as the root of suffering. This hope is just a manifestation of desire that leads to self-inflicted suffering. It can even be a hindrance to our spiritual growth. It becomes a kind of opiate, a pattern of avoidance that dulls pain and masks life’s harsher realities.
The true Christian understanding of hope is of something more than a feeling — more than wishful thinking or denial of life’s unpleasantness, stress, and anxiety. It is not simply desire and yearning. Christian hope is linked to prayer in a more profound sense than simple petition. It touches on our whole relationship to God. How and why we pray is shaped by hope.
The church teaches that hope is a virtue, alongside faith and love, drawing from Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Like all virtues, hope is a human quality or “excellence” that can be cultivated through practice, but ultimately it reaches its fullness through the grace of God. To borrow a term from Flannery O’Connor, the American Catholic novelist, hope is a ‘habit of being’. It is rooted in an incarnational worldview – a belief that we live in a world suffused with grace and the presence of God’s spirit. As the protagonist of Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest asserts with his dying breath, “Tout est grâce”, all is grace. This conviction that grace is everywhere is also the heart of St Ignatius of Loyola’s “Contemplatio ad amorem”, the final meditation in his Spiritual Exercises.
Hope as a virtue is more akin to confidence than to desire. Confidence rooted in God’s promises; confidence that we are held in God’s hands and that progress toward union with God is genuine. It is the trusting conviction that life unfolds according to God’sdesign, whatever calamities or hardships may strike. The comfort that hope gives does not flow from wishes being fulfilled. It comes from our being more firmly rooted in God’s love. It is this hope that is reborn each Christmas.
