The saints, mystics and poets remind us that hope is not naïve optimism but the steady courage to love amid suffering and loss.
Shall I tell you what gives me hope? Besides the Our Father, of course, which has long been the perfect prayer, indeed, the indispensable prayer of hope for every Christian. How could it be otherwise owing to the fact that the Son of God himself invented it?
“Blessed is the man who goes to sleep under the protection of that outpost,” declares God the Father, who, in words daringly placed on his lips by the poet Charles Péguy, allows his own Son to avert his anger when faced with the sins of his children.
“Those three or four words that conquer me, the unconquerable … which move forward like a beautiful cutwater fronting a lowly ship. / Cutting the flood of my anger.”
That is how God now sees us. And upon the strength of that certainty, we trustingly take our stand, secure in the hope of a forgiving God who never grows weary of granting mercy to poor sinners.
In a letter written to her spiritual director, Venerable Mother Mary Magdalen of Jesus in the Eucharist, an Italian Passionist nun who died in 1960, tells him that while she’d “like to speak about my great wretchedness,” Jesus forbids her to do so, preferring that she speak instead of “God’s mercy in pardoning me, of his ever-increasing goodness to me without my meriting it.”
Even more astonishing to her, however, is the fact that “Jesus seems pleased to see me fall because of his pleasure at hearing me cry out with great force that I love him, that he should come to raise me up and cure my wounds with the kisses of his love.”
Perfection, in other words, is found not in performing great and heroic deeds, but in showing great love.
“So I am content with loving and being loved by my God. No other way is open to me, and if I do not proceed along this path, I would undoubtedly remain forever buried in my imperfections.”
The Lord’s Prayer, therefore, which Jesus himself taught the disciples when asked how they too might learn to pray, contains the whole content of Christian hope. To which there is no end to the graces unleashed by those who pray it with an ardent and sincere heart. We have only to ask. In fact, it matters not one whit how dense the darkness may be enshrouding the sinner — God is always there to hear the cry of the heart.
“Asking is the supreme expression of man,” writes Luigi Giussani, “and it is the most elementary one: man can ask no matter what condition he is in — even if he is an atheist. Indeed, the more man feels in difficulty, the more the act of asking suits him.” We are all beggars before God, as it were, asking for all that we do not have. God, too, is a beggar, asking each of us for a love we are free to refuse, even as we calculate the cost of doing so, which is an eternity without God, without love.
There are other points of entry for those in search of hope, however, and poetry is one of them. Certain passages from T.S. Eliot, for instance, have so impressed themselves upon my memory that I find myself reaching for them anytime temptation strikes. In the final movement from “The Dry Salvages,” for example, there are lines so lapidary that they never fail to quicken the heartbeat of hope:
Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint —
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
Sanctity is not a job, in other words, but something “given and taken,” which is why God invites us into a kind of partnership with him. It is he who gives the grace, but it is for us to take it and thus grow in virtue. It is an exchange with no expiration date, by the way, immersing us in “a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.”
So, where does the hope come in? Where else but in those places we fall short, where we fail to reach “the point of intersection,” preferring to “cling” to that which is not real, whether it be past or future. Alas, says Eliot,
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The gift half guessed, the gift half understood, is
Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future,
Are conquered, and reconciled.
Here is high-octane poetry indeed, while most of us are puttering around in cars that run on empty. And, yet, it is precisely here that we have come to the heart of hope, to that place where an act of trust will simply have to be made lest we fall remorselessly into despair. Because the end toward which the life of grace longs to take us — “the still point of the turning world,” where heaven and history, Kairos and Kronos, suddenly come together — remains an ever-elusive goal for the generality of humankind. “For most of us,” says Eliot, “this is the aim/
Never here to be realized;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying.
The trick, therefore, is not to give up on hope. It is the springboard on which we stand, the place from which, over and over we are urged to set out, soldiering on in the expectation that, as the Lady Julian of Norwich assures us, having heard it first from Jesus himself: And all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
