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Hard-Won Hope

by Brian Caulfield 

The headlines these days are not likely to inspire hope in many hearts. Yet I must confess to feeling especially hopeful, both as a Catholic and as an American. My hope, I think, has something to do with the fact that I am a middle-aged man with young children. I have the experience of years mixed with the wonder of children in my life. Every day is an adventure in their eyes, and it rubs off on me.

In a sense, I owe it to my 9-year-old and 5-year-old boys to be hopeful because they have a future and I must give them a strong sense that life is good and worth living. But it goes deeper than that. Experience tells me that whatever troubles we encounter, evil has its limits, bad things pass, and good – despite all appearances – has a refreshing persistence. God exists, and we all know it. Deep down, we all know it.

As Christians, we have the privilege of a unique hope. To us, hope is more than a dream of what could or should be. Hope is a virtue, often a hard-won virtue that at any moment may seem to flee from our sights, but which should always remain in our hearts. Hope does not mean we think things will always go right in our lives – that is naivety. Hope, rather, is related to faith. We firmly believe – amid much contrary evidence – that there is ultimate good, ultimate right and ultimate justice, because God is all these things and more.

In his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved In Hope), Pope Benedict XVI leads the reader to a greater understanding and appreciation of the nature of hope. The deep-down, innate hope that all humans hold is for a full and eternal life, a life that is rooted in love and happiness and lasts beyond death. As I understand him, the Holy Father says that the Christian response to this primordial hope is unique in all of history. Christianity does not offer a way to transcend or change reality, a roadmap for human progress, or even a complete account of why things happen the way they do. Christianity offers, first of all, a Person. The most basic question about our existence, about the very nature of reality, is not the scientist’s how, the historian’s when, or even the philosopher’s why. It is the believer’s Who. “Who do you say that I am?” (Matt 16:15).

Founded on a Person, and grounded in the question of identity, Christianity is always concerned for the human person in his given nature. It is not about utopia or the “–isms” of the day but about the human condition and experience as they are found in the world. Pope Benedict spends a long chapter in Spe Salvi looking at the alternate hopes of the world that are expressed in scientific progress, secular philosophies or Marxist theory, and he shows how they fail to satisfy the human spirit. Christianity, on the other hand, provides an enduring hope because it brings man to a better understanding of himself. God became man, the creator became a creature, he died and rose from the dead for us. This is hope not in a theory, or in science or in the limited capacity of mankind to reason and to know. This is hope in a Person who loves us.

As Catholics, we used to learn the “grammar” of this hope very early on. The first question of the Baltimore Catechism is, “Who made us?” From the beginning, we are looking for a Who, and we are told that he is in close and intimate relationship with us. Pope Benedict writes, “His love is at the same time our guarantee of the existence of what we only vaguely sense and which nevertheless, in our deepest self, we await: a life that is ‘truly’ life.”

Yes, I am hopeful. I am hopeful because of my middle-aged perspective, because of my young sons, and most of all because of the hope who has a Name.

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)