A Reflection on Hope
in a Time of Distress

Advent is the season of hope and we’ve never needed hope more than we need it now. If Advent hope works for us this year, nothing could be more timely. If it doesn’t work for us, then it’s just one more disappointment in a very discouraging year.

We falsely think that hope is possible only because the future is unknown, entirely malleable, at least in our imagination. So we are free to create a future that is as bleak or as bright as possible —any way we want it. We grasp for hope in our lives by imagining a favorable future. People of a particular personality type find this difficult to do, however, because they are inveterate pessimists, always anticipating the worst, while others are natural optimists. Hope, then, seems to be not a virtue at all, but just an expression of our natural disposition. In life, optimists seem to have an easier time of it. Maybe that’s true, but true hope must be more profound than that.

The Bible goes both ways on the future. The biblical readings for Advent give us two strikingly different visions for the future. On the dark side, for the first Sunday of Advent, Mark’s gospel predicts, “those (future) times will have tribulation such as has not been since the beginning of God’s creation until now, nor ever will be.” The gospel foretells wars, earthquakes, famines, persecution and civil unrest. Sounds like a terrible future, in the midst of which the Son of Man will come, unexpectedly and even more ominously, “like a thief in the night,” to pass judgment. Not something to calm the nerves of a pessimist.

But then there’s the other vision of the future. On the Third Sunday of Advent, to cite one of many such examples, the Church puts before us the vision of Isaiah:

As the earth brings forth its plants,
and a garden makes its growth spring up,
so will the Lord GOD make justice and praise
spring up before all the nations.

That’s a vision that should cheer up everyone, although justice and praise before all the nations seem an inconceivable outcome for our world, a triumph of optimism It’s the kind of imagery that led the author of the Book of Revelation to conclude the entire bible with the plea, “Come, Lord Jesus, Come!” He was looking forward to the end time as the greatest optimist ever.

I’m beginning to suspect that the biblical authors never really intended to predict the future, and thus left us adrift in the battle between optimism and pessimism. Ask the Bible: What does the future hold for us? You won’t get back a definitive answer, but just feedback for your fears and hopes as a way to cope with our human predicament. It’s not a magical solution, but all that we can get from the Scriptures—at least if we restrict ourselves to a simplistic reading.

Lately I’ve been pretty discouraged looking toward the unknown future. I don’t think I’m an inveterate pessimist. But lately—maybe this is true of you as well—I find an oppressive sense of doom hanging over me. The world is a mess—the virus with all the precautions that restrict our freedom, the precarious economy, our polarized politics, the insecurity of loved ones, the sorts of personal problems that all of us must deal with. Too many things can go wrong, and some inevitably will. It’s as if the fulfillment of that bleak prophecy in Mark’s gospel is about to come true. “Welcome to 2020,” as every cynic is saying.

I know the problem with pessimism is that wearing it on one’s sleeve can make its destructive effects self-fulfilling. Pessimism is contagious and can morph into depression. That’s why, if you care for small children, you don’t want to share your desperation with them. Or bring it home to the family. And you don’t want to demoralize the people you work with. But it’s difficult to repress one’s frustrations, fears and, yes, anger. If you think things are bad now, the worst is yet to come. Rough days for hope to survive.

Worse still are the pollyannaish people who evade pessimism by denying present distress. They comfort themselves, for example, with the really bizarre claim that COVID-19 is a hoax or that “herd immunity” is the answer, ignoring the millions of deaths required to reach that elusive goal. False optimism based on illusion is a cruel potion to add to our mix of swirling emotions. I object if anyone wants to label that an instance of hope.

But in the midst of all this, a truly surprising fact emerges: this confused mess that surrounds us can, indeed, despite it all, be the seedbed of real hope. In fact, hope thrives in the environment like the one we are being forced to endure.

Let me explain.

In his latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis talks about hope. But he introduces hope only at the end of his first chapter, which bears the foreboding title, Dark Clouds over a Closed World. “Despite these dark clouds,” the Pope writes, “I would like in the following pages to take up and discuss many new paths of hope.” Where does this sequence—dark clouds followed by hope—put the Pope on the pessimism/optimism spectrum? You’re right if you think it’s an unusual way to foster hope in others. But if Pope Francis is right, we could all be on the threshold of hope after all the dark clouds we’ve been living under. What a thought!

Here’s what the Pope says about hope:

. . .  hope “speaks to us of something deeply rooted in every human heart, independently of our circumstances and historical conditioning. Hope speaks to us of a thirst, an aspiration, a longing for a life of fulfillment, a desire to achieve great things, things that fill our heart and lift our spirit to lofty realities like truth, goodness and beauty, justice and love. . .Hope is bold; it can look beyond personal convenience, the petty securities and compensations which limit our horizon, and it can open us up to grand ideals that make life more beautiful and worthwhile”. Let us continue, then, to advance along the paths of hope.

Exalted language, to be sure. I’ve been reading over that description of hope countless times.

Pope Francis says that hope is in every human heart, independent of the circumstances we confront. Quite a claim. It means that hope must be available to each of us, for every human being has a heart. But here’s the qualification. Pope Francis contends that hope is buried deep. Maybe that is why it seems so elusive, difficult to locate and easy to overlook. If you’ve been having some difficulty with hope these days, it doesn’t mean that you have no hope, but that you just have to keep digging for it—deep down. Don’t give in to any discouragement when you’re searching for hope.

Amazingly, Pope Francis says that hope is independent of our circumstances. That was a new thought for me. I always regarded hard times, disappointments, discouragement—most of all, fear—to be antithetic to hope. They could crush all hope because they are stronger than hope. So how can Pope Francis justify the bold claim that hope is independent of our circumstances? Thinking this over, I was reminded of one of my favorite verses from St. Paul: “For those who love God, all things work together unto good.” I know anyone of us can cite a thousand cases that seem to refute that claim. But so could Paul, as when he cites “anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword.” Quite a line up! And most of those Paul had personally experienced firsthand. Still Paul could insist, “all things work unto good.” Which reinforces the Pope’s claim that hope is “deep” when circumstances—even though tragic—cannot be cited as evidence that hope has been overcome.

So where do we find this hope that can survive even in the face of all that opposes us?

Obviously, hope is linked with faith and love, the other two “theological virtues.” Christian tradition has always considered these three virtues a unit. So we can’t find the hope that resides deep in our hearts without using faith as the bright light guiding our search. Furthermore, it’s not true that hope can stand up to everything. For resentments, contempt and hate when unrestrained are stronger than hope. So to overcome those destructive forces we need love. To find hope, we have to join forces with faith and love.

Properly equipped now with faith and love, may I suggest that we continue our reflections by turning to one of the most beautiful expressions I know of true hope. It’s a familiar prayer, one of the communion prayers of the Mass:

Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil,
and graciously grant peace in our days.
By the help of your mercy
may we be always free from sin
and safe from all distress
as we wait in joyful hope
for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

These are probably words familiar to you, though they come from an older translation that has been replaced by the inferior wording of the revised Roman Missal. The prayer is recited in the Mass immediately after we have all prayed the Lord’s Prayer and are preparing to receive communion. 

With this prayer we’ve come a long way from simple wishful thinking, optimistically imagining a bright future for ourselves. The prayer situates us within the present, but by invoking different categories of discernment than the analytical tools we customarily employ to describe our plight. The prayer lists the cosmic forces that transcend our ordinary categories: “evil” and “sin” conspire to plunge us into “distress.” But these forces do not have the final say over us. The prayer directs us to the even stronger graces that are gifts from God: “peace” and “mercy” contend together to produce freedom and safety. This is the spiritual conflict that describes our present world, whatever the specific issues and circumstances we may face. 

So where does this leave us in the here and now? This response may at first seem underwhelming. The answer is that in the midst of this turmoil, the posture we are to assume is one of waiting. At this point, hope is not related so much to the future, as it is to the present. For waiting is what we do in the present. But it is not a passive waiting, something that tries our patience. Rather, we wait as people already transformed, at peace, freed from sin and safe from all distress. Our waiting, therefore, takes on a special character. We ask, what are we waiting for?

It is only by embracing the present and calling upon the resources buried deep in our hearts that we can look truly into the future and experience how evil and sin yield to peace and mercy. This future is not to be simply the happy confluence of chance events, miraculously turning out well to our advantage. Rather, this future is fully centered on a person who has gone before us into the future and beckons us finally to follow him. The coming of Jesus Christ is described in the Scriptures in highly symbolic and in the vaguest of terms, for the future must always remain the unknown, even though the early Church insists that this is one of the central mysteries of our faith. “Come, Lord Jesus” is the final call of history into the future because this coming of our Savior is the final answer to all our inquiries and uncertainties and hopes and aspirations. At long last we find that the future can indeed be the basis of our hope, a future that is given to us as pure gift and not of our conniving, a future beyond all our imaginings, a future that was always at work on us even when we failed to recognize it, beckoning us into an eternity with God who is at the same time the origin of all that is.

 —Walter Modrys SJ