Hope is a Gift and Duty for Every Christian
Introduction to a book on Hope
A new official publication for the Jubilee Year 2025 came out on October 1, “A Light in the Night – Meditations on Hope”, a short anthology which collects excerpts from various speeches by the Pope on the theological virtue of hope.
Here is the introduction to his new book, written by Pope Francis, a true “Ode to Joy”:” The Jubilee of 2025, a holy year that I wanted to dedicate to the theme “Pilgrims of Hope”, is a propitious occasion to reflect on this fundamental and decisive Christian virtue – especially in times like the ones we are living, in which the third world war being fought “piecemeal” that is unfolding before our eyes can lead us to assume attitudes of gloomy discouragement and ill-concealed cynicism.
Hope, on the other hand, is a gift and a task for every Christian. It is a gift because it is God who offers it to us. Hoping, in fact, is not a mere act of optimism, like when we sometimes hope to pass an exam at university (“Let’s hope we make it”) or when we hope for good weather for the trip out of town on a Sunday in the spring (“Let’s hope for good weather”).
No, hoping is waiting for something that has already been given to us: salvation in God’s eternal and infinite love. That love, that salvation that gives flavour to our lives and that constitutes the hinge on which the world remains standing, despite all the wickedness and nefariousness caused by our sins as men and women. To hope, then, is to welcome this gift that God offers us every day. To hope is to savour the wonder of being loved, sought, desired by a God who has not shut Himself away in His impenetrable heavens but has made Himself flesh and blood, history and days, to share our lot.
Hope is also a task that Christians have a duty to cultivate and put to good use for the sake of all their brothers and sisters. The task is to remain faithful to the gift received, as rightly pointed out by Madeleine Delbrêl, a 20th-century French woman who was able to bring the Gospel to the geographical and existential peripheries of mid-century Paris, marked by de-Christianisation.
Madeleine Delbrêl wrote: “The place that Christian hope assigns us is that narrow ridge, that borderline at which our vocation requires that we choose, every day and every hour, to be faithful to God’s faithfulness to us”. God is faithful to us; our task is to respond to this faithfulness. But take care: it is not we who generate this faithfulness; it is a gift from God that works in us if we allow ourselves to be moulded by His power of love, the Holy Spirit Who acts as a breath of inspiration in our hearts. It is up to us, then, to invoke this gift: “Lord, grant me to be faithful to you in hope!”
I said that hoping is a gift from God and a task for Christians. And to live hope requires a “mysticism with open eyes”, as the great theologian Johann-Baptist Metz called it: knowing how to discern, everywhere, evidence of hope, the breaking through of the possible into the impossible, of grace where it would seem that sin has eroded all trust.
Some time ago I had the opportunity to dialogue with two exceptional witnesses of hope, two fathers: one Israeli, Rami; one Palestinian, Bassam. Both lost daughters in the conflict that has bloodied the Holy Land for too many decades now. But nonetheless, in the name of their pain, the suffering they felt at the death of their two little daughters – Smadar and Abir – they have become friends, indeed brothers: they live forgiveness and reconciliation as a concrete, prophetic and authentic gesture. Meeting them gave me so much, so much hope.
Their friendship and brotherhood taught me it is possible that hatred, concretely, may not have the last word. The reconciliation they experience as individuals, a prophecy of a larger and broader reconciliation, is an invincible sign of hope. And hope opens us to unimaginable horizons.
I invite every reader of this text to make a simple but concrete gesture: in the evening, before going to bed, as you’re thinking over the events you have lived through and the encounters you have had, go in search of a sign of hope in the day just gone by. A smile from someone you didn’t expect, an act of gratuitousness observed at school, a kind act encountered in the workplace, a gesture of help, even a small one: hope is indeed a “childlike virtue”, as Charles Péguy wrote.
And we need to go back to being like children, with their sense of wonder, to encounter the world, to know it, and to appreciate it. Let us train ourselves to recognise hope. We will then be able to marvel at how much good exists in the world. And our hearts will light up with hope. We will then be able to be beacons of the future for those around us.”
Images
- Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash