Building hope today

IN the rush of our technology-driven life today, we should not forget to develop a basic virtue that gives us the bigger picture of life—the ultimate dimensions and parameters of our life, our goals and the means, energy and impulses to be used.

This is none other than hope, a virtue that I’m sure we have heard many times before but tend to ignore, since it is often regarded as too abstract and academic, not immediately relevant if not completely useless and impractical.

Yet, hope in one form or another is actually what we try to cultivate in life. It’s unavoidable, given the nature of things. We dream, we set goals and standards for our different projects, we aspire and pursue our ambitions and we do a million other things, all of which require hope.

Our present condition that involves an increase of pressure, confusing knowledge overdrives, increasingly sophisticated challenges and difficulties, require that we need to seriously cultivate this virtue. There’s no other way. It’s either that or we get into a free-fall toward disorder, chaos and desperation.

Our problem is that, as usual, we have a very limited idea of hope. And from that handicapped position, it’s obvious that all sorts of dangers, confusion and errors can ensue.

Among the anomalies besetting our understanding of hope is that it is a purely man-made virtue, with only earthly and natural dimensions and relying solely on human and material resources.

We seem to get stranded in the external properties of the virtue, without entering into its real essence, significance and practicability. We need to recover the true nature and purpose of hope, and spread its knowledge and skill far and wide. That’s what we urgently need these days.

First, we need to understand that hope is a gift from God, one of what are called theological virtues. As such, it goes always in this life with the other pair of faith and charity.

The direct corollary of this reality is that the first thing we have to do about it is to ask for it, often kneeling and begging God our Father not only to grant it to us, which he actually does unstintingly, but also to increase it all the time.

We should never be casual about this fundamental and indispensable requirement of hope. Though we have to be discreet about it and natural in living it, we have to understand that without this condition met, no amount of human ingenuity can substitute it.

We really need to pray, which actually sheds a lot of light in terms of the practical and concrete details of this virtue. We have to shoot down whatever bias we have that prevents us from doing this spiritual duty.

In this regard, we may have to do a major if painful effort, given the hardened prejudice many people have against religious exercises.

Of course, hope increases also to the extent that we deepen our faith and enrich our charity. In this life, these three theological virtues go together and mutually affect one another.

The more faith, the more hope. The more charity, the more hope, too. And vice-versa. The dynamics of this spiritual and supernatural reality largely escapes our rational understanding, much like the chicken-and-egg dilemma. But that’s how the relationship among these three virtues can be described.

And so we just have to intensify our faith in terms of knowledge and of the will to believe, as well as our charity, that language of the heart that enables us to supersede the requirements of reason and other merely human estimation.

St. Paul tells us that this theological supernatural hope is very different from just human hope in the sense that the latter involves aspiring at something that is not yet realized and many times fail to be realized, while the former will never defraud us.

This is how he reasons out: “Hope does not disappoint, because the charity of God is poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Rom 5,5,)

It is the Holy Spirit who is already given to us that assures us beyond doubt that we are going to receive, if we continue to hope, what Christ has promised us. We may not yet receive these promises now, but we are already assured of them by the Holy Spirit no less.

It’s good that we immerse ourselves in this truth so that we can be ready when all sorts of earthly trials assail us. With strong faith, we can even exploit these trials to let our hope grow even more.