Deacon Kyle Eller: As Christians, we’re meant to live in hope

Mere Catholicism 

During Advent, I preached three talks at a retreat on Christian hope in one of the parishes I serve, and I thought, as a new calendar year begins and as the church in northeastern Minnesota, under the guidance of our bishop, leans in to hope along with healing and joy, it would be fitting to share some reflections from the three talks I gave. 

God who keeps his promises 

To begin, the essential foundation for Christian hope is trust in God, something that we all have room to deepen, build, or restore. Often when we casually speak of hope, we mean something less than what Christian hope means. We mean a kind of heightened wish, with more or less reason. We might hope, for instance, that the new year will be better than the last or that the upcoming season for our favorite team will be successful or that we’ll get a raise or promotion. 

But Christian hope means something more. An analogy: Imagine you’re a young student with a doting, wealthy uncle, and he promises you that if you work hard and stay out of trouble, he’ll have a good job waiting for you when you graduate school.  

That’s a deeper hope than wishing for a happy new year or a winning season, built on something more solid and certain: that promise from someone with the means and the good will to make it happen. 

Importantly, it’s a hope that changes the way you live. Yes, you might strive to meet those conditions your uncle set, but in a more positive way, just the security of knowing you have a job lined up, something to fall back on, might inspire you to reach for a dream. You might start to look toward marriage earlier than you would have otherwise. You might just live with less anxiety. 

Christian hope is a little like that, except the one making the promises is God, who is infinitely more reliable than the best of uncles. He doesn’t ever lie or let us down. He is all powerful and loves us with a perfect love. There are no “unforeseen circumstances” for him. His promises are certain. We can confidently order our lives around them. 

But it can be difficult to believe that. We experience a broken world, where people (including ourselves) let us down every day. We’ve learned not to be too trusting or to get our hopes too high. That’s why it’s so important to deepen our trust in God. 

God, of course, does not promise us a good job or fortune or fame or a life free of suffering and full of pleasure. He promises much more than those things. He promises fullness of joy and life for all eternity in heaven for those who remain in his covenant. He promises to redeem us and forgive our sins and heal us. He promises not to abandon us. He promises to be with us in our suffering. He promises he will take care of us so long as we “seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness.” He promises peace beyond what the world gives. 

Hope in suffering 

But what about suffering? The suffering we experience is often the greatest challenge to hope. It comes in almost infinite varieties: griefs, traumas, chronic pain, loneliness, addiction, mental illness, wars, and natural disasters. 

Bishop Daniel Felton, in his pastoral letter last Christmas, described some of the areas of darkness we have experienced locally in recent years: the COVID pandemic, the diocesan bankruptcy, cultural upheaval, and so much more. 

His teaching points us to the source of our hope, which is the Paschal Mystery — the suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. And I think we all know this at some level. We know we can “offer up” our suffering and unite it to the cross of Jesus. We know that our eternal hopes — our salvation and redemption — derive from it. We know that Jesus himself tells us we must pick up our crosses daily to follow him.  

But what’s clearer to me after considering his teaching on this is how the Paschal Mystery functions as a kind of template for our daily crosses, too. God took suffering and death and apparent defeat and turned it into joy and life and the greatest of victories. For us too, even in the midst of our trials, as Christians we train our eyes on the truth that defeat and suffering and doubt and grief and even death don’t have the last word, that beyond them is goodness that far exceeds them. 

Through the Paschal Mystery, we can train ourselves in hope to reframe our experience of the trials of this life. In the midst of them, without denying the reality of suffering, we can lift our eyes up to the horizon and see those “dawning moments” the bishop writes about for our diocese, waiting patiently for the good we know God will bring, in his own way, and in his own time.  

And as he is teaching in the midst of the Eucharistic Revival taking place in the church in the United States, we can have the most profound and personal experience of the Paschal Mystery right there in the Eucharist, and especially in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, every day. At every Mass, Jesus crucified, died, and risen, and all the graces flowing from that mystery, intersect with our lives. We can and should bring our own joys and sorrows, our good deeds, our sufferings, and unite them with the Paschal Mystery in the liturgy. 

This is part of what we mean when we say the Eucharist is the “source and summit of the Christian life.” It’s where we are given the grace and strength to live as disciples and where we bring our daily lives to the Lord, joining it to the sacrifice, and in so doing cooperate in sanctifying the world. 

Growing in the virtue of hope 

An overlooked truth of hope is that it’s what we call a “theological virtue.” This means, on the one hand, that it’s a divine gift and not something we can inherently do for ourselves. When we are baptized, God gives us the capacity to live Christian hope. 

On the other hand, a virtue is something we can grow in, a good habit we can build up until it becomes a stable disposition for us. Akin to the other virtues, like prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, hope is something we can actively work on. 

Take temperance, that virtue of governing and moderating our desires and passions wisely. How do I grow in temperance? By individual acts of temperance. If I struggle with gluttony, and I know I shouldn’t have that doughnut, I can leave it on the plate. If I struggle with anger, I can deliberately choose to hold my tongue instead of offering a biting remark. The more I do that, the more practiced I become at it, the easier it becomes, the more habitual it becomes. 

The same thing is true for hope. We can grow in hope by deliberately choosing acts of hope. When we’re afraid or anxious or aimless, we can choose to place our confidence in the promises of God, in whom we can place all our trust. When we’re in the midst of a trial, we can remember the Paschal Mystery and lift up our eyes knowing that there is resurrection and life and joy ahead. 

This can and ought to be very simple. One of my favorite ways to make an act of hope is just to pause and say that short prayer from the Divine Mercy Chaplet, “Jesus, I trust in you!” 

As we grow in hope, we will begin to order our lives around God’s promises. We will begin to live differently. We will have more peace and joy. And God will bring great fruit from it. 

Deacon Kyle Eller is editor of The Northern Cross. Reach him at [email protected].