Good Hope

• 4 years ago

By DONALD DeMARCO

Hope is prolific and perpetual. We hope our team wins, that there’s a good movie on TV tonight, that we get a good night’s sleep, and that tomorrow will bring a better day. Such hopes are easily and routinely made. However, they do not rise to the level of virtue. Hope becomes a virtue when things begin to appear hopeless, when, in the words of an old soap opera, our hopes “are dashed against the rocks of despair.”

We observe the number of deaths mounting on a daily basis during the COVID-19 pandemic. And our hope for a return to normalcy seems unrealistic. Can hope remain hope when it is opposed by seemingly unrelenting forces? Can hope be extinguished by disappointment? Good hope, hope that is a virtue, persists in an atmosphere of difficulty.

As G.K. Chesterton has explained, “As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indisputable.”

We can find no better personal witness to hope than St. John Paul II. George Weigel titled his definitive biography of the late Pontiff, Witness to Hope. John Paul emerged from the battlegrounds of atheistic Communism and fascism without losing an iota of hope. As the leader of the Church, he observed abuses on nearly every front. Nonetheless, as people soon recognized in his pontificate, his Holiness the Pope was also “His Polishness the Hope.”

It was fitting, then, that Weigel would title his personal interactions with the Holy Father, Lessons in Hope. Recognizing difficulties is part of Christian realism. It belongs to the Christian to be clear-headed and open-minded. At the same time, abandoning hope is contrary to Christian belief. John Paul was a witness to hope because he accepted the tension between the problems that surrounded him and the hope that never left his heart. As Weigel states, at the close of his personal profile of the Pope, “To know both these things and to try to live responsibly in the tension between them is to have learned something important from Karol Wojtyla, Pope St. John Paul.”

Weigel wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal in which he coined the phrase, “tyranny of the possible.” By that somewhat cryptic phrase, he was alluding to his observation that Pope John Paul II could see possibilities where others saw only fixed and unchangeable realities. Hope, therefore, sees solutions that others overlook. As long as hope is alive, the possible can become the realizable.

We need to retain our hope because it gives us the strength to go on and find solutions to our various problems. Loss of hope installs a person in Hell, a dwelling place where hope is no longer a possibility. According to the great American novelist, Herman Melville, “Hope proves man deathless. It is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable and attesting her eternity.”

One of the stormiest, if not the stormiest, cape in the world is where the powerful currents of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans converge. When Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias discovered this cape in 1488, he called it, appropriately, the “Cape of Storms.” Later, King John II of Portugal renamed it “Cape of Good Hope” in anticipation of finding a sea route to India.

In this chronicle, history and symbolism converge. The hope of finding a sea route to India was eventually fulfilled only because hope had been kept alive. This is the historical fact. But added to this fact is the symbolism of hope being “good hope” because it is born in an atmosphere of difficulty. The stormy cape provided the crucible in which hope was tested and purified so that it could emerge as a virtue, one of “good hope.”

“Hope never spread her golden wings,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “but in unfathomable seas.”

Good hope is not merely a wish. It is intensely realistic. It is strengthened and sustained through prayer. Furthermore, it has the attendant qualities of realism, courage, patience, and perseverance. It is the virtue we need the most when it is most needed, an endless hope, we might say, so that our life does not terminate in a hopeless end. It is the conjunction between the natural and the supernatural.

Good hope is real, practical, and accessible. We need only to make the right effort and hope will enrich our lives and guide us in the proper direction. However, we must forgo the vain hope that technology, politics, or mere good fortune can serve as replacements for good hope. We exist within the realm of God’s Will, His Love, and His Providential Care. We become people of good hope only when we dispose ourselves to receiving that larger hope God had in mind when He created us.

“Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word” (2 Thess. 2:16).

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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College & Seminary. He is a regular columnist for the St. Austin Review. His latest three books are How to Navigate Through Life and Apostles of the Culture of Life [posted on amazon.com], and the soon to be published, A Moral Compass for a World in Confusion.)