Father Simone’s Word of the Week

Lately, a word that keeps coming up in my mind, in conversations and on the tip of my tongue is “HOPE.”  If we don’t want to hear hope, no one can convince us.  If we are looking for reasons that make sense and signs we can see to prove we should be hopeful, I can think our hope will come up lacking.  Human weakness, emotions, logic and undoubtedly the enemy’s tactics give more reasons to lose hope, but that’s human hope: secular hope; hope that needs to be proved; hope that doubts first.  So I say Christian hope: Hope in Christ can’t afford to be tangible.  Hope in Christ is based on Him, which is based on faith: in other words “TRUST.”  Hope can’t be defined in visible terms.  It’s relational.  I can’t describe what trusting Jesus looks like.  It just is.  If you’re not looking to trust, you’re not going to find it.  Like truth, if we won’t hear it, no one can force it.  Jesus won’t prove you can Trust Him.  That’s not trust.  When we do learn in our bones, within the conviction of our soul what trust is, we just do.  Words fail to describe it.  We can’t imagine what our life was like before we trusted and we can’t understand why others don’t.  To the extent we trust Jesus with our life, the world and foremost just ourselves, hope must be unconditional.  Our hope cannot depend on what we see or don’t see.  Hope must be unrelenting, “stubborn as an …” no matter what we hear, what’s happening, how we feel or how things look.  Hope in Christ does not fix things like magic, but empowers Him by our trust to work things out according to His design, His grace and His timing.  This kind of hope will probably annoy others who deem this hope naive.  And while we need to be there for those whose hope is wavering, we should close our ears when we are tempted to despair.  We know the areas of our life when at times we feel discouraged: in ourselves; our relationships; our parish; the Church; the world.  That is where hope must be believed most. 

“Faith, Hope and Charity.”  If we have faith, we just hope.  If we are hopeful that God will and does provide for us, we find the freedom to be generous towards others and purposefully driven in giving of ourselves.  St. Paul did say “Strive for the greatest of gifts: LOVE.”  If our love was based on His Love, we would be patient.  We would be kind.  We wouldn’t be jealous, pompous or rude.  We wouldn’t be worried about our own interests.  We wouldn’t be quick-tempered.  We wouldn’t brood over injury or rejoice over wrongdoing.  His love in us would bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things.  Hence in His love, hope never fails.