Monday, February 22, 2021

Choose Hope


 This week's reflection comes to us from Professor Carol Cross. Carol is an Adjunct Professor of Chemistry at Mount Mercy University.

As we head into Lent this year the thought came to me that it has never felt like Lent of 2020 ended. The past year, due to the pandemic and derecho, has been a year filled with sacrifices and struggles – almost as if Lenten practices were handed to us one after the other. Lent is good, and good for us, but Lent is tied intimately and necessarily to Easter. Easter is a time of feasting and celebration, a time of hope and happiness. Easter did come in 2020 yet found us dealing with the overwhelming struggle of the pandemic. For me, celebrating Easter was difficult while facing our strange new world.

During Lent of 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, my daughter and I did what a lot of people did and cut out dozens of paper hearts to put up on a front window. This started as a game, “heart hunting,” for people who were out on walks. These hearts were intended to be a sign of solidarity with our neighbors, with essential workers, with doctors and nurses, with anyone who was struggling through the pandemic. To our hearts we added the words, “keep HOPE in your heart.”  Eleven months later, the hearts and words on my daughter’s bedroom window are very faded and a bit tattered, but still up. We decided we won’t take them down until there are no Covid related deaths in Iowa for at least one week.

Along with teaching at Mount Mercy, I am the primary caregiver of my youngest daughter who has significant physical disabilities.  My day fully kicks in with a call from her that she is awake. The first thing I do when entering her room is open the curtains to the big window in her room – the window that has hearts taped all over and big letters spelling out the message, “keep HOPE in your heart.” Initially, as I mentioned above, this message was for anyone walking or driving by our house. But after a few months, I knew that our neighbors, the mailman, and anyone passing by probably didn’t even notice the window anymore. After a few months, I started to get a bit irritated with the need to look around all the hearts to see out the window.

But then, at some point, when I opened the curtains one morning it occurred to me how much I needed this message – how much I needed to be reminded to keep hope in my own heart. As the pandemic grew worse, as the derecho devastated our city, and as protests, hatred, and division dominated the news in our country, I struggled to continue hoping that things would get better.

Reflecting on my struggle helped me better understand the two different types of hope – natural hope and divine hope. Natural hope isn’t some vague sense of optimism or a feeling that we create but is a disposition of our will by which we desire a difficult, possible good. Natural hope has an end in sight – an object that is good and valuable that we confidently look forward to and seek to attain. When I say I am hopeful that the end of the pandemic will come, I am saying this based on my rational evaluation of the reality of the situation – we now have good vaccines and they are becoming more readily available, we know what we need to do to keep each other safe (masks, hand washing, social distancing, etc.) and it seems that more people are doing this, and so on.

But what if the reality of a situation doesn’t give us a rational basis for hope? Sometimes we must acknowledge that the object we wish for is unattainable and so we can’t justify our hoping. Because this can happen, we ought to be thoughtful about the object of our hope.  Surely the end of the pandemic would make us all happy! But if the pandemic stretched on for many years and the pandemic’s end was our only hope for happiness, we may fall into despair and depression.

Our faith helps and guides us as we determine what will bring us true happiness. And our faith gives us more than just things in the natural world to choose from as the object of our hope. This distinguishes  divine hope from natural hope.  When the object of our hope is to be with God, then we have not only chosen an attainable end but also the highest and greatest end. Our faith teaches us that, “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1817). So natural hope and divine hope differ not only in the object desired but also in the fact that divine hope is a gift of God’s grace.

By living lives of faith we surely have good reason to be persons of hope. When the world around us is difficult and we are struggling, we can still have hope in knowing that the object of our hope never changes or leaves us or fails in His love for us. And continuing daily to live a life of faith in a state of grace, we have good reason to hope that someday we will be with God, the source of true happiness.

And so divine hope gives us perspective, brings peace, guides our activities, and sees us through difficult times. Lent is a good time to practice divine hope. Here is a simple prayer of hope we can say each day.

Act of Hope

O my God, relying on your infinite goodness and promises, I hope to obtain pardon for my sins, the help of your grace and life everlasting, through the merits of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Redeemer. Amen.


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