DARK, BUT ?

Three candles: the light is growing, however slowly, however modestly, however vulnerable to the winds of change and the rain of disappointment. Which might make us reflect on the curious virtue of hope.

In common parlance it refers to the thought of something that may occur and that would please us if it did. I hope it’ll be sunny tomorrow for the school picnic. Such hope is natural, but it’s hard to think of it as a virtue. Hope as a virtue is something much tougher, more like the weed that grows through the almost invisible crack in the tarmac of a parking-lot. It is that in us which allows us – urges us, compels us – not to give up. To fall down, to get up and to go at it again. To fall down again, to get up again, to go on again.

So if we apply this to the three candles, the trinity of theological virtues – Faith, Hope, and Charity – we see that Hope is a central religious virtue. Not (just) in the sense that we “hope for the Second Coming”, but in the sense that the falling down, the getting up and the going on apply a fortiori to our relation with God. We should like to be better at it than we are. We aren’t happy with the way we live it from day to day. And so?

Hope is not a wish, not even a confident wish: it’s a determination, and a rueful recognition that the more we fall down, the more we will realize that if we manage nevertheless to get up and go on, it’s not our doing but that of Him Who loves us. As such, Hope is a gift from Him to us, and one that we return. Without it, we would long ago have given up; we would have given in to despair. With it, what it hopes for, the causa finalis or “ending end” as Sidney called it, is in fact being created, is happening, in and through the process itself. In the same way as a good marriage – something many of us hope will happen to us – in fact is created, happens, in and through the daily humdrumlies, falling down but getting up again and going on. So is a true friendship. So is good parenthood. And as God’s love for us has something of all those three things, if we stubbornly return it day by day, refusing to be terminally discouraged, it becomes reciprocal, and a thing of beauty. Through Hope.