Hope and its enemies

As a new year begins, it’s natural to look to the future with a sense of hope. But for Catholics, the Holy Year 2025 presents a unique opportunity to explore and cultivate hope — and to examine what makes it so difficult to hold onto.

Most of us know that hope is not wishful thinking or optimism. It does not lead us into delusion, or comfort us with false promises or guarantees. But we still find it easier to articulate what hope is not than to define what hope is. That is largely because we cannot acquire the virtue of hope on our own power or become more excellently hopeful as we practice it over time. The virtue of hope is what we call a “theological virtue,” an infusion of pure grace.

But hope must have an object; that is, we must hope for something we do not yet possess. For hope to be genuine, it must be directed toward attaining what is good. But for hope to be Christian, it must be oriented toward the source of all goodness — God.

That is why hope draws us upward. It elevates and intensifies our desires, until the goods we once hoped for no longer attract us; until what we want most is nothing less than God Himself. Today, that kind of hope appears to be in short supply.

Its enemies, on the other hand, are not. The Catechism identifies two principal sins (yes, sins!) against hope: despair and presumption. The fact that we can find these easily and everywhere betrays the deep and pervasive hopelessness that marks our current culture.

From the perspective of Christian virtue, despair is much more than mere negativity. Despair convinces us that we should expect nothing from God — neither assistance nor forgiveness. Despair, then, is an indictment against God, a charge against his goodness, his justice and his mercy. Those who despair lose hope for their own salvation. Increasingly convinced that their choices have no real effect, souls caught in despair tend toward idleness and sloth. They fail to persevere.

Many sincere believers struggle with despair. And when they do, they may hedge their bets by placing their hope in things like politics, money and even luck. That approach to life will always leave us disappointed and bereft. God alone is worthy of our trust; he is the sole source of genuine hope. And yet, the world we live in tells us that it is wise not to place all our eggs in one basket.

If despair is a deficit of hope, presumption is its excess. Presumption, however, takes two distinct forms. Some presume to achieve salvation without God’s assistance. These souls hope in the sufficiency of their own personal capacities. Relying on their strength and resources, they resist commending themselves to God’s grace. They are diligent in their pursuit of virtue but derelict in how they pursue it. They forget that we cannot save ourselves.

Others presume on God and take him for granted. Operating from a sense of entitlement, presumptuous souls demand God’s mercy without repentance. They expect to attain heaven without doing anything at all to merit it. As The Baltimore Catechism explains, “Presumption is a rash expectation of salvation without making proper use of the necessary means to obtain it” (The Baltimore Catechism, 1891, Question 1183). Chief among these “necessary means” are prayer and the sacraments.

When we fall to the enemies of hope, the consequences are dire. Those who lose hope are left unmoored in the tides that swell around them and within them. Without hope, there is nothing to anchor our choices. In the absence of hope, there is no wind to fill our sails, no fuel to move us forward.

But God knows what to do when our hope wanes. Divine power completely upended the most hopeless circumstance in human history: the agonizing death of Christ on the cross. The Resurrection is the ultimate validation of the choice to place all our hope in God. It is proof that he keeps his promises. But sometimes, it’s good to know that this same God has placed a longing for eternal happiness in every heart. He does this not to leave us disappointed, but to inspire every one of us to seek — and find — our ultimate fulfillment in Him.

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