Order of Malta Evening of Recollection
Jubilee of Hope
Cathedral of Mary Our Queen
March 18, 2025
High Hopes
Those of you my age might remember Frank Sinatra’s hit song, “High Hopes”. Since I don’t want to plunge you into despair, I won’t sing it for you . . .but perhaps you won’t mind if I recall the intro, first verse, and the refrain:
Next time you’re found
With your chin on the ground
There’s a lot to be learned
So look around.
Just what makes that little old ant
Think he’ll move that rubber tree plant
Anyone know an ant can’t
Move a rubber tree plant.
But he’s got high hopes,
He’s got high hopes
He’s got high apple pie in the sky hopes . . .
A subsequent verse is about a ram determined punch a hole in a dam and the song concludes advising that all problems eventually go kerplop!
In retrospect, this old song from 1960 may seem silly, and may even make you want to sell off your Sinatra LP’s … but stay with me! This song captures something important about human nature: unless it is drummed out of us, we human beings have “high hopes”. This is something Pope Francis highlights in this Jubilee Year dedicated to hope: I quote: “Everyone knows what it is to hope. In the heart of each person, hope dwells as the desire and expectation of good things to come, despite our not knowing what the future may bring” (SNC 1).
If we look back over our lives, we can remember having had “high hopes”. As children, we hoped for certain toys at Christmas but much more than that. We hoped to have friends and to be liked by our classmates, even to be popular. Growing up, we aspired to make the cut for sports teams, to make the dean’s list, and more than that, to be respected by our elders. We probably would not have said so, but we wanted to be loved by others. Emerging into adulthood, we set our sights on a college education, on graduate school, on a career, on starting a family, and on climbing the ladder of success, whatever our chosen field might be. Just to be clear, I’m not excluding myself from most of this (except for starting a family!).
Often, we express our high hopes by our striving – by doing what it takes to get ahead. It helps to be an optimist, to have a sunny outlook on life, just as pessimism hurts us as does wildly unrealistic optimism. It’s good to dream, for dreamers are creative. It’s not so good to be a day-dreamer who never gets down to business, and it is worse to be a “Gloomy Gus”. Underneath all the striving, the effort, the anguish we are constantly looking for something more than human respect and material success can of themselves give us: We are in fact hoping to be loved and to love others in return. Love is the oxygen of human life and we are all hoping to breathe.
Natural and Supernatural Hope
Of course, there is a distinction to be made between natural hope and supernatural hope. Not to put too fine a point on it, natural hope is confined to the present world whereas supernatural hope opens us up to eternal friendship with God. As Pope Francis said, “We are dust but dust that aspires to heaven.”
How are the two related – natural and supernatural hope? How is the daily striving for success related to our heavenly aspirations? A pessimistic assessment of our humanity would say that one is necessarily opposed to the other. Either we are striving for earthly success or for heaven, but not for both. And, let’s be clear: earthly optimism is not theological hope. Earthly optimism sometimes disappoints – just look at the stock market! Whereas our hope in Christ Jesus does not disappoint, as St. Paul proclaims. Yet the two hopes, earthly and heavenly, are related. Earthly striving can point to our heavenly aspirations because we are never done trying, never done striving. Nothing fully satisfies. This is a sign that we are made for something or Someone beyond the limited, tangible world we live in.
The trick is to ensure that our earthly hopes and heavenly hopes are cousins, indeed “kissing cousins”. To put it more politely, our religion and the rest of life need to be related. We shouldn’t compartmentalize earthly hopes and heavenly hopes. We need to resist the temptation to seal off our professional life and personal life and their aspirations from our religious life and its aspirations. Rather, our earthly striving has to be infused with heavenly striving. Everything about us has to be oriented towards heaven: our deeply personal life, our vocation, our relationships, our professional life. There’s no neutral territory here: either our deepest thoughts and feelings, our marriages and priesthood, our friendships and relationships, and the work we do day in and day out – either these are pointing us beyond ourselves or they else are self-referential. And when we exist for ourselves and not for God and others, then it is that we lose hope.
If we should avoid compartmentalizing earthly and heavenly hope, neither should we confuse them, as can often happen. The so-called “gospel of prosperity” does exactly that. It teaches that believing in the Bible & charitable giving increases one’s wealth and that material wealth and success are evidence of God’s grace and favor. Some versions of the prosperity gospel make the covenant seem like a business deal: if we uphold our end of the bargain, God will bless us with abundance. Doesn’t sound the Gospel of the Son of Man who emptied himself of glory and had nowhere to lay his head! In fact, Pope Francis teaches us that the poor often teach us how to hope, those who have few earthly goods but keep their eyes fixed on God’s love.
Above all, let’s be clear about the object of our hope. “Hope,” Pope Francis wrote, “is born of love and is based on the love springing from the pierced heart of Jesus on the Cross: ‘For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life (Rom 5:19)’”. In a word, we recognize that despite our limitations and our sins, God, in his love for us, went to the greatest lengths to save us – and so we should place all of our trust, all of our hope in the God who loves us so. Over the years I have met people who have lost hope in God, sometimes because of scandal, sometimes because they were in desperate situations, but often because do not really believe God loves them. They may think God is real but they don’t think God cares about them. They may imagine that the very love they are longing for is but a dream. Hope is a fragile virtue; it needs to be cared for, tended, nourished.
What Undermines Hope
Hope has indeed been described by the poet Charles Péguy as “the little virtue” placed between the stout virtues of charity and faith. As such, it can easily be undermined. During Lent, we do well to examine our consciences with regard to hope. What are ways that we undermine hope in our lives? What are ways we can nurture hope?
Earlier, I said that hope is undermined when we live only for ourselves, and not for God and not for others. We may think we’re doing ourselves a favor, living in that way; we may think that, if we’re not bothered by others and their problems, and if God doesn’t intrude too much . . . then we will live a happy, contented, care-free life – but it is not so. Living only for ourselves is like living in a house in which the four walls and the ceiling close in on us. Our focus, our horizon, becomes narrower and narrower. We suffocate spiritually.
Another enemy of hope is anxiety. St. Paul in his letter to the Philippians (4:6-9) writes: “Have no anxiety at all…” He’s not writing this from a resort on the Aegean Sea! No, he wrote those words while he was in Rome, in prison, awaiting trial. And he is writing to a church likely to face brutal persecution. Yet from his pen flows the words, “Have no anxiety at all…” Perhaps you are familiar with the book, “The Anxious Generation” that describes the causes and consequences of the mental health crisis that afflicts so many young people in Western cultures. For the author, sociologist, Jonathan Haidt, the culprit is the I-phone and surely lives lived mostly on the small screen are anxious lives – lives susceptible to falsehoods, half-truths, damaging messages, bullying. But perhaps there are deeper reasons for so much anxiety, among them loss of religious faith, loss of a sense of purpose and meaning, the need to invent oneself, including one’s sexual identity, and, of course, loss of any sense of God’s personal love. But let’s also be clear: Those of us weaned on Selectric typewriters are not immune from anxiety. As we grow older and look at the expanse of our lives, we see what we have done and failed to do – and can feel anxious. We are anxious about the inevitable decline in our health. Anxiety robs us of peace, it makes the future seem bleak, and makes it difficult for us to trust in God and in his promises. During the Communion Rite at Mass, we pray to be delivered “from all distress”, and that surely does include the anxiety that is so much a part of life.
Another enemy of hope is the negativity of our culture. Think of all the negative messages on cable television and social media. They peddle false and divisive ideologies that undermine our hope in the future and undermine human solidarity in the present.
Allied to anxiety and negativity is loneliness. When we feel we don’t have a friend in the world – and many young people today report that they are not only single but friendless, then the dark clouds of despair come rolling in. It’s important to have good friends with whom to pray, repent, laugh, eat, serve the poor, and good friends on whose shoulders we can cry.
Let’s not forget the role of the devil; he wants nothing more than to undermine our hope in the Lord. This is especially true when we give into temptation. Sometimes he turns the guilt we rightly feel against us – telling us that we are hopeless creatures, that we will never change, that God is disgusted with us, and doesn’t want to hear from us anymore. Let’s shut that down just the way Jesus shut down the devil in the desert.
What Nurtures Hope
Let me make a few suggestions for nurturing hope in your life and mine. First is prayer, daily prayer, prayer from the heart, those sacred moments when we are alone with God and talk things over with the God who made us and redeemed us. I can tell you this from experience. When problems mount up, when I feel overwhelmed, I intensify my prayer life. In times of crisis, the psalms I read every day in the Liturgy of the Hours pop – they speak to me with the voice of God – they challenge, they console, they engage. When it seems no one is listening, I know that God will listen. When it becomes difficult to rest, I try to follow the example of the saints who found their rest, their peace, in the Lord. Prayer strengthens our relationship with God and therefore it expands our capacity to hope in what God promised, our capacity to say with St. Paul, “I know in whom I have trusted” (2 Tim 1:12).
Second, as noted earlier, hope is nurtured by our daily decisions. As Pope Francis has written, “St. Paul’s invitation to rejoice in hope calls for concrete choices in our daily lives.” Whether or not we’re hopeful has a lot to do with what we do with our time, our money, our energy, where we place our priorities, whom we see, with whom we associate. If it is only when our particular “set”, we stifle ourselves. If it is with others whose experiences are different from our own, we may be challenged, we may disagree, but at least our life isn’t a closed book.
Third is fasting and generosity to those in need. Somewhere Pope Francis says that a full stomach militates against hope. By that he means our being self-satisfied in our relative comfort. But when we not only pray but fast and give of our means to the poor, somehow the horizon of love expands, our prayers reach heaven, our lives become like a stairway, not to the stars, but to heaven itself.
Finally, hope is nurtured in us when we encourage others. Have you ever tutored a student or given a poor child a coat, or ministered to the sick, and received a beautiful smile in return? That happened to me in Ukraine when I was distributing coats to orphans. I gave a young girl who lost both her parents a warm coat – her face lit up with a most beautiful smile and she hugged me. That night, as I was saying my prayers, I thought of her. If she has hope, I asked the Lord, why isn’t my hope more ardent? Sometimes we don’t have a coat or a lesson to give, but we can always give a word of encouragement to others, especially those who are struggling in some significant way.
Exemplar of Hope
Let us end this mediation by turning to the Blessed Virgin Mary. At the Annunciation, Mary learned that Elizabeth her cousin was with child. Knowing that Elizabeth was in her advancing years, Mary went to visit her. At the door of her house, Elizabeth said to Mary: “Blessed are you who trusted that God’s Word would be fulfilled.” Mary staked her whole life on the truth of God’s promises. Let us ask Mary, Our Lady of Hope, to intercede for us that we too may stake the whole of our lives on that “hope that does disappoint because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rom 5:5).
My Lenten wish for you is this: may you have the “highest of hopes!”