As Catholic Christians, we often speak of hope very casually. It is only when we feel the roaring fire of hope or the sinking pit of hopelessness that we realize just how vital hope is for our lives.
When I was a child being raised as a Catholic, I remember hearing the word “hope” a lot. We would say we hoped for this or that, whether it was about a primarily spiritual matter or not. Even if this was sometimes superficial, I remember how much hope I had when I was a child and how much it consoled me.
As I got older, my youthful consolation faded away as the shadow of hopelessness began to be cast over my life. When I was in middle school, my faith was shaken, and I became a self-identified atheist. My parents still made me go to church, but the parts of the faith that had once filled me with hope now seemed like lies people told themselves to cope with a meaningless world. It is astonishing how much hope our faith provides us even when we do not recognize it or actively rebel against it. We have hope that God loves us, we have hope our sins will be forgiven, and we have hope in life everlasting.
I can honestly say the years as an atheist felt hopeless. I was always wracked by fear and worry about mortality, the lack of everlasting life, and although I was not aware of it fully at the time, a lack of a relationship with the God who loved me.
It was during my hopelessness that I sought hope in the fleeting and the earthly. My hope was not in God’s love or the transcendental but rather in the materialistic collection of collectibles I had or the good grades I tried to achieve at school. However, these seeming sources of hope would quickly become exhausted. A good grade would be replaced by a bad grade and the collectible I hoped would make me happy would sit collecting dust. It was at these times that hopelessness began to fester into a deep chasm of despair in my life.
After I returned to the Catholic Church in early college through a miraculous experience with the Rosary, I quickly found the bright beam of that divine and inexhaustible hope burning into even the darkest chambers of my life. Through my reinvigorated life in prayer, hopeful faith became a lifeboat on even the most tumultuous of seas. Life even today as a seminarian still has its stormy patches, but there’s always the burning lighthouse of hope guiding me home.
As I said at the beginning, we often use the word hope very casually or fail to realize how much hope our faith provides. We know that we can hope inexhaustibly in a God who loves us and desires a relationship with us, we can hope in divine justice and life everlasting, and we can hope in the Church guided by God.
Hopelessness is a dangerous temptation in the modern world, and while not always grand, hope is that still small voice of God which calls us to seek comfort and refuge in Him.
Maximilian Waldron, Seminarian, Diocese of Birmingham