I want to talk about hope. But I begin with a caution, because in the United States talk about hope and about a hopeful life can often open the door to unreality. My view here will be down-to-earth, a view formed by many years of dealing with the realities of daily life. And the first good lesson you learn in facing reality in a hopeful way concerns the past.
Put simply, there is no hope for a better past. The past is empty of hope, just as it is empty of life. I think of discussions with people trying to make sense of a tough life. And frequently they will start by looking backward. “If I had not done that …” or “if only this could have had happened …” Well, these are pointless discussions. Just as there is no hope for a better past, there is no possibility of a different past. The past is gone. It is over.
Unfortunately, the past has powerful allies in some of our psychological theories. I think back to my years of training as a counselor. The theories we learned talked about the ways childhood experiences and family histories could set the stage for adult lives and attitudes. That past was presented in these theories as really controlling adult choices. Well, I don’t buy it.
Everyone has a past. That past was. It is not now, unless, of course, you choose to bring it along with you. At which point it’s not a past. It is your present because you want it with you now.
And that’s where hope comes in. Hope is about the future. I look at hope in two ways, but each one is future-oriented. There is the hope of common sense, of human courage, that looks to the future and says, “Whatever happens, I can handle it. I’ve got a future.”
And there is the hope of the Gospels, the hope of faith, the hope of charity, that says, “Whatever happens, God will be with me, with us. We will not be alone.”
I suspect that we all know people who sadly do not face the future with hope. They seem to look at life saying, “I’m stuck. I’m stuck here, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Well, the Gospels teach us that we’re not stuck. The Gospels are about life now, and in the present we have choices to make, all the time.
The past is not like that. The past is gone. It is dead. Unless, of course, we decide to keep it alive. And, as we see too often, it is possible to spend time in memory’s garden, tools in hand, puttering around over and again in the garden of dead flowers. That is so futile because there is no hope for a different or better past. It is gone. Hope lives in the present and looks to the future.
I am puzzled at how so many of our public discussions of our future seem to sidestep reality. They can be little more than fantasies, touching on make-believe. But for a Christian, the future is not about make-believe. It is about how we will live our lives in the real world we choose to shape.
How do we separate fantasies from a hopeful future? I think we all know the answer to that question because we live with it all the time. We do it by taking charge of our lives. We make an act of trust in our ability and courage to keep going.
Trust in ourselves, like hope, is future-oriented. It is a gift we give to ourselves when we can choose to be masters in our own lives. And we do it believing that God will be with us as we move ahead. That is hope at work in us.
— Father David O’Rourke, OP
