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Le blog de la Bergerie                         Sharing the faith . . . in English . . . et en français!    |
Hope is both the goal and the journey. Hope is the goal in
the sense that it is the direction that we are walking to, it is the promise
that we believe in, a most amazing and beautiful promise that someone who
loves us is waiting for us and we know the face of that person, we know
his name and we have placed all our trust in his hands; and hope is, at the
very same time, the actual journey, it is the process that takes us to the goal,
it is the manner in which we walk, our ability to advance one step at a time,
exercised in proper prayer and tested in charitable action.
Wow! What a paradoxical and complex thing it is! It is both fragile and solid.
We are not comparing apples to apples here, the goal and the journey are, by
their very nature, two different things. But true and living hope is weaved
into both. I just finished Pope Benedict XVI new encyclical letter "SPE SALVI"
and I am extremely thankful for the encouragement that it brought me. I had
been struggling with understanding what "hope" really means and by peeling away
the various layers of the hope brought by salvation, his latest encyclical both
explains what it is and reveals the program that it entails. Here are a few
passages from "Spe salvi", the ones that I underlined right away:
Redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have
been given hope...
and this goal is great enough to justify the effort of the journey.
Faith is the substance of hope. A wild plot of forest
land is rendered fertile-and in the process, the trees of pride are felled,
whatever weeds may be growing inside souls are pulled up, and the ground is
thereby prepared so that bread for body and soul can flourish. 13 Are we not
perhaps seeing once again, in the light of current history, that no positive
world order can prosper where souls are overgrown? The present-day crisis of
faith is essentially a crisis of Christian hope.
Reason is God's great gift to man, and the victory of
reason over unreason is also a goal of the Christian life... every generation
has the task of engaging anew in the arduous search for the right way to order
human affairs;
Pray properly: When we pray properly we undergo a process
of inner purification which opens us up to God and thus to our fellow human
beings as well "But who can discern his errors? Clear me from hidden faults"
prays the Psalmist (Ps 19:12 [18:13]).Failure to recognize my guilt, the illusion
of my innocence, does not justify me and does not save me, because I am guilty
for the numbness of my conscience and my incapacity to recognize the evil in
me for what it is.
All
serious and honest human conduct is hope in action. Great progress has been
made in the battle against physical pain; yet the sufferings of the innocent
and mental suffering have, if anything, increased in recent decades.
With death, our life-choice becomes definitive-our life
stands before the judge… and the judgement of God is hope, both because it is
justice and because it is grace.
The true measure of humanity is essentially determined
in relationship to suffering and to the sufferer.
I highly recommend this encyclical because
it is crucial for us believers to be able to articulate the reason for our hope.
For the ones among us who are privileged to have faith, this encyclical will
re-enforce it and deepen it and give us many tools. For the ones among us who
are not so sure, for the seekers among us (and I remember clearly how it feels),
this encyclical will be both enlightening and challenging. Read it, read it
alone and meditate it or read it as a group and share your reflections and learn
from each other. Either way will be fruitful. Download it, print it
and stuff it in the Christmas stockings of your loved ones!
Benedict XVI is a good teacher and he has this wonderful gift of taking abstract
theological concepts and tough intellectual ideas and opening them up for today's
listeners in a clear and accessible manner. In the process, he is guiding us
to the heart of the matter, the love of Christ in his first encyclical and the
hope of salvation in the second one. He takes our contemporary malaise (fueled
by atheism and materialism, by modern arrogance) and redirects our gaze to the
only solution, the one that is not found in our own navel (contrary to some
voices) but above and beyond our own ego, in a transcendent love, in the love
of God.
I used pictures of frost in nature to illustrate the fragility and fleeting
quality of hope because frost is here in the morning and gone by noon. But the
reality of hope is both delicate and extremely solid too so I should be using
pictures of mountains! There are many types of hope and we all experience some
of them to some degree (if not, then I don't see how you can get out of bed
in the morning). But the deeper types of hope have to do with our worldview,
with the big picture, and the most profound and durable and tested type of all
is the one anchored in God - as was so movingly illustrated by Saint Joséphine
Bakhita. Pope Benedict XVI calls the various types the lesser and greater hopes.
He explains right upfront how faith and hope are intermingled, how they are
resting on a proper understanding of what it is to be Christian, what is the
promise of eternal life and what is the true fabric of this life, this abundant
life that Christ opened up for us. He cautions us against the modern temptations
of individual salvation, of a political or scientific solution where we save
ourselves by our own efforts, he develops to great lengths the need for every
generation to work for the kingdom here and now as we should be very much aware
of the inner limitations of our own efforts. Pope Benedict points out the errors
and limitations of the French Revolution, of Karl Marx and his friends, of the
false promises of a better world without God.
I truly loved §30, 31, 32 and 37 and I could quote them in full! But no, I'll
stop here and I will pray that you read the whole encyclical. And I will wait,
with patient and joyful hope, for encyclical number three…
Spe Salvi |
Copyright ©December2007 Michele Szekely