Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our reading from Romans 8 today, Paul says, “In hope we are saved” (8:24a).

Now, I have something of a confession to make. Of the three theological virtues (faith, hope and love), the one with which I most often struggle is hope. It’s not that I don’t struggle with the others—I think being a fallen human being means struggling with all holy things in one way or another. And it’s not that I am or feel hopeless either. Not at all!

It’s that so often, it feels like we think of hope as the ability to imagine or wish for or wait for a time when things’ll be better by and by. The difficulty I find with that notion of hope is that it supports a subtle (and I think questionable) understanding of the future as the good place or the amazing place or the salvation place. And the difficulty here is at least two fold: 1) time will not save us, there’s no time-bound or earth-bound evolutionary process at the end of which is our salvation—in fact, all processes and all evolution and all things under heaven and this side of eternity, including time itself, are in need of redemption (the redemption for which all creation groans in expectation as Romans 8:22 affirms); and 2) we can only ever live in the present—the future is always one step ahead, and if that’s where all the goodness and amazingness and savingness lives…we’ll never get there: it’ll always be ahead of us, flying as swiftly into the future as our steps are swift to pursue it.

Hope, therefore, must mean something else—not a subjective or passive longing for a forever-receding goodness, not a mere wish for better by and by.

So here’s an alternative. I think theologian James Alison says it best when he describes hope not as wishful thinking, but as “objective expectation.” In his article “Taking Cinderella to the Ball: How a Mimetic Anthropology Restores the Theological Virtue of Hope”, Alison speaks of hope as akin to discovering oneself an heir to a life-changing inheritance. He writes, “the promised inheritance is substantially mine even when it is not yet in my possession, and because of that, I already now find myself starting to become a publicly visible demonstration, a reliable sign of what is on its way. Who I am is objectively being altered as someone else’s promise, their desire, moves towards its fulfillment in my reception of it.” This is in fact what it means to be inheritors of the promise of joy and peace and resurrection life, what it means to be and become adopted children of God—we don’t wait for the promise to come or for ourselves to arrive at a future in which the promise is fulfilled. We find ourselves becoming the people of the promise the more it transforms us, here and now, into images of its fulfillment. Hope is a thing pointing to a presently available reality of good, the Reign of God and the fulfillment of all things, that even now is pressing towards us and transforming us even as we are being stretched toward it.

Friend, as we approach the Paschal Feast, may the hope of Easter Joy sustain you, uplift you and completely transform you into an image of Joy’s fulfillment!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+