Email Guidelines Guidelines Hope: 2nd Theological Virtue
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“God created human beings to be immortal” Wisdom 2:23
Do not let your hearts be troubled; you trust in God, so trust also in me. There are many rooms in my father’s house; I am going now to prepare a place for you, and after I have gone and prepared a place for you, I shall return to take you to myself, so that you may be with me where I am.” John 14:1-3 ;
However, this is not the hope, that the Bible gives or asks us to believe in. It is what we need to get us through life, when we frequently have the sense of not being ‘quite there yet.’ We live in the hope that ultimately we will get there and find our fulfilment, peace and joy in God.
Let’s really pray for the grace to live in hope and that God would increase our hope. There may have been times when we could not feel any hope and God got us through that, let’s be thankful for that.
Tuesday
When my hope fails me as it often does I find it very comforting to deepen in the fact that I am held by Christ. Of course we make our efforts to hold on to Christ, but ultimately it is him that is holding us and doing the work which I find a big comfort. This is summed up in a quote from the ninth century orphan Paschasius Radbertus who became a great saint and wrote “Christ is held by the hand of hope. We hold him and are held. But it is a greater good that we are held by Christ than that we hold him. For we can hold him only so long as we are held by him.”
Let’s pray that we can go about our daily lives serene and hopeful in the knowledge that we are held by Christ.
Wednesday
And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. Romans 5:5
However far on we are in our journey of faith and however strongly we may believe what is written in this verse, we all have moments where our hope can become weakened. So let’s reflect today on what can weaken it and how we can work against that. Saint Augustine tells us, “There are two things that kill the soul: despair and false hope.” Despair is when we find it impossible to believe what Saint Julian of Norwich says that “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” This can be for many reasons, for example we can feel we have wasted too much time, or are a lost cause, tried too many times and failed, and ultimately we cease to really believe in God’s grace and redemption.
The other way that hope can be destroyed is through presumption. At moments where we think we have achieved a goal and there is nothing else to be done or achieved. If we reach this state then we have nothing left to hope for and have lost sight of God’s vision for us as moving towards him and constantly in a state of progress.
Let’s pray that Christ would really keep our hope alive and our desire to persevere in our journeys towards him.
Thursday
“For those who fear the Lord, all will end well; on their dying day they will be blessed… The crown of wisdom is to fear the Lord; she makes peace and health flourish. The root of wisdom is to fear the Lord, and her branches are long life. Ecclesiasticus 1:13.18-20;
Ultimately what destroys our hope is one of the seven deadly sins ‘acedia’ which according to the theology of the Church,is a kind of deep sadness in view of the high calling God has given humanity; and so by acedia;we give into discouragement and disillusionment and become despondent and inactive.
Because of it we can feel a kind of religious vertigo when, aware of the heights or the call of holiness to which we have been called, we can’t fine neither the courage nor the will power to be as great as we are called to be. We would actually – incredibly – prefer to be less great in order to avoid the responsibilities and the obligations that greatness demands of us.
We work against this by developing a ‘Fear of the Lord.’ This is why I chose the verse above. We need an awareness of how easily we can slip into despair and sin. A healthy fear of the lord motivates us to be all that we are called to be. I had a very powerful experience in Assisi of the power of God, it woke me up and shook me out of the complacency I can sometimes fall into in my faith and gave me a healthy fear of the Lord in terms of taking the gift of my life and my faith seriously.
Lord please help us today to become more aware of your power and hope for our lives, please give us the courage to grow towards being all that we were created to be.
Friday
1Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.2Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.3Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. Hebrews12:1
For me this verse is a summary of how we are called to live in hope and to live our lives of faith. At moments where I have whole heartedly fixed my eyes on Christ’s life I have been able to have the right perspective of my life. I have been able to put hard ships and doubts into perspective and look at what Christ endured and how he lived it. I have been able to experience God’s grace and blessings, rather than the traps that I can fall into of either thinking that I am not worthy of receiving his blessings and grace or that I don’t need them as I am going in my own strength.
I really pray that we would be filled with hope as we continue on our journeys of faith. Let’s pray that we would be immune to the cynicism and despair that can often surround us and be open to God’s hope and grace.
©Verbum Dei * 2010
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