Hope is an Extraordinary Spiritual Grace

Hope is some extraordinary spiritual grace that God gives us to control our fears, not to oust them.
- Vincent McNabb

One of the greatest obstacles to having hope is our misguided understanding of what hope really is.

In Wednesday’s blog we began with a quote from Vaclav Havel:

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

It’s not just positive thinking. It’s more than that. It’s a belief, a certainty, as Havel stated, that something in time will make sense. It’s not about not having fears, because fears are part of every life. But it’s a “knowing” that things will work out – in whatever way they work out – for the best. It’s being able to manage our fears. If we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that things will make sense we can walk into, with and through the fears and face anything that comes our way.

Sometimes our fears do get the best of us and that’s when we need others to help be the physical reminder that things can and will get better. We’ve listened to many people whose hope is nearly gone. They absolutely cannot see a way out of their distress, out of their troubles. They see nothing all around them but a lingering, descending darkness and gloom. They cannot envision that there will be a better day, a certainty of relief, the reality of healing. They live in despair, feeling defeated and definitely discouraged. They need someone who can see hope, feel hope, envision hope, to embody a hopeful way.

Just the other day we spoke with someone who has been, for a long time, in that hopeless place – and for very understandable reasons. If we were dealing with the same circumstances we might very well be in that hopeless place too. But that person knows that hope cannot be regained, alone. Even in despair this person has reached out for someone else to be a fellow traveler on the journey out of hopelessness. At the end of our conversation we were thanked for “extending a hand” to help find the path to hope that could not be found, alone. We all, at times, need that hand, that friend, that source of inspiration and certainty that things – no matter what – will be okay. As Henri Nouwen has written –

Hope means to keep living
amid desperation
and to keep humming
in the darkness.
Hoping is knowing that there is love,
it is trust in tomorrow
it is falling asleep
and waking again
when the sun rises.
In the midst of a gale at sea,
it is to discover land.
In the eyes of another
It is to see that he understands you.

We have heard at times, too many times, that there is “false hope” – a belief that things will be okay when they won’t be. And therefore, hope becomes, in the words of Friedrich Nietzche … the worst of all evils, because it prolongs man’s torments.

We fundamentally disagree with that assertion. We believe that hope, instead, is the path that leads us away from our torments, out of our despair, and into a place in which we can look our fears in the face, acknowledge them and control them so that they no longer control us.

Hope is truly an extraordinary spiritual grace that we are given.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash