On Having Hope Again

The Response to Evil and especially to Suffering. Part 5.

It's been the theme throughout these posts, it's been increasingly the theme of my life and work and it's much, much too large to fit into this poor little post. Don't Give Up On Hope. This post is really more of a postscript to a much larger project one which has been tugging heavily at my heart and coming out in all sorts of little fragments, one which doesn't even know yet to which genre it belongs, and one which will probably take me a very long time to write. So I'm writing the postscript first, partly because it will take me less than a year to write it, but also because I've heard a number of more eloquent voices than mine speaking on my topic of hope with great relevance to this season in the Church and great poignancy if my internal response is any measure. And at this particular moment, I'd rather point you to them than rehash what they said so well. (Two that particularly struck me: A homily given by Fr. John Burns at Cor Jesu in Milwaukee and a blog post by Anthony D'Ambrosio of Catholic Creatives.)

The first half of this year was for me such a brutal and beautiful barrage of learning what I thought I knew - how to have hope - that it has become increasingly difficult for me not to write about it. And so the postscript to the impossibly large task of writing about hope in the darkness, is to write about the two most practical weapons God gave me to fight through my daily darknesses and temptations to despair. There were many, many moments that made up the story of learning to have hope again, but I'm inclined to think these were the sine qua non of the story and were certainly the two things I could always fall back on even when I wasn't feeling it.

1. Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

Just as the Israelites learned trust in God's providence by only having manna enough for one day, we learn trust by asking Him just for what we need for the day and trusting that He will take care of the big picture. When I was overwhelmed by my hurt, but especially by fear of how on earth I was going to fix everything and feeling like things would never be right, this became my constant support. Grant me today the grace I need for today. It not only shrunk what I had to be anxious about to the size of a day instead of a vague and vast mass of things to be worried about, it also was a daily practice of trust that God would heal me. That He knew what He was doing and that His loving providence was an infinitely better plan than my frantic efforts. It taught me to radically trust without becoming complacent or inactive. And the more that I put it in the context of what He had already done in my life, the more I was able - even when my pride and pain blocked my ability to feel His Love - to surrender to Him and to put my hope in His Love.

2. This is the Chalice of My Blood

It has long been part of my prayer at Mass to offer myself with the gifts of bread and wine at the offertory - I don't remember who it was who taught me that, but it was long ago. But there was one Mass in particular this past Spring, when I had, as usual been having a hard time and was trying to figure out what the heck I was supposed to do with it all. I'm not sure if I had actually been asked to bring up the gifts that day and had ended up with the wine, or if I was just praying with the Offertory again but it struck me that the wine I was bringing to the altar was all the suffering of a broken heart that I had been struggling with so much. I was surprised at how difficult it was to let go of and to offer at the altar, to allow Him to be in charge of it and to relinquish the petty power of self-pity that it gave me. It was a very real and difficult action, not just some sort of passive image in prayer. The priest prayed "through your goodness we have this wine to offer you..." Oh how infuriating and glorious are the paradoxes of the Cross! And once it was offered, I watched Christ take it, transform it into Himself and then pour Himself back into me.

Just as nourishing our bodies has to happen over and over again, over and over again I would find myself repeating this prayer and there was no one Mass when the lightning bolt struck and everything changed. But each time it got a little bit less painful and the peace grew a little stronger. I would backslide, then get better again, but I firmly believe that the Eucharist and this particular way of entering into the mystery were central to the growth that came out of my struggle and to my having hope again.

P.S. Also Laugh

The in-between things were often times the unsung heroes, at least for me, the super intense melancholic. The antics of the small children I watch, goofy things like Parks and Rec or Rhett and Link, being outside, watching a good movie or reading a good book - really anything that took me outside of myself helped to refocus my perspective and remember that this particular suffering was not the end of the story.

#TheResponsetoEvil #Hope