Pastoral

“WE HAD HOPED…”

The disciples on the road to Emmaus were shattered because nothing seemed to have turned out as they had hoped. Their future seemed empty and depressing.

More difficult to hope

A similar sense of hopelessness is not far below the surface of our way of life. Global warming threatens unknown and frightening changes; terrorism has produced both personal and communal insecurity; our lifestyle in the affluent West cannot continue indefinitely, or be extended to the rest of the world without making unsustainable demands on the planet’s limited resources; demographic and economic changes make it increasingly doubtful that there will be adequate pensions in the future; a changing world greatly weakens the prospect that jobs can be secure and life-long; the long-term economic outlook is full of uncertainty. Young people look towards the second half of the twenty-first century, or perhaps avoid looking towards it, with an uneasy feeling that the world of their adulthood and old age will have changed in many ways, by no means all of them pleasant.

Three related characteristics of today’s world make it more difficult to hope. The first arises from a distortion of the recognition of the respect due to the beliefs of other people. Those beliefs deserve respect precisely because they are the fruit of a human being’s search for the truth: “Objectively speaking, the search for truth and the search for God are one and the same” (48). Respect undermines itself, however, when it degenerates into a feeling that every belief is as good as every other belief and that, consequently, there is no truth to be found, only a vast number of equally valid opinions. If that were the case, the human search for truth would lose its meaning.

The complete truth is always beyond us; we could never fully grasp the reality of the infinite God, nor indeed the full truth about ourselves. But there is a Truth which we seek and which attracts us. There would be no hope of finding a truly satisfying meaning in life if any foundation on which we build could be no more than a doubtful, subjective opinion about a ‘truth’ that does not, in the end, exist outside our own minds.

The second characteristic is that for all the wonderful growth in possibilities, knowledge and communications that we have experienced, there is a sense in which our horizons have shrunk rather than expanded. Our reason “has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being” (49).

We all live in, and a generation is growing up in, a world in which a non-religious view of life is taken as normal and obvious whereas a religious outlook is viewed with a slightly puzzled tolerance: “The impression is given that unbelief is self-explanatory, whereas belief needs a sort of social legitimisation which is neither obvious nor taken for granted” (50). But humanity viewed without its Creator is not expanded and freer; it is diminished and deprived of the foundation for its hope.

Thirdly, there is a tendency to see social, economic and political life as purely secular realities. But if these are to be inspired by hope, they need to be based on a vision of the human person; they need to be at the service of a real fostering of human dignity and fullness of life. There is a fundamental contradiction in expecting people to leave their understanding of what it is to be human, their understanding of the meaning and purpose of human life, ‘outside’ when they enter into these spheres.

This does not, of course, mean that one should require others to share one’s vision, or that one should expect them to accept arguments that depend on it. It does mean that to suggest that in these spheres people should forget the reason for the hope that is in them ( I Pet 3:15 ) would be a recipe for a culture that is empty and for a politics that is a mere game of words rather than a service of one’s fellow human beings in all their amazing worth and dignity (51).

In the Eucharist we bring every corner and aspect of life, however secular it may appear, to the Lord proclaiming that the deepest meaning of all that we do, all that we experience, all that we are is to be part of the journey towards the new creation into which Christ has led the way. From the Eucharist we bring a deeper understanding and a firmer commitment to live every corner and aspect of our lives as part of that journey.

The most urgent matter Europe faces

Inner emptiness, the feeling of loneliness, the absence of purpose, the loss of hope all find their root in a vision of life which sees humanity ‘apart from God and apart from Christ’. European culture is marked by a kind of untroubled apostasy among “people who have all that they need and live as if God does not exist” (52). “Possibly the most urgent matter Europe faces, in both East and West, is a growing need for hope, a hope which will enable us to give meaning to life and history and to continue on our way together” (53).

The emptiness and longing that only God can fill cannot be suppressed, however hard we try to fill it with lesser realities. We can see many symptoms of something profoundly wrong with our society – binge drinking, drugs, a scale of values that often gives precedence to pleasure, possessions and various forms of prejudice over fundamental human values, social inequalities that deprive people of the opportunity to develop their God-given gifts, a lack of urgency about our responsibilities to the developing world, the destruction of God’s creation, which is our inheritance from the past and ought to be our legacy to the future. We are tempted to measure the health of our society by its wealth rather than by how well it helps people to grow in their own humanity. All of these are signs of our searching for shortcuts towards satisfying the hope that is within us. None of them can yield the fulfilment they seek.

The one hope for each of us and for the whole human race is Jesus Christ:

Risen and living Lord, you are the ever new hope of the Church and of humanity.

You are the one true hope for the human family and for history.

Already in this life and in the life to come,

you are ‘among us the hope of glory’ ( Col 1:27 ).

In you and with you, we find truth:

our life has meaning,

communion is possible,

diversity can become richness,

the power of the Kingdom is at work in history

and helps to build the city of humankind.

Love gives an eternal value to human efforts.

Suffering becomes salvific,

life will conquer death,

Creation will share in the glory of the children of God (54).

Dare to hope

When the disciples recognised Jesus in the breaking of the bread their weary desolation was transformed into a burning hope. ‘Our hope had been…’ they said. What they now discovered was that their hope had been too small and timid. Jesus revealed a hope that could conquer even death itself. In the Eucharist the Paschal Mystery of Jesus is present to us – his passage through death to risen life. The narrow inadequacy of a merely human hope lies in the fact that within this life every hope must be incomplete. Every relationship and achievement is threatened by death; every society, however good, is shot through with injustice and prejudice and dishonesty; the generations that have gone before us are, in any case, beyond our reach, we can do nothing to repair the oppression and the disadvantage and the pain suffered by those who have already died.

By his resurrection, Jesus enters the new creation where there will be no more mourning or crying or pain, and where all things will be made new ( Rev 22:4,5 ) for the dead as well as the living:

The vigilant and active expectation of the coming of the Kingdom is also the expectation of a finally perfect justice for the living and the dead, for people of all times and places, justice which Jesus Christ, installed as supreme judge, will establish (55).

We sometimes use the phrase “I scarcely dare to hope”. The invitation of the Risen Jesus says: ‘dare to hope!’ Our faith challenges us to expand our horizons beyond anything that we can see or hear or imagine: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him, these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” ( I Cor 2:9,10 ).

The hope that is offered to us in the Eucharist is not just about a distant future. “The Eucharist is a mystery of presence, the perfect fulfilment of Jesus’ promise to remain with us until the end of the world” (56). We are in the presence of Christ himself, “the goal of human history, the focal point of the desires of history and of civilisation, the centre of humanity, the joy of all hearts, and the fulfilment of all aspirations” (57). Our hope is already being fulfilled. It is the hope for which we were made, a hope that we could never construct or achieve by our own efforts or by pursuing limited and fragile possessions, popularity or power.

In a world whose great need is for hope, when we gather in our Churches for Mass, or we visit our Churches to pray before the Blessed Sacrament, we enter the presence of “Christ Jesus our hope” ( I Tim 1:1 ). There we find our meaning, our purpose, our mission and our hope.

It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal (58).

Learning to hope

The first way of opening our hearts to the Good News of hope is to pray, listening to the word, worshipping, praising and thanking God. This attitude is found above all in the celebration of the Eucharist, as both the source and summit of our lives. In the Eucharist and in all liturgical acts, it is God who is present and at work among us – the Father speaks to us and receives our worship through his Son, Jesus, who sanctifies us, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, who makes us into the Body of Christ. We are therefore in the presence of and offering worship to the source of our hope.

In particular, the sacrament of reconciliation has an important role in the recovery of hope. One reason why there is a loss of hope is a sense of powerlessness to overcome guilt and failure:

One of the roots of the hopelessness that assails many people today is found in their inability to see themselves as sinners and to allow themselves to be forgiven, an inability often resulting from the isolation of those who, by living as if God did not exist, have no one from whom they can seek forgiveness. Those who, on the other hand, acknowledge that they are sinners, and entrust themselves to the mercy of the Heavenly Father, experience the joy of an authentic liberation and can continue life without being trapped in their own misery (59)

The attitude of prayer, a contemplative outlook (60), should mark our whole lives. The hope that can answer our longings can only come from God. Every human hope is fragile. There is no lasting hope to be found in ‘fleeting and insubstantial things’ (61):

In prayer you will discover his life-giving presence. By making him the foundation of all your activity, you will thus be able to invite Europeans to an encounter with him, our true hope, the One who alone knows how to satisfy fully the yearning for God hidden in the different forms of religious quest now reappearing in contemporary Europe (62).

The Mass of The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Divine Hope points towards her as the one who continued to hope and to believe ‘that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord’ ( Lk 1:45 ): “Your lowly servant placed all her trust in you: in hope she waited for, and in faith conceived the Son of man, whom the prophets foretold” (63).

THE YEAR OF THE EUCHARIST