Freedom Begins When You Learn to Hope in God
How often do you feel hopeless? Do you ever get the feeling that what you do can’t really matter? One intriguing aspect of The Truman Show is that the main character seems to have a perfect life but he is unsatisfied because it is all fake. He finds no purpose in what he does day-to-day. Even though everything is easy for him – his world is literally tailored to him – he finds himself metaphorically adrift in the sea. When we lose sight of our purpose, we stop engaging with life. We drift, because we’ve lost motivation. Hope is the key to finding our purpose, because it places our hopes and dreams firmly in the loving embrace of God. Do we live buoyed by hope or dragged down by despair?
Nature of Hope
Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1817).
Desire the Kingdom of Heaven. Trust Christ’s promises. Rely not on your own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit. Desire. Trust. Rely. Freedom begins when you begin to hope in God.
Too often, we don’t know enough to desire Heaven. At most, we think that Hell would be a bad place to go. But hope shows us the deeper purpose and brings back joy to us through living out freedom in a real and existential way. When we learn to live in hope, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ (cf. Rm. 8:38).
We have to learn to have the right desires if we want to grow in hope. Desire is different from attachment. Desire frees us, while attachments weigh us down.
Therefore, set your desire on my words; long for them, and you will be instructed (Wis. 6:11).
Is there an attachment in your life that doesn’t allow you to be free? Maybe it’s a person, grades, an internship you want to get. That attachment will tie you down and rob you of any sense of freedom. That’s when despair creeps in. They seem to think that there is some situation in this life that is weighing on them and they will never be able to escape from it. To overcome despair, we need a deeper hope.
Hope makes us free in Christ. We need to let go of other things so that we can hold on to Jesus like never before. Nothing will separate us from the love of God (cf. Rm. 8:39).
In his encyclical Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI has a chapter titled “The Shape of Hope.” It seems a little odd – how can hope be a shape? He reflects on the nature of freedom and its relation to hope, and how it lays the foundation for true love while giving our lives purpose. According to Pope Benedict, to understand what we may hope for, and what we may not, we must first understand the nature of our freedom.
Hope isn’t shapeless – it has a form, a direction, a purpose. Our world looks at hope as a formless blob. We refer to hope when thinking about dessert but rarely connect it to our eternal well-being. Perhaps this is because we buy into the myth that things are always getting better, leaving little perceived need for God.
Freedom and the Myth of Progress
The myth of progress is ingrained in our cultural psyche. We imagine an inevitable cycle of improvement, unstoppable and unquestionable. Unquestioning faith in technology characterizes our age. Yet technological progress in material things does not mirror the freedom inherent to moral decisions and moral reality.
Are we freer because of technology – or more enslaved to it? Pope Benedict reminds us that freedom is based on more basic decisions. We can’t simply inherit virtue. We choose it ourselves.
Freedom presupposes that in fundamental decisions, every person and every generation is a new beginning (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 24).
No matter how one generation fares, the next must decide whether to follow the same moral norms. We see how much can change even in a short time. Utopian philosophy misleads us, suggesting that structures alone can secure a just society. Structures are necessary, but they are never sufficient. True morality cannot be delegated to institutions.
Dystopian realities seem to emerge all around us. We feel darkness creeping in. Faith is often pictured as light, but hope can be seen the same way. Hope helps us with the perspective of eternity, anchoring us in God and preventing us from being bogged down by material concerns.
The Kingdom of God will never be definitively established in this world. We should do good while living on earth, but we must avoid the temptation of thinking that we can offer permanent solutions to perennial questions. Permanent structures would deny human freedom. This is the fallacy of the myth of progress.
What this means is that every generation has the task of engaging anew in the arduous search for the right way to order human affairs; this task is never simply completed (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 25).
Moral progress is never finished. Looking at hope only in terms of progress is insufficient. Ask yourself: what are the big things that give you hope? The small things? Which of these truly draw you toward the Kingdom of God.
Limits of Progress
Structures are helpful but insufficient. They are necessary and should be encouraged, but they are not a definitive solution. If they were, they would deny human freedom. Just as technological progress cannot eliminate suffering, Jesus reminds us that some realities – like poverty – persist, inviting a different kind of response rooted in love and hope.
Can progress save us if our hearts remain unchanged?
While progress can shape the world materially, it cannot address the moral and spiritual realities that Christ calls us to. This is why Jesus’ words to His disciples remain relevant today. When his disciples grumbled at the rich ointment poured over his head, Jesus rebuked them, saying:
Why do you trouble this woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me (Mt. 26:17-18).
Jesus is not advocating waste, but He recognizes the act as worship. Poverty will always exist, giving the wealthy the opportunity to serve and detach from earthly possessions. We may desire salvation in this world, but it is impossible. Science and resources alone cannot save man.
Francis Bacon and those who followed in the intellectual current of modernity that he inspired were wrong to believe that man would be redeemed through science (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 25).
Sometimes progress blocks future progress, as with our reliance on fossil fuels. If we had recognized earlier the limitations of oil, we might have advanced alternative energy sooner. If progress cannot give us meaning, what can? We must turn to love, the only power that redeems.
Life as Relationship
Life is relational. The more we fall into selfishness, the more disconnected we are. When we feel hopeless, we can pray with Psalm 35: “How long, O lord?” God reaches each of us personally and through community. Salvation and hope are never merely individual. We grow in our communion with Jesus.
The other day, I saw a small boy walking down a big set of stairs, holding on to his mother’s hand. He was overconfident in his method; if she was not holding him up, he would have crashed down the stairs in dramatic fashion. But he trusted the goodness of his mother and know he could take big steps with no risk of falling. Jesus invites us to have similar trust in him. This is how we grow in our communion with Jesus.
Communion with Jesus calls us to communion with others. To love Jesus totally, we need to be deeply free.
Loving God requires an interior freedom from all possessions and all material goods: the love of God is revealed in responsibility for others (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 28).
Building up our relationship to Christ allows us to recognize the greater and lesser reasons for hope that we have. When we reflect on our reasons for hope, we learn to see our lives in the context of our relationship with Christ and experience how we cannot be separated from him. This gives us a sense of interior freedom. This freedom calls us to community, even though we might often feel pulled to a more individualistic way of looking at the world.
Modern Christianity, faced with the successes of science in progressively structuring the world, has to a large extent restricted its attention to the individual and his salvation. In so doing it has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 25).
We learn to trust Christ’s promises and not our own strength. We must remember the communal aspect of salvation. Faith is born in the Church, and it is in the Church that we most confidently live our faith. Paul was able to hold on to Jesus, but only after he let go of so many other things. This gave him confidence to love God above all else.
For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rm. 8:38-39)
God is always present, even when we feel isolated. But what can put our relationship with Christ at risk? Sin. Self-centeredness blinds us to its danger. Our friendships, habits, and daily choices can either lift us up or drag us down. One of the greatest sins is despair, because it destroys our will to keep fighting. Never give in to despair. If you ever fall, pick yourself up, shake off the dirt, and keep walking towards Christ.
Sometimes, we can get dragged down by our friend group. Look around and see who you are hanging out with. I remember speaking with some students who wanted to work on their language. They recognized that they were using foul language too frequently. “But Father, my friends do it more than I do.” Ok, well there’s the problem. If we do not find friends who lift us up, we will be dragged down to their level. If your friends do not challenge you to be better, look for better friends.
No friendship, job, internship, or program should come between you and the love of Christ. How do you make this happen at a practical level? Ask: what keeps me from Mass? From confession? These are things that separate us from him. Without hope, we stumble; in Christ, we soar free.
Redemption and Love
It is not the science that saves us.
It is not science that redeems man: man is redeemed by love (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 26).
We learn to rely on the Holy Spirit. We try so hard to save ourselves, but we can never do it on our own. We can’t earn our redemption. We need his love. Love leads to redemption.
I know a story about an emergency room doctor who was struggling with addiction. One thing that happens to men is that we strive for success. We tend to run away from where we fail to experience success. For him, home life was tough. His kids were at that age where they are difficult to deal with. His wife was busy with her own life. He found solace in two things: work, and the bottle. He had a parking space at the hospital. He would get a phone call to come in. “Without you, this person will die.” It gave him a tremendous sense of accomplishment to be at work.
He was living out of whack. He would sometimes take shots of vodka to steady himself before performing emergency operations. He knew that his life was going down the wrong path, but he was unsure about how to steady himself. His despair became so great that he wanted to end his earthly existence. His son’s birthday was coming up on Sunday. His plan was to take his own life the following Monday. Thankfully, he made it to a rehabilitation program just before it was too late. Without hope, we fall into despair. We need to rediscover love as a source of hope.
Through love, we are drawn beyond ourselves and opened to the transcendent. Separation from Christ destroys hope.
You were at that time separated from Christ… having no hope and without God in the world. (Eph. 2:12)
Hope is grand. One image of hope is the anchor because hope allows us to be firmly grounded in what is most important. The connection that we have with Christ is a true covenant, that is sealed by our baptism. Our baptism allows us to share the sentiments of Paul that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ (cf. Rm. 8:38). We sense this connection when Jesus speaks about the Vine and the Branches (cf. Jn. 15). Jesus makes it clear that we can bear fruit only when we are connected to him. We have a God who wants to reach out to us and be close to us.
Hope anchors and roots us in him.
Interior Freedom
This hope gives us the gift of interior freedom in spite of suffering when we unite our crosses to Christ’s:
I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal. 2:20).
St. Augustine lived this way after his conversion. He decided to live completely for the word of God and for the eternal things. He was deeply in tune with how Christ dies to separate us from sin and death. Jesus died for all of us, so that we might live not for ourselves but for him (cf. 2 Cor. 5:15). He snatched us from the jaws of death and from the grasp of sin. He has the right that we should live for him. We do this by getting out of our own heads and living for others (cf. Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 28).
Hope frees us. Hope sustains us. Christ grounds us in Himself and makes us truly free.
New life
When we think of the words “conversion story,” we might as well jump to St. Augustine. His conversion story has inspired millions down through the centuries. He described his daily life as correcting the turbulent, cheering up the faint-hearted, supporting the weak, and refuting the opponents of the Gospel. Further, he felt the need to guard the Gospel against insidious enemies, teach the unlearned, stir up the indolent, and check the argumentative. This still wasn’t everything; he needed to put the proud in their place, set the desperate on their feet and reconcile those engaged in quarrels (cf. Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 29).
The Gospel is challenging and St. Augustine recognized this even to the point of exclaiming:
The Gospel terrifies me (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 29).
Why was he terrified of the Gospel? He knew that it had a lot of control over his life. Sometimes, we are too simple when speaking about the Gospel. The word of Jesus challenges us to deep moral conversion and dramatic changes in our lives. Augustine recognized this and knew that he could no longer live purely for himself, as he had done for much of his life. We too are called to experience a healthy fear that:
prevents us from living for ourselves alone and compels us to pass on the hope we hold in common (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 29).
We grasp after so many things, when what we really need to do is to hold onto Jesus. We rely not on our strength, but on the Holy Spirit. This is a concrete way of living out hope. This deep, theological hope is described in an interesting way in Hebrews 11.
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Heb. 11:1).
Hope is described indirectly, in how it relates to faith. Hope is a strong virtue, not a whimsical characteristic. Hope lays the foundation for a strong faith and bridges to love. Living hope in this way is a form of relying on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Our hope is like the piece of metal in us that is attracted to the great magnet of God’s love. The things we hope for are often not so easy to grasp or perceive. This does not make them less real. Rather, we need to hold on to them with all our might. When we learn to see things through God’s eyes, we begin to grow in hope and can face even difficult situations with a courageous heart. Hope makes us free in Christ when we stop grasping and start trusting.
So many people lack conviction. And if you live with passion and conviction, other people will be jealous of you. You can see it in any room. There are some people who are constantly taking their cue from others. They are followers and insecure. Then, there are some who have deep conviction and passion. Others look to them naturally. Perhaps they exercise a quiet leadership. It is no less real for that.
Practical Steps to Cultivate Hope
We have already mentioned some greater and lesser hopes in our lives. There are little things that motivate us and big things that are the major drivers of our actions. Sometimes, we can get caught up in these hopes. There is a risk in these little causes for hope if they distract us from the Kingdom of God.
Sometimes one of these hopes may appear to be totally satisfying without any need for other hopes (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 30).
We can put all of our efforts into buying a Lamborghini and when we acquire it, we feel like we are fully accomplished and desire nothing else. It ends up closing our hearts and minds to what is more deeply necessary for our happiness. When we are too comfortable, we lose our motivation for hope.
There is a risk that Biblical hope for the Kingdom of God could be displaced by hope for the kingdom of man. Materialism overwhelms our hearts and we forget that we are made for so much more than what this world has to offer. In Proverbs, we read that our minds have many plans, while it is the purpose of the Lord that will be established (cf. Prov. 19:21).
We often get caught up in our own hopes and dreams. In doing so, we forget what God has prepared for us – a reality far better than we can imagine.
We cannot hope for the world if we do not first trust that hope is available to us. When we think of a part of the world overcome by famine, violence, or war, we can see how desperation wipes out hope and leads people to drastic choices that end up continuing the cycle of pain and suffering.
We need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 31).
God is the only one who can truly satisfy our greatest desires and so we naturally desire him. The problem is that too often we trust in ourselves instead of in God. The Psalmist invites us to do it differently.
Commit your way to the Lord, trust in him, and he will act (Ps. 37:5).
Here, we have an entire plan of spiritual life. If we learn to commit ourselves to the Lord, we will naturally grow in trust of him. He will act, even though we don’t know exactly how and when.
God is the foundation of hope: not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety (Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, 31).
If we find in God the foundation of our hope, we will continue working, even when things seem bleak. It will help us re-discover the freedom that we lose when we get sucked into our own selfishness. Discovering hope is discovering freedom to do what is good and just in the eyes of the Lord.
Hope makes us free in Christ; despair drags us down.
How can you build up your hope? Identify one attachment you can let go of so that you can hold on to Christ more firmly.
Desire the Kingdom of Heaven. Trust Christ more than yourself. Rely on the grace of the Holy Spirit, rather than your own strength. When we hope in God, we throw our anchor into Heaven. No storm can drag us away.
Even if we live in a world that sometimes seems unreal or chaotic, hope in God anchors us in true freedom and purpose. When we learn to focus on the things that build us up, we learn to give the proper shape to hope and to live in the freedom that only Christ can give us. Learn to hope in God. Freedom begins when you learn to hope in God – and hope begins when you trust His love more than your own strength.