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What is the basis for your hope? Spirituality
My parish began it’s Lenten Mission this evening, and we began by discussing the meaning of hope. The speaker discerned “hope” from “wishful thinking” a few different ways. For example, wishful thinking is something unattainable, like a regret, where one might say “I wish I hadn’t done that…”; whereas hope is something attainable, like perhaps saying a prayer for the well-being of others. One other interesting thing about hope is - there has to be a basis for it to make it real… It got me wo…
In answer to the Lenten Mission question - it was a kind of “trick” the Formation Director pulled.
Everyone spoke of having hopes in the oddest stuff, but a few months later it hit me that he pulled the line from Hebrews11:1 to make a “fill in the blank” question of it. In St Paul’s teaching, it becomes clear that faith in Jesus is
the basis for our hope.
The quotes below are abridged comments from Hebrews. While scriptural abstractions, they “fill in the blank” with respect to the Formation Director’s question: “What is the basis for your hope?”. They are edited for brevity, but have been kept in the same order as NABRE presents them.
"Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen… "
“Because of it the ancients were well attested…”
“By faith, the universe was ordered by the word of God, so that what is visible came into being through the invisible…”
“Anyone who approaches God
must first believe God exists and that he rewards those who seek him…”
“By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance;
he went out, not knowing where he was to go…”
“By faith, Abraham received power to generate… …descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sands on the seashore.”
Abraham’s vision (what he hoped for) was realized because he had faith that God had ordered the world a certain way.
The hard part is what followed for Abraham’s ancestors,
who only partially understood what Abraham understood about faith, although they wanted and hoped for what faith brought. It is as if they knew faith would work, but it wasn’t really knowledge in the sense of a scientifically demonstrable proof they could replicate and obtain for themselves. They could only say what they thought, what they were seeking, and then proceed to look for it based upon what they believed to be true.
“All these died in faith. …
though approved because of their faith, (they) did not receive what had been promised… God had foreseen something better for us, so that without us they should not be made perfect…”
So I’m still discerning that part. I know our belief system, but my hopes are crazy and erratic and I wander too much. Like St Paul, I have a thorn in my side, and the discipline isn’t always so easy to fathom. From what St Paul says further in Hebrews, Jesus understood faith completely, and so we should do what Jesus did to find what we hope for.
If I get the part about hope clear, I’ll let you know. Seriously. I’ll pray over your post here because it means a lot to me.
Thank you for asking, and may God Bless you for so doing!
