What is your hope for 2021?
Maybe it’s that life will go back to normal. Maybe your hope is to return to an “in-person” life. Maybe your hope is for a boring news cycle. Is your hope for community? Or to not just survive, but thrive?
Hope is the underlining feeling of expectation or desire for certain things to happen. As Catholics we have this hope because of Christ.
In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul reminds the people of Rome where their hope lies. This was a community of Jews who had become Christians. They had been exiled from their homes in Rome by the Emperor Claudius. They were hurting, suffering, and now returning to their old lives in Rome.
St. Paul writes that they could boast in hope, because God has poured his love into our hearts. They could even boast in the afflictions of the last years, “knowing that suffering produces endurance.” (Romans 5:3) Endurance builds character. And character builds hope.
And hope does not disappoint.
These words ring true for us too.
The last year has been tough. Many of us feel battered and bruised, some of us in our bodies, but most of us in our spirits. I imagine this was just a fraction of the pain those first-century Christians felt, so it is not as if St. Paul does not know our pain when he writes. He does.
We too can boast of our afflictions over the last year. We can see how they refined us and how they built our endurance and our character. Not that it did not hurt. It hurt. And yet, we realized just how strong we are. We can boast in hope.
We don’t know what this new year will hold.
We hope for healing for ourselves, our families, our communities, and our nation.
St. Paul reaches out from the pages of his letter to comfort us, telling us of what he reminded those first-century Christians, that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, 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.” (Romans 8:38–39)
We can imagine all the things we think separate us from the love of God and add them to Paul’s list: our fears—of now and the future—our fear of media, of leaders, of ourselves. None of that can separate us from the love of God that has been poured into us through the Holy Spirit.
May we cling to that love.
May it heal us.
Photo by Pinakeen Bhatt on Unsplash.
My husband, Joseph has been diagnosed with cancer all in a matter of less than two months. He was literally well one day and diagnosed the next. He is presently in palliative care because the doctors think he is too weak for chemo sand have decided to concentrate on quality of life. Yet I dare to HOPE and believe God will send my husband home fully recovered. God will surely show me many blessings in this storm He has sent us to face. Thanks be to God.
Hope empowers and heals. Long live hope.
Hope – one of the three theological virtues – is neither easy to practice nor even to fully understand. I’m happy with the way St Paul outlines this – ” … suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope (Rom. 5:3).” It’s always a thing of joy knowing fully well that this hope (in Christ Jesus) does not disappoint. In a period of cultural decline, faithlessness, despondence and hatred, my prayer and hope for this year is for God’s healing on a sick and troubled world.
Dear Fiona,
Thrive is a wonderful word. Thank you. Thank you also for that sentence about St. Paul and his letter to the Romans. I never thought much about the people in Rome he was writing to in that letter. I am a leader of the meetings of the Association of Hebrew Catholics based in St. Louis. So please pray for us. Fr. Elias Friedman believed that this time of the homeland for the Jews is an important time. That is to say that we have opportunities now that we did not have before 1948 and we might not have these opportunities in the future. Jeffrey Charles
The verses from Romans (Romans 8:38-39) are profound and, when I read and meditate on them, reach deep.
The words articulate Paul’s modus operandi – why he was/is such a great missionary. My hope for 2021 is a deepening commitment to God and the sacrifice that so lovingly entails.
Only “as Catholics”? What about us other Christian’s? 🙂
I was wondering the same thing