The Virtue of Hope: What It Is and Is Not
By Doris Donnelly

Reprinted here with the author's permission, this talk was given Oct. 1, 1998 to the general assembly of the National Council of Catholic Women in Dearborn, Mich. Doris Donnelly is professor of theology and director of the Cardinal Suenens Program in Theology and Church Life at John Carroll University, Cleveland, Ohio. The talk appeared in Origins, published by Catholic News Service.

Hope has lived for many years the fate of the middle child. Flanked by her two popular sisters, Faith and Charity, she has often been invisible, or ignored, and frequently misunderstood.

Until now.

The millennium has given Hope a new lease on life because the journey into the next century requires imagining a future, wishing intensely for the unseen and persevering through some very tough times, which no one knows how to do better than Hope. The spotlight is shining on her, which is good for Hope but may even be better for the rest of us since entering into and surviving the next century demands a full-hearted exercise of this virtue. The more information we have, the better equipped we will be.

What exactly is this virtue and why is it in such demand? Let's begin by discarding her mistaken identities.

A good example of the first misconception about hope happens in ordinary daily conversation. Someone asks, "Does your car meet safety standards?" And another answers, "I hope so." The response is, in a sense, the opposite of confidence and security. In fact, the "I hope so" sounds like a strong wish tinged with doubt. What the responder seems to be saying is "I'm not sure," "maybe... but maybe not." And either of these retorts falls short of the biblical understanding of hope, which doesn't doubt even though at the same time it never sees the thing it hopes for.

Second, many people use hope's name when what they mean is the popular romantic image in which hopelessness is disguised as hope. This happens routinely when people use expressions like "well, there's nothing left for us to do but hope," which in translation means "We might as well give up. It's hopeless."

Third, there are those who speak of hope in situations not worthy of hope's power. "I hope to win the lottery," "I hope never to live to 150," "I hope she calls by 6" are all frivolous uses of hope. Hope's range of activity exceeds all such puny and sometimes inappropriate desires. The hope the Bible talks about is far more serious, even cosmic. We could summarize St. Paul, who insists on the universality of hope in everything we do. It could not be more obvious for him: We live by hope -- we live by it -- so that every fiber of our being is bound up with it. This passionate acknowledgment gets at the truth that only one person can realize our hope for healing and salvation -- and that person is Jesus Christ. This is big-time hope, and its promises are proportionately large.

A fourth and perhaps the most common way that hope is misunderstood is as optimism. The terms are often used interchangeably, and we frequently picture the upbeat optimist as a person of hope. But there may be nothing further from the truth than that. Optimism is a surface quality, a mind-set that sees something positive in all situations -- even hopeless ones. It is a Polyannaish attitude that often refuses to acknowledge illness, hurt, woundedness, sin, tragedy and despair. "Cheer up," the optimist tells us. "Things are sure to get better tomorrow!"

Hope, on the other hand, is not an attitude but a virtue that faces reality head-on, reads situations often as bad going to worse -- things very well might not get better tomorrow! -- and knows that no matter how reality presents itself, all shall be well and there will be light at the end of the tunnel.

The Positive Side of Hope
So far I have spoken about Hope, the middle sister in the famous trio, by describing what she is not. We know that dubious or uncertain hope is not true hope, that it is often camouflaged as despair or hopelessness, that it is not to be confused with optimism and that hope thinks with big brush strokes on a giant canvas.

If we were to talk about hope positively, we would be helped, I think, by turning to one of the most credible guides on the subject, namely to Jesuit Fr. William Lynch. It is he who wrote that to hope is to acknowledge three basic ideas: (1) What I hope for I do not have and cannot see; (2) it may be difficult; (3) I can have it. It is possible for me to hope.1

When Lynch talks this way, I hear the call to persevere and an invitation to use the imagination. I hear him saying that when our backs are up against the wall there is a fact and a possibility that is not yet in, that there is a way around our troubles and that the boundaries of the possible are wider than they may seem. I think Lynch has the right idea.

In his novel, Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis observed that there are two responses to difficulties: the brittle approach and the flexible one.2 To stand firm or to bend. We are fortunate when we find someone who models the fusion of the two -- or when we ourselves do that -- when someone is at once tough, enduring and yet amazingly flexible when it comes to options for the future. I think of Nelson Mandela imprisoned for 14 years before becoming the president of South Africa as an example of that synthesis, or of Vaclav Havel, the president of Czechoslovakia, or even of Christopher Reeve, the actor, and especially today in this gathering of women, of a woman whose story comes to us through the exceptional writing skill of her daughter.

The woman I have in mind is not as celebrated as others -- men or women -- but for me the ordinariness of her life combined with her unusual strength strikes me, often enough, as the story of many women I know, and because of that, worth celebrating.

The woman I have in mind is Jill Ker Conway's mother, who measures up as a woman of extraordinary hope, with strength and flexibility as her allies. MIT scholar and former president of Smith College, Jill Conway writes about her mother in the critically acclaimed book The Road from Coorain.3 This is her story:

Mrs. Ker and her husband sink all their money into a sheep and cattle ranch in the Australian outback and watch the ranch prosper until the drought of 1944. With no water, the animals die. The few remaining ones are shot to end their misery. The death of Mr. Ker forces his widow to decide whether to sell the ranch. In spite of blunt advice from bankers and personal battles with depression, she holds on to it until the rains come. She leaves Coorain and hopes -- she hopes -- for the chance to return and start all over again.

Resettled in Sydney, with ranch-sitters guarding the 18,000 decimated acres at Coorain, she holds down two jobs to raise her family as a single parent. She also devises a plan. Estimating that sheep prices will soar when the rain comes, she decides that she will make her sheep purchases when rain is spotted as far as 300 miles away. With flawless business instincts, she watches the news reports, borrows funds and signs a deal for ewes. In a matter of hours, her investment doubles when her gamble proves right. When the rains come, her calculated risk propels the family into a life of financial security.

Mrs. Ker is a clear example of the perseverance that is always a part of hope. She sticks by her plan despite the constant reminders that it is potential folly, that she should behave as women are supposed to behave -- acquiescent and docile. Instead, whatever obstacle emerges, she turns another comer. She keeps hope alive.

While some people like Mrs. Ker exercise at least partial (and sometimes successful) control over the externals of their destiny, there are others who are totally deprived of that opportunity. And they still hope. The stories of Nelson Mandela, Andrei Sakharov, Viktor Frankl and Rigoberta Menchœ bear this out. What these (and many less famous) men and women do is remind us that even when determining outside conditions is out of the question, an inner determination is possible. These people stand witness to the energy and extraordinary power of hope.

Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn introduces us in virtually all of his novels to characters who survive against the most extraordinary odds. Under the most deprived and depraved conditions, they keep a flame of hope burning and, one by one, maintain a dignity that transcends their grimy, sordid, inhumane surroundings.

In a perverted way, even in the prisons of the Gulag, or Dachau, or South Africa or Central America, some persons could control at least part of their external destinies. All these few needed was to turn in a friend or lie, and they would have it made. Solzhenitsyn's characters tell us what's at stake in such a deal: selling one's soul and then living with one's empty self.

No matter what the personal advantage, some of Solzhenitsyn's characters simply cannot cave in. Nerzhin, for example, the central character in The First Circle,4 is sent to a prison for scientists where there is meat and butter and hot water. The price for these luxuries is to cooperate with the regime. The options are spelled out clearly for him: Remain in these comfortable, cushioned surroundings or risk starvation, torture or death in a typical prison.

Not only does Nerzhin choose the less privileged place, but he also feels more at home there. Stripped of everything, he finds that only under such conditions can he be at peace with himself. Call it integrity, character, moral force. Whatever its name, it is a choice that enables Nerzhin to bottom out rather than to sell out, and to find in the depths of his will the capacity to undergo a spiritual growth and purification that is redemptive. Nerzhin is convinced (and convinces us) that only by living through hell can he experience paradise.

I am thinking today of prisons and prisoners because of the feature story in the March-April 1998 issue of Catholic Woman, your National Council of Catholic Women publication,5 where you urge involvement in prison ministries, especially as they relate to women. In that project as in many others, you combine theory, facts and action -- the most powerful combination there is.

Prison ministry
In this connection I would like to introduce you to Elaine Roulet, a Sister of St. Joseph of Brentwood, N.Y., who for many years has been working with incarcerated women.6 She found, as you did, some sobering statistics: among them, that 67 percent of women in state prisons have at least one child under 18, and that many of those are children are under 10. Thirty percent of incarcerated women in state prisons across our country have three or more children.

Sister Elaine got to thinking about the children. She begged and borrowed the funds to establish a home for children which she called "My Mother's House." She so named it to allow children to be able to say to their peers when they left school each day, "I'm going to 'my mother's house," rather than, "I'm in foster care because my mother's in jail," or "I'm going to a shelter" or even "I don't have any place to go."

Elaine's sensitivity gives hope to children and their mothers who are often enough on the brink of despair. This is hope writ large -- a hope that says to the children: "Don't give up. Someone really does care. There is a future for YOU."

Your prison ministry initiative also reminds me of the fictionalized but powerful vision of hope that percolates in the movie The Shawshank Redemption.7 How appropriate that a movie about hope should have redemption in its title!

You may recall the story.

Into this prison, governed by a sadistic warden who relishes punishing inmates in the name of a god of vengeance, enters Andy Dufresne. Andy has been framed and sentenced to life in this horrible patch of misery. But Andy refuses to surrender to despair. He imagines a world outside of Shawshank where he hopes one day to own a fishing business.

Meanwhile he keeps himself busy as he plans. An accountant by training, he offers his services to the sinister warden, who accepts them as a way to cheat his way into a fortune. Andy, however, leverages his position for the benefit of the other inmates -- rules are occasionally relaxed, funding for the prison library is obtained. To anyone taking notice, Andy looks like he plans to grown old and die at Shawshank.

But Andy never surrenders his hidden dream, his hope. He lives out Lynch's formula: What he hopes for he doesn't have and cannot see; it is difficult; but he can have it. It remains possible for Andy Dufresne, prisoner at Shawshank, to hope -- even though all the cards seem stacked against him.

When Andy miscalculates the warden's cruelty, he is beaten savagely and placed in the total darkness of solitary confinement for 60 spirit-breaking days. He emerges as a broken man -- or so it seems.

When the other inmates ask how he survived, Andy says, "Hope." Hope. The fragility of his physical appearance belies the strength of his spirit. Not only are Andy's hopes sustained in solitary but they are realized at the end of the story. That, in fact, turns out to be an important but not the most important part of the story. What is of greater importance is that he is able to share the fruit of his hopes with someone else. Even the justice which is effected at the end of the film is for the good of others.

Andy Dufresne held onto a dream, an impossible dream by most people's reckoning, and he lived to see the dream come true with and for others.

I'm intrigued by the fact that this story about hope has redemption in its title. Somehow that is a hand-in-glove perfect fit.

Hope and Depression
This might be an appropriate time to point out that many stories about hope are related to depression. It is often the case that the troubles we face -- the reasons we are called on to hope -- spiral us near the brink of despair. A marriage falls apart, or a loved one dies or is ill; we lose a job or a promotion or a friendship. Sometimes none of these losses affects us directly, but we know the sadness because those in our families or those with whom we are connected are suffering, and a slow depression comes over us.

We struggle to overcome it and most often we do, but that is of little consolation when we are in the thick of it. Although some people have a harder time than others getting through the hassles of life, depression and despair can strike anyone. Sometimes all one can do is live through its pain and suffering in order to come out on the other side, even when the thought of surviving seems remote.

Depression chokes the will to hope. It vitiates the will to carry on. Face to face with depression, even the giants among us knuckle under. The question then becomes how to confront the temptation to give up and how to make it through the tunnel to light. I mentioned earlier the Jesuit guide William Lynch. Let me say now that part of the reason I called him a credible guide was that he was once described as someone who cherishes the presence of hope because he knows the anguish of its loss.8 Lynch offers three important clues to surviving depression and clutching hope with all the power in us. The clues are wishing, friendship and waiting.9

Domestic Violence
The wishing that Lynch speaks of is not airy and evanescent. Nor is it escapism, but rather the way the imagination exercises itself to find a way out of a predicament. Consider, for example, one of the NCCW initiatives from 1994 -- your education and action program in response to domestic violence.

Let's imagine how that gets played out in real life: a woman who has been in a battered relationship for 15 years. Her situation seems hopeless. She judges that she cannot leave the abusive relationship because she has nowhere to go. She wishes it were otherwise (and Lynch would see even this fragile wishing as a sign of hope!), but she has no job skills and no money. She also has the children to think about, and she is sure the abuser will track her down no matter where she hides.

Her tentative wishing is helped along the way by people who create, organize and administer protective shelters for such women. Her wishing is helped by people like you. Lynch has precisely your kind of activity in mind when he speaks of friendship. Friendship says we do not have to strike against despair all by ourselves because there is someone wishing along with us. "Wishing with" bolsters the hope of the one on the line.

If the antidote to despair involves wishing and friendship, it also involves waiting. At rock bottom, hope asks that we cope with obstacles, remain fixed on a goal and that we stand poised, ready to spring if an opportunity presents itself. So the battered woman waits. With the counsel of others, she figures out the right time, the best time -- a week, a month, a few days -- to make her move. "The positive waiting of hope," writes Lynch, "has made up its mind and wishes so strongly that it will wait for what it wants."10

I cannot imagine, reading the history of initiatives of the NCCW, that you have not waited expectantly, impatiently, hopefully for some of your projects to get off the ground and to bear fruit. RESPITE, "Mothers Outreach to Mothers," "Works of Reconciliation," "Discovering and Sharing our Gifts," "The Campaign to End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes" and others -- many others, too long a list to catalogue here -- all of these began with a hope that the status quo was unacceptable; all of these projects wished a vision into being with the help of like-minded soul sisters who said yes. If there's anything about hope that's true, it is that it is a team sport.

The New Testament and Hope
The New Testament, especially the letters of the apostle Paul and the letters of others, support what we've been saying about hope. They bolster our boldness and confidence in what we are doing under hope's inspiration.

When the Letter to the Hebrews says, "We have this (hope) as a sure and steady anchor of the soul" (6:18), the image is familiar -- hope symbolized as an anchor while faith is represented as a cross and charity as a heart -- but it also seems so very right. As waves buffet the unsteady boat on the surface of the water, we know we are attached to an anchor with chains that will not break, fathoms below and fully out of our sight range. And the anchor's durability, tested over time, has been vouched for by others who have sailed through turbulent water sometimes more menacing than what we face.

A line from the popular hymn, "How Can I Keep From Singing" may say it best: "No storm can shake my inward calm while to this Rock I'm clinging." If we imaged God as the rock or Christ as the rock -- an image, incidentally, with ample biblical precedent (cf. Ps. 62:6; 71:3; 89:26; 92:15; 1 Cor. 10:4) -- we might get the idea of the solidity, steadiness, constancy and invincibility of hope.

It often happens, as John Carmody writes in How to Handle Trouble,11 that not only does suffering test hope, but that only when the chips are down and we touch rock bottom do we truly get to know what it's all about. Another writes: "It is precisely de profundis that hope begins to be understood."12 Hope does not disappoint because God is our hope, and it is the nature of God to honor commitments, to lead us through the valley of darkness. Christian hope, quite simply, is based on the undeviating reliability of God.

Now that we know when hope gives proof of its power -- namely, when the going gets really tough -- Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians (15:19-20) tells us to let our imaginations soar. "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead," and now anything is possible!

We are invited to think beyond this life and certainly beyond this century. We are invited to think and to hope beyond fixed parameters, beyond the doubts scattered in our paths, beyond those who think leaving well enough alone is the best course. We are invited to imagine a different world as we enter the next millennium -- and we need desperately to do that because some things are pathetically out of joint on the planet we now inhabit.

Last Sunday, on Sept. 28, 1998, The New York Times published highlights from the U.N. Human Development Report in its "News of the Week in Review" section. The style of the report in itself is interesting. Instead of faceless statistics like per capita gross domestic product or export-import figures, it digs itself into the facts about who has what -- education, food, health care, clean water -- and who has not these things. Published under the title "Kofi Annan's Astonishing Facts!" I offer a sample of only three of them:

Do you find these facts as I do so astonishing that you think you are hearing them wrong as I thought I was reading them wrong?

Probably not. Probably your reaction is that all of these facts are too believable, which is why you and I with you have taken to heart the words from the sixth chapter of Hebrews which asks, commands or maybe begs, that we "seize the hope set before us" (Heb. 6:18).

Seize it, yes, and keep hope practical. Seize it, yes, but share it.

Keep hope alive because as the First Letter of Peter reminds us, "we have been born anew into a living hope " (I Pt. 1:3) and as such it is active, vibrant, ready to make a different tomorrow and into the next millennium as well. We must never forget that hope ceases to be hope unless it is turned outward, unless it touches and does for others. Our role is to be mediators and ambassadors of that hope.13 It would be meaningless if its power were intended only for those within the club, the conference, the council, the inner circle.

So what do we do in the practical order?

Third World Debt
I can't think of a better place to begin than with your initiative to call attention to the Third World debt that has a stranglehold on the developing countries of the world. The religious injunction surrounding the Holy Year and the Holy Father's apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente call for this loud and clear: to cancel debts, to forgive debts, to wipe the slate clean, so that the poor nations on our planet are not buried in a debt that suffocates them.14

"We must never forget that hope ceases to be hope unless it is turned outward, unless it touches and does for others. Our role is to be mediators and ambassadors of that hope."

This is thinking in the big leagues with others who are currently importuning the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to heed the millennial call. This is a project worthy of hope. And it is a crusade that will meet opposition and even, perhaps, amusement by those who know better. Or think they do.

It seems like folly. A waste of time. But it is also an initiative whose time is come. It is a wish that needs to be made on behalf of people who have given up wishing because they think the world has forgotten them. This is a plan that can only be done by networking -- or by what William Lynch would refer to as friendship -- your sense of connectedness with a world that deserves more than the share it's getting. "Hope is truly on the inside of us, but hope is an interior sense that there is help on the outside of us"15 -- and you, NCCW members, are a catalyst for that help.

A joint effort like this -- and it must be joint -- honors the truth that God is the source of hope. This is the same God who is our anchor, our strength, our rock, so our dreams are in good hands. But if God is the source of hope, it is also consoling to remember that the Holy Spirit is its sustaining power, so that the hope we know is the kind of hope that does not dwindle but gathers in force.16

These are peculiar words to describe Hope -- the middle sister -- who lived obscurely in the shadow of her more famous siblings -- words like power, strength, stability, solidity, anchor, rock. Who would ever have imagined that they would be used about Hope?

I guess you did.

You imagined a new life for her and continue to breathe expectations into her.

As NCCW members and affiliates, you are keeping hope alive with your Third World debt initiative through which you give hope to people about to jump ship -- to people who doubt they are attached to an anchor. You keep hope alive with the necessary combination of intelligence and know-how. You keep hope alive by reminding us all, as we stand on the threshold of a new millennium, that there is plenty of distress in the world but that Hope has come out of the shadows to show us the way to make even the formerly unimaginable dreams come true.




Notes

1 William F. Lynch, SJ, Images of Hope (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1965), 32.
2 C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1956), 261.
3 Jill Ker Conway, The Road From Coorain (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 53119.
4 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).
5 Catholic Woman, Vol. 24, No. 2, March-April 1998, Special Section.
6 For the story about Elaine Roulet, CSJ, see Maria Harris, Proclaim Jubilee! A Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century (Louisville, Ky.: John Knox Press, 1996), 68-69.
7 1 am grateful to Patrick Klus for reminding me of the hope connection with this movie.
8 Lynch, 11.
9 Ibid., 129-186.
10 Ibid., 185.
11 John Carmody, How to Handle Trouble (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 169-172.
12 C.F.D. Moule, The Meaning of Hope (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955), 29.
13 Ibid., 52.
14 Tertio Millennio Adveniente, 51.
15 Lynch, 40.
16 Moule, 37.



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