MEDITATION ON HOPE

1. WHAT MAY WE HOPE?

The Post-Synodal Exhortation, Ecclesia in Europa, in which John Paul II takes up again the work and the conclusions of the Synod of Bishops in preparation for the Grand Jubilee of 2000, says: “Throughout the Synod, a powerful impulse towards hope gradually became evident. While taking seriously the analyses of the complexity characterizing the Continent, the Synod Fathers saw that 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” (EiE, n. 4).

The most recent Papal magisterium has chosen hope as its central theme. Benedict XVI’s Encyclical, “Spe Salvi”, offers us some precious elements to enrich our reflection on this theological virtue. Apparently, one of his main objectives is to offer a response based on our Christian identity to a universal and not just European need. Suffice it to quote, for example, number 22, where he says: “Again, we find ourselves facing the question: what may we hope? A self-critique of modernity is needed in dialogue with Christianity and its concept of hope. In this dialogue Christians too, in the context of their knowledge and experience, must learn anew in what their hope truly consists, what they have to offer to the world and what they cannot offer. Flowing into this self-critique of the modern age there also has to be a self-critique of modern Christianity” (Spe Salvi, 22).

As we glance at the Congregation worldwide, we have to admit that there is a “growing need for hope” in all our settings, albeit in a different way. Among the many factors that make it difficult for us to look at the future with enthusiasm are the shortage of vocations, except in some Salesian geographical regions; the fragile formation of the young generations; the problems of present-day youth, aggravated by external factors like violence, drug-trafficking, and old and new forms of poverty; and sometimes, on a deeper level, the waning of apostolic passion and the adoption of models of religious life far from the ideals of the Gospel. In various portions of his letter convoking the Chapter, the Rector Major presents as challenges some of the features of this disquieting situation of the Congregation (cf. AGC 394, p. 9-11. 17-20, and passim).

In the run-up to the GC26, a similar feeling has surfaced. The very insistence of the Congregation on “starting afresh from Don Bosco to reawaken the heart of every Salesian” with regard to his charismatic identity and apostolic zeal presupposes the existence of such a situation and calls us to be on the alert.

We know very well that hope is generated by faith, and sustains love. But, there can also be a situation in which faith, based as it is on a concrete historical reality, can paradoxically remain closed to hope, and shut itself up within the pain of remembrance (etymologically: nostalgia) and lamentation over the past.

I think we can see this situation clearly reflected in the biblical narrative of Gideon’s vocation:

As Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press, to hide it from the Midianites, t¹²he angel of the Lord appeared to him and said to him, ‘The Lord is with you, you mighty warrior.’ ¹³Gideon answered him, ‘But sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us, saying, “Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?” But now the Lord has cast us off, and given us into the hand of Midian.’ ¹⁴Then the Lord turned to him and said, ‘Go in this might of yours and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian; I hereby commission you.’ ¹⁵He responded, ‘But sir, how can I deliver Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.’ ¹⁶The Lord said to him, ‘But I will be with you, and you shall strike down the Midianites, every one of them’ (Judges 6,11-16).

Undoubtedly, Gideon has faith; he is convinced of God’s salvific intervention in favour of his people… but in the past; what he lacks is hope, the belief that God has not abandoned his people but continues to be the “God-with-us”, inviting them to look to the future with confidence. The upshot is that Gideon is called to collaborate with God, and not just lament over his apparent “absence” or withdrawal of support.

We too can be like the People of God in exile, recalling the divine marvels of the past (and as they did, we too can perhaps forget all too easily our own responsibility):

We have heard with our ears, O God, our ancestors have told us, what deeds you performed in their days, in the days of old, you with your own hand (…); yet now you have rejected us and abased us, and have not gone out with our armies (…) All this has come upon us, yet we have not forgotten you, or been false to your covenant. Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from your way (Ps. 44, 2.10.18-19).

2.HOPE IN THE POSTMODERN ERA

There is no doubt that in the contemporary world, and especially in the existing “youth culture”, hope has not become any easier today.

Phenomenologically speaking, there are three fundamental characteristics of hope we can point to, in so far as it is a human disposition:

* hope tends of its very nature towards the future; in this way it reveals the inner dynamic of the human being as a forward movement: “while there’s life, there’s hope”. Without forgetting Pandora’s myth, we can say, with Aristotle: “Hope is the dream of a man ever on the alert.”

* hope is always lived within a positive outlook, for not everything that comes along is “worthy of hope”: it can be an object of fear or anxiety instead;

* hope includes a “passive” element (waiting), but also a positive disposition on the part of one who lives this period of waiting (hope).¹

We have to recognize that, side by side with this inner movement towards the future embedded in the depths of the human being, there is also a danger of his not living the present moment in a positive way. In this connection, Pascal says:

We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past in order to hold on to it and stop its too rapid flight. It is madness to wander in the times which are not ours and to ignore the only one which belongs to us; it is silliness to dream of the times which do not exist any more and thoughtlessly to overlook the one which alone exists… We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we do, it is only to strike a light for future use. The present is never our end (goal). The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so”.²

Unfortunately, the human experience of time has become particularly problematic in the postmodern era.

In a conference he gave the Superiors General, the Rector Major offered the following analysis:

The human being, although always living in the present (this is a self-evident truth), is a “being of the future” (E. Bloch, W. Pannenberg): By his very nature, he is faced with a utopia, something that has not as yet “not happened” in our world and in history. This can be said, a fortiori, of the younger generation which carries this approach to the future in its very psychosomatic identity, written into the “humblest” cell.

This is why we see a tragedy in the postmodern situation: the threat of the future that weighs on humanity places us, especially our younger generation, before an existential contradiction: on the one hand, with the irresistible need for a future horizon, and on the other, with the lack of this horizon. If we add to this the rejection of the past on the part of today’s youth culture, we can understand the sensation of being “locked in” in the small space that the present provides, with no solution to enable one to “experience the fleeting moment” (l’attimo fuggente).

This threat shows up in a double way: on the one hand, in what J. Moltmann called “the loss of atomic innocence” from Hiroshima onwards:³ we know – and recent news items remind us – that for some decades, and for the first time in the history of the world and of mankind (from what we know), there exists the real possibility (depending concretely on the decisions made by some) that could see the entire human race disappear as a consequence of a nuclear conflagration. The fact that the leaders of nations may reach some possible agreement in this regard does not eliminate the danger. As the same Moltmann said, we can never get back our lost innocence. “The era we live in, even if it were to last forever, is the final era of mankind… We are living in the end-times, that is when each day could bring about the end.”⁴

On the other hand – and not totally unconnected with what went before – we find this threat in universal and irreversible ecological decline: from air pollution, the loss of drinkable water, and the destruction of forests to the giddy exploitation of unrenewable energy. As Moltmann again said, “We are all equal…faced with the ozone layer.”

This “suppression from outside” of future horizons is a typical fact of our times, and is fundamental to the understanding of our obsessive attachment to the present, and the need for immediate “satisfactions” which are characteristic of the postmodern era: since it is not the same to “want to live ‘today’ “ in the perspective of tomorrow, anchored in today, because maybe tomorrow will not exist… Some days ago a newspaper, writing of a review of a book by the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész, Literature Nobel Prize-winner, used this expression: “Is it possible to have children after Auschwitz?” (which recalls a famous sentence: “Is it possible to believe in God after Auschwitz”?). It is a question that today so many young people ask when facing marriage and family: not with the illusion of earlier times, but with the anxiety of facing the future touching them; is it worth bringing new beings into the world? Undoubtedly this “privation of the future”, in a totally different sense, also affects consecrated life, especially the new generations.

In this respect, modernity can be described as the disposition of someone who rejects the past, and projects himself towards the future wherein he lodges all his expectations; postmodernity, instead, in so far as it is a reaction to ingenuous modern optimism, is akin to “placing oneself” as serenely as possible in the present and living the “carpe diem”. A very “pertinent” text from the Bible is the witness given by the elderly man, Eleazar, during the Macchabean war:

‘Such pretence is not worthy of our time of life,’ he said, ‘for many of the young might suppose that Eleazar in his ninetieth year had gone over to an alien religion, and through my pretence, for the sake of living a brief moment longer, they would be led astray because of me, while I defile and disgrace my old age (…) Therefore, by bravely giving up my life now, I will show myself worthy of my old age and leave to the young a noble example of how to die a good death willingly and nobly for the revered and holy laws” (2 Mac 6, 24-25. 27-28).

3. HOPE IN BIBLICAL REVELATION

In contrast with other conceptions of life and history, Israel’s experience, moulded in the Bible, presents God as a “God of exoduses”, an advocate of leaving the listless security of the present for a future that is certainly promising (in the fullest sense of the word, i.e., as the object of a promise) but always insecure because if there is no faith, all the talk of an exodus or a movement towards the future makes no sense. “¹⁵If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. ¹⁶But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them” (Heb 11, 15-16). Here, then, is a question to put to ourselves: can we say that our God, in like manner, is “not ashamed” to call himself our God?

Because of her faith in God, the whole of Israel’s history was a constant straining towards the future, clearly marked by a confidence in the accomplishment of the promises made by a faithful God (fides – fiducia – fidelitas – spes: faith – confidence – faithfulness – hope).

Similarly, the lack of faith turns into despair and desperation, the two sides of a coin, and results in a hankering after the past: “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger” (Ex 16, 3 and passim).

The entire history of God’s People is permeated by God’s promise. In spite of Israel’s infidelity and ingratitude, the pre-exilic prophets, and Jeremiah in particular, while threatening God’s punishment and the inefficacy of the Covenant because of this infidelity (cf. Jer 13; 19), always announced a New Covenant (Jer 31, 31ff.; Ez 36, 24ff.; Dt Is.).

In the extraordinary vision described in Ez 37, the dry bones are an eloquent symbol: “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ ¹²Therefore prophesy, and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel’.” (Ez 37, 11-12)

In the New Testament, more than a single text, it is the Christ-event in itself which is the definitive (eschatological) accomplishment of God’s promise. But, the trial and the death of Jesus show us dramatically that God’s thoughts are not like man’s thoughts (cf. Is 55, 8ff.).

Instead, for him who believes in the “God of Jesus Christ”, “hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. 6 For while we were still sinners, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly (…) ⁷⁸God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5, 5ff.). Therefore, “blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, ⁴and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Pt 1, 3-4).

It is noteworthy to find mention made of three periods of time: the past of faith, the future of hope, and the present of God’s faithfulness and our Christian commitment to love (cf. the following verses, 6-9). Instead, as the Holy Father points out: “Paul reminds the Ephesians that before their encounter with Christ they were ‘without hope and without God’ in the world (Eph 2, 12)” (Spe Salvi, 2). This is probably the text most often quoted in the Encyclical: it appears in numbers 3, 5, 23 and 27 – in different contexts, obviously.

One of the books of the NT which clearly expresses the relationship between the three theological virtues is the Letter to the Romans; here are some of its fundamental texts on hope:

+ In the first place, the Letter sets before us the figure of Abraham seen from this perspective: “Hoping against hope, he believed and so became the father of many nations”(Rom 4,18).

+ A second text presents, conversely, a string of characteristic Christian virtues: “Suffering produces endurance, ⁴and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, ⁵and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5, 3b-5).

+ A little further, in chapter 8, we are reminded that hope looks towards the future: “For in^* hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes^* for what is seen? ²⁵But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom 8, 24-25).

+ Towards the end of the Letter, there are two notable texts in this regard: “Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope” (Rom 15, 4). And the concluding words: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Rom 15, 13).

Another of the New Testament books that speaks eloquently of hope is the Letter to the Hebrews. The Pope dwells on this Letter too in his Encyclical, especially on two of its passages, 10, 34 and 11, 1; he offers a broad, and even polemical, exegesis of the latter text (Spe Salvi, 7-9).

Let me conclude this short biblical reflection with a beautiful, albeit brief, expression of St. Paul: “Love is patient (…); [it] hopes all things” (1 Cor 13, 4.7). St. Paul is actually reminding us that love always goes beyond hope itself, but precisely in order to hope for everything and always. In this sense, paraphrasing Hans Urs von Balthasar, we can say that “love alone is worthy of hope”.

4.DON BOSCO, MAN OF HOPE

It is important to note that, in our Rule of life, there is a linguistic inclusion which embraces our Constitutions in their entirety. Article 1 points to how the certainty of our faith that our mission is not a human venture but comes from God, constitutes “the support for our hope” (C 1). And the last article does not speak of God’s initiative, but of our collaboration with him and with the mission he entrusts to us: our fidelity is “for the poor and the little ones a pledge of hope” (C 196).

Even if it is not mentioned explicitly, hope is very much present in the articles describing the Salesian spirit, especially 17-19. As in the global presentation of the evangelical counsels, the concluding phrase embraces a vision of faith and a commitment: the Salesian is “an educator who proclaims to the young ‘new heavens and a new earth’, awakening in them hope and the dedication and joy to which it gives rise” (C 63).

In all this there is manifested our sonship of Don Bosco, a man who had an extraordinary capacity for hope, or to put it better, a man who was able to integrate to perfection the three aspects of a Christian’s relationship with God: faith, hope and charity.

Rather than remain on the level of generic or rhetorical statements, we shall mention, briefly and schematically, three aspects – the temperamental, the educative, and the theological - which describe how our Father, Don Bosco, lived the virtue of hope.

Blending nature and grace (cf. C 21) and without forgetting that both are God’s gifts, we speak of a temperamental disposition in him towards hope: he showed an extraordinary ability in converting difficulties into challenges that motivated and urged him onward; he showed, till the last moment of his life, an enthusiasm and a hopefulness originating from his passionate and apostolic love for the young. Those were certainly not easy times in which he lived; yet he never bewailed them nor did he hark back nostalgically to the times gone by (cf. C 17).

Furthermore, hope was an educative disposition in Don Bosco. Whoever works with children and youth needs hope more than anything else; he must experience the truth expressed in Psalm 126: “Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall return with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves” (v. 6).

The only thing is that, in education, the “return” does not take place within a few days or months, but, in the best of cases, after many years. Therefore, waiting and hoping are indispensable in educative work.

In this field (of education), we again come across the relationship between hope and love: only the one who loves can hope (in the deepest sense of the word). Once more, we have here an echo of the Pauline phrase: “love… hopes all things” (1 Cor 13, 7). I would like to go deeper into it, but using just one sentence which is not a simple play on words but an expression of a marvellous reality: only the one who loves us, believes us to be better than we are, and can place his “hope” in us; however, we can be better than what we are, only if someone loves us… This is what Don Bosco incarnated in himself in an extraordinary manner.

Finally - and it could not be otherwise in a saint like him - we find deep down in him an attitude of hope which was not limited to this world and to this life, but which did not prevent him from living the present moment intensely, keeping his gaze resolutely directed towards heaven and his feet firmly planted on the ground. The words uttered by the Servant of God, John Paul II, in his Apostolic Exhortation, Vita Consecrata, seem to have taken their inspiration from Don Bosco: “We need to trust in God as if everything depended on him and, at the same time, to work generously as if everything depended on us” (VC 73).

In his Spiritual Testament, Don Bosco wrote these moving words: “Adieu, dear children, adieu. I wait for you in heaven (…) I leave you here on earth, but only for a short time. I hope the infinite mercy of God will enable us all to meet one day in heaven. There I await you.” Here we also come across the community aspect, on which His Holiness insists a great deal: “Our hope is always essentially also hope for others; only thus is it truly hope for me too” (Spe Salvi, 48).

5.TO CONCLUDE: A PARABLE…

I came across a very simple but delightful and suggestive story which I would like to narrate to you. An elderly lady was very lucid as she approached the moment of her death. Her good friend, who kept close to her, asked: “Have you any wish to be fulfilled after your death?” The old lady replied: “There’s one thing. I want to be buried with a fork in my hand.” “A fork?” asked her friend, surprised by the request. “Yes,” she repeated, “a fork! In all my years of attending dinners, I always remember that when the dishes of the main course were being cleared, the fork was always kept because I knew that something better was coming… So, I just want people to see me there in that casket with a fork in my hand, and I want them to wonder ‘What’s with the fork?’ Then I want you to tell them in my name: “Because she well knew that the best is yet to come!”

In reality, this is the deepest motivation of our life and our work - what Don Bosco called, in all his simplicity, a “piece of paradise” in the Salesian garden: “Death for the Salesian is made bright by the hope of entering into the joy of his Lord” (C 54).

The Office of Readings in Spanish for departed Salesians has a hymn that expresses this truth in a simple and inspiring way:

Think of what it will be:

To leap ashore, and find you are in heaven!

To pass from the storms of life

to endless peace!

To grasp an arm, and find, as you go along,

that it is God’s arm!

To fill your lungs with pure air…

a divine air!

Giddy with happiness to hear a cherubim say:

“This is never-ending joy!”

To open your eyes and ask what’s going on,

and hear God say to you: “You’ve reached home!”

Oh! What immense delight

to immerse myself in your ocean!

to close my eyes and begin to see;

to stop my heart and start to love!