By Ryan LeBlanc

We have occasion to hope.

As on the first morning after the Fall, as on the day of our baptism, God gives us hope.

To receive that hope, let’s begin with recalling to ourselves what it is to hope.

Take a moment to ponder. What is the most hopeful moment in your life?

What it is to hope

We all have different journeys. For some of us, that hopeful moment is also joyful and glorious, that breaking upon us of some new goodness. For others, when we put in the work of reflection, we might find our most hopeful moment occurred under some heavy darkness, before the dawn.

I wondered if I was most hopeful at the births of my children. Pregnancy is a beautiful and blessed time of hope. And worry.

At this point, however, when I think of hope, I remember an awkward, bedside sacrament – the Anointing of the Sick. All sacraments are inherently hopeful, as we receive them with our limited hearts, yet in them we turn to unlimited grace.

But I’d gently suggest that the Anointing of the Sick is the most hopeful of the Seven Sacraments. It offers healing in body and soul, and we so often turn to it when our attempts to cure, or prevent, fall short.

Anointing as the sign of hope

My loved one receiving the Anointing realized fully the hope offered to her in Christ, even when she did not recognize and respond to those who were gathered around her.

Maybe my experience of hope in that moment was a part of what I’ve taken to calling the “splash zone of grace” – when God moves so powerfully through a holy soul and through holy church, that those bearing witness experience in their own hearts the grace that filled and overflowed. One more sign that God’s love is a torrent, not tiny drips we have to squeeze out ourselves.

Maybe I see hope in that moment retroactively. Certainly, grief and compassion were at the forefront of my awareness then. But there’s no question that the peace of that moment had to be born of hope.

Let’s neither dodge nor belabour the point: Death is ugly. I find it repulsive.

The moment when I held anointed hands and kissed an anointed forehead, however, was life. Was beauty. That’s hope.

Because I need to overthink something, I wonder what distinction there is between hope and optimism.

Hope or Optimism?

The world, as I see it, desperately needs to hope. The closest it seems to allow is a begrudging optimism.

I’m pretty sure they aren’t the same thing. For example, I cannot describe my experience of sacrament as optimistic.

Optimism seems to be the anticipation of the unlikely good. Fair enough.

Dying healed, however, does not strike me as particularly optimistic. It is an act of hope, only possible because of Christ.

Hope, then, also looks for the good, and can endure through the evil.

Three keys to understand hope

For now, I see three things about hope that I cannot experience in optimism.

First, hope is in a person, while optimism suggests the mechanics of the material universe will somehow work out in a way we could interpret as positive.

I’m only hopeful in the sense that my spouse will agree to marry me, that my child will receive and return my love, that my friend will be there when and where we agreed to be.

For the great movements of nature, I hope God will give shelter me from the storm or transform me into shelter. And in the end, when I stood by the hospital bed which held suffering and loss, I hoped God would heal my person in heaven and me on Earth, without her.

This suggests the second distinction. Optimism says that I can find a way to live with whatever the universe serves up – and when it serves up muck, optimism is rightly criticized for being unrealistic. It’s my resilience for controlling my attitude in the face of adversity.

Hope does not abide control. We do not hope for things we can afford or manipulate or force.

We hope because we cannot control.

When I prayed over my loved one, the Anointed, I had much better ideas about how to spend a Tuesday evening than dying. I would have written her last chapter much differently – I would have cut long passages of suffering, if I could. A good part of the muck we had shed was attempting to achieve the right outcome to her illness, no matter how unlikely. The ending, then, was always certain, and only when we accepted it, could we hope.

Finally, hope is a choice, an act. It takes effort. Optimism is not in itself an action. You can act optimistically, but you can also remain passive with optimism. You can’t hope unconsciously.

To hope, I need to want to.

Pilgrims of Hope – the Jubilee Year

This year, we hear that pilgrimage is hope (Jubilee 2025: Pilgrims of Hope), which is:

• To set out with our destination in mind, knowing the path will pass through territory we would rather skip over;
• To move towards our destination, accepting the day’s journey as part of the distance between A and B;
• To trust that the welcome at the end is worth every stumble and setback, and to surrender to Jesus, the Anointed One who is with us always.

Who knows?

Maybe the most hopeful moment of our lives is still to come.

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Ryan LeBlanc is a teacher at Bethlehem Catholic High School in Saskatoon and a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Holy Family. His writing is available on his blog at https://ryanleblanc.podia.com/

Catholic Saskatoon News is supported by gifts to the Bishop’s Annual Appeal: dscf.ca.