Hope is Charity's Teacher

This weekend I had the privilege of speaking with Knoxville Catholic High School students about how to “Be More.” Inevitably I leaned on my old friends Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to speak to these young people about what it means to be a “thing.” Equipped with an acorn and the image of an oak tree, I proceeded to demonstrate the dual nature of all things as having both act and potency. It is an amazing thing to look into a perplexed and captivated high school student’s eyes when you are traversing new territory with them. I love thinking. I love seeing other people think. For a moment it makes us aware of another’s soul. Perhaps the best combination is when we think together—for it is then we know our souls are not venturing into the great unknown alone. That is the benefit of the Church, the Communion of the Saints; indeed, it is as a beloved professor once told me, “Never do theology alone. It will only turn out bad for you and God.”

As I was speaking to these young people about sanctification I used the familiar process from St. Paul: faith, hope, and charity. We begin all conversion by faith. We must first believe. Then we must truly believe in the promise of that belief—trusting totally in God’s Providence to provide the elements our faith espouses. Only then can we engage in great acts of charity. Only then. You see, I think most of us, at least myself, want so badly to change the world that we get in too big a hurry. We want to go from acorn to oak, from faith to charity, and just skip all the intermediate steps. While the world may see this impatience as admirable, it actually demonstrates a certain spiritual decay. How are we to love the world until we trust in God’s love? Whose love are we loving the world with? It was at this point in my presentation that I felt my own words convicting and convincing myself.

Hope is not one of my strong suits. Hope is the virtue that asks us to relinquish ourselves to the strength of God exclusively; to commit ourselves to the total vulnerability of His Will. It is the theological virtue that demands the most patience—it asks us not for a simple ascent to a set of truths or to a certain set of actions. Instead, it asks us for a series of inactions—it asks us for our time to be put to God’s use, to prayer, to trust, to surrender. Recent events in my life have forced me to reconcile my lack of hope in life. It is easy to disguise holiness through strong faith and what seem to be acts of charity. But without hope no work can be charitable. The difference between a charitable work and a good work is the presence of God’s Love. Hope is the only way we come to personally know God’s Love; and without that knowledge we have nothing to offer a situation but manipulation, at best.

The journey toward hope is not easy. It is actually very unsettling. Hoping becomes what Chesterton describes in his story The Man Who Was Thursday as “ the sensation that the cosmos had turned exactly upside down, that all trees were growing downwards and that all stars were under [Syme’s] feet. Then came the opposite conviction. For the last twenty-four hours the cosmos had really been turned upside down.” You see, in our pride, we see the world as we wish—we want our feet on the ground because we believe that it is there that we possess the control. We are happy being in a world where upwards is the way to go, for it is then we can pick the degree and trajectory of the climb. Yet this is not reality. Reality is that all is under the Providence and control of God. We are not happily seated by gravity, but levitating by God’s Grace. Our footholds are the Heavens. “All men are hanging on the mercy of God,” as Chesterton writes in another work. Hope is accepting this view. It refuses the comforts of the prevailing worldly paradigm. All is not as it seems, yet all will be well. Because God is in control. This is hope. And this is, like many other things Christ demands of us, a “hard teaching” (John 6:60).

There is a great bumper-sticker that reads, “Jesus is my co-pilot.” I’ve heard it said that if Jesus is your co-pilot, you ought switch seats with Him. We must give ourselves up. We must decrease that He may increase. For it is Christ that will make all things good, right, and well. Not us. It is He who loves supremely. Thus, if it is charity we seek to do, why imagine ourselves capable? Let Christ do it! Hope is this process of shrinking our will, our egos, our pride. The promises of Christ that we pray to be made worthy of derive from a docility that only the selfless and Christ-centered exhibit. We are worthy when we are willing to say, “Yes!” or “Do it unto me according to thy Word.” We love only when we have stopped being ourselves and let Christ love us and love the world through us. Acorns only become oak trees by shedding themselves of the security of their shells. Only by letting the soil influence them, by letting the rain invade their interior, by bursting forth into an unknown, uncertain world and trusting they find the Light, the acorn shows us the glory and exaltation of the thing.

Learning to hope is capsizing and captivating. It will rock your world because your world must be rocked. God will shake all things away until only He the unshakable remains (Heb. 12:26-27). Hoping is Charity’s teacher. It teaches us what love is by showing us how to trust in God’s Love. When we come to know this we are certain and secure in the greatest Love. From there we know how to share and what to share and know not to count the costs; for Hope teaches us that despite it all, God’s Love is real and that it will remain evermore. As we learn to Hope we learn what it means to be loved. In Charity we learn to love. Faith merely teaches us to know that God is love without the experience of it. Hope is so vital because it takes us from the theoretical nature of faith to the personal testimony of Hope. As a heroine of mine, Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “Abstractions, formulas, laws will not do here. We have to have stories. It takes a story to make a story. It takes a story of mythic dimensions; one which belongs to everybody; one in which everybody is able to recognize the hand of God and imagine its descent upon himself. Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a definition of faith than it is if we have trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac.” The problem with stories is they take time; they involve intricate plots, character development, awkward settings and scenarios. But it is an essential stage toward the pathway to Charity.

Oak trees don’t just appear ex nihilo. They are the product of docility to the elements of God’s creative power. No acorn lasts—if it refuses to take root, it will inevitably rot or be gobbled up by a squirrel. The course of human life begins at faith, then demands the metamorphosis of hope, only to arrive at the life of charity. There are no short-cuts to charity, for like the oak, it doesn’t simply appear ex nihilo. Charity is the product of docility to the Will of God. We only come to know it as we faithfully and hopefully forget ourselves. Faithful-do-gooders try to foil the three-step process of St. Paul by jumping the gun. Without Hope their heart is not correctly aligned to the acts they perform—which is just as important, if not more important, as the act, itself. As opposed to being faithful-do-gooders let us be hopeful-God’s-Will-doers. This will produce charitable results. It will transform our hearts. It will change our entire perspective of reality so that, despite the gloom of the situation, two things will prove possible, both of which are intricately related. We can love. And we will never despair. Never.