We Can Only Hope

I love to fish, which is pretty surprising since I never catch any fish.  By never, I mean never – the never-ever kind of never.  As a young boy, I fished off a dock at Lake Wallenpaupack with my grandfather’s fishing gear and got pretty good at landing sunnies.  In my teens, I occasionally trolled the wild waters of Verona Park Lake, where ginormous carp were the catch of almost any day.  Nowadays, I spend as much time as I can angling the icy rivers and streams that cascade down and around the Catskill Mountains and the deep-water reservoirs they feed.  They’re loaded with rainbow trout, brown trout and large and small mouth bass, or so I hear.  I’ve been fishing there for five years and haven’t caught a single fish.  It seems that somewhere between my teens and my forties, I lost my fishing finesse.  That is, until last week, when I hauled in eight – that’s right, count ‘em – eight mackerel in one day off the craggy shores of Spruce Point, Maine.  Perhaps my luck is changing.  We can only hope.

                Hope is an interesting emotion.  Google defines hope as “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.”  I like this definition because it emphasizes that hope consists of both expectation and desire.  When we hope, we don’t just want something to happen; we expect it to happen, too.  Hope is an optimistic wish for future happiness that’s grounded in our steadfast belief that our wish will come true.  Hope carries us through disappointments and gives us the strength to persevere until we achieve our desired goal.  If “hope” doesn’t sum up my fishing career, I don’t know what does.

                This bipartite, secular definition of hope is useful in understanding the religious sense of the word as well.  For Catholics, hope is a theological virtue – a habitual disposition to do good that’s infused in the soul by God.[1]   While we usually think of virtues as good habits that we acquire through perseverance – habits we practice to make perfect – we can’t obtain the theological virtues (faith, hope and love) on our own.  They’re given to us by God.   The theological virtues are written on our hearts by God to animate our moral lives so we can merit eternal life.[2]  So it is with hope.  “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness.”[3]  Hope opens our hearts to the expectation of eternal blessing.[4]  Through the virtue of hope, we not only desire eternal happiness with God; we expect it.

                It should be no surprise, then, that people who live in hope of eternal life generally are happier and healthier than their areligious counterparts: they’re resilient; they overcome illness and setbacks quicker; and they’re calmer and more stable when adversity strikes.  I’ve seen it with my own eyes and experienced it for myself.  It’s no wonder that the anchor is the symbol of hope.  While the seas of life rise and fall around us, hope anchors us with the sure expectation that eternally fair skies and calm seas are always around the bend.

                A few weeks back, my youngest daughter asked me why I keep fishing when I never catch any fish.  I explained to her that fishing is an exercise of hope; if I didn’t go fishing with the desire and expectation that I would catch a fish, it would be pointless.  Now she knows that if I had given up on fishing during those dry years, I wouldn’t have had the thrill of catching eight mackerel last week.  It’s the same with life.  Without hope, life would be pointless.  Tremendous kindness, generosity and love run deep.  So as we cast our lines into the murky waters of life, we should always expect and desire an abundant catch of the wonderful things this life and the next have to offer.  We can only hope.

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[1] See Catechism of the Catholic Church at 1803.

[2] Id. at 1813.

[3] Id.at 1817.

[4] Id. at 1818.