Homily — Hope

Advent is the time in the church cal­en­dar when we are sup­posed to look ahead, in expec­ta­tion, in hope for redemp­tion. Today at church, the priest, whose hom­i­lies are very lulling, gave me a bit of food for thought about hope. He described hope as a cen­ter from which two pos­si­ble bas­tard [he did­n’t say bas­tard, but it is the right word to use] ver­sions may arise. Despair on one end, and pre­sump­tion on the oth­er.

It is my under­stand­ing that his def­i­n­i­tion of hope is the same as my def­i­n­i­tion of fate. That is, hope is a belief in fate. I think. Per­haps this will make more sense when I describe what he said.

Despair is a twist­ing of hope [fate] into a view that no good can come from our actions, that all that we do will not decrease the amount of woe in the world. Action becomes mean­ing­less there­fore. On the oth­er end, pre­sump­tion says that action is mean­ing­less because no mat­ter what the action, all will come to God’s good end. True hope, appar­ent­ly, lies in the mid­dle ground. We must give our­selves hope by act­ing moral­ly and hav­ing noth­ing but trust and faith in the out­come. The dan­ger appears to be accept­ing the out­come as a con­stant.

This still seems curi­ous, because it while this hope [a faith in effects] seems to be like fate, at the same time we must be the agents that make hope exist.

I think what the priest might have been mean­ing to say is that despair and pre­sump­tion are both exis­ten­tial copouts, false fates. But hope, or the true fate, requires engage­ment. If this is applied to the free-will ver­sus pre­des­ti­na­tion dis­cus­sion it seems that the path is clear. As long as we choose pre­sump­tion or despair as our idea of fate, noth­ing will reach ful­fill­ment. Yet if we are active agents, mak­ing moral and eth­i­cal choic­es regard­less of their effects, then fate will act through us. We are a self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy.