Hope, a flowering tree in our daily garden

Far from false hopes or disappointed illusions, hope is a rebound for the heart, a motor to move forward and the assurance that our present and future life has meaning.

I don't know if you're like me, but there are certain words that I only have to think of to provoke a physical reaction: a flush of heat invades me, my eyes start to shine and my heart beats chamade... The word hope has this effect on me.

Hope, not to be confused with illusions

Ah, hope! Madness for some, source of life for others! Madness, of course, when we confuse hope and illusions, even if it is true that it is not always easy to distinguish: it happens that we have built our hope on illusions and it is as she melts into disillusion.

But the hope, the true one, is that which makes Michelangelo say: God gave a sister in memory and he called her Hope, or the one that used to make pregnant women say that they were in hope. While illusion leads to sadness, sometimes even to death, hope, like women, carries life within itself and communicates it around it.

More than hope

We sometimes use indistinctly hope and hope, but while hope is simply the fact of hoping, of awaiting with confidence a happy event, the second term implies a disposition of the mind, that is, the choice to trust in the to come up. Hope is trust in motion.

For example, all winter I looked at the gaunt magnolia tree in my garden, not sure if it would bloom again in the spring, but I hoped that its flowers would make me happy in the spring. So much for hope. Hope, on the other hand, made me rely on my experience of previous years to have confidence that it would flourish.

Comfort for everyday life

Many biblical texts refer to hope, such as that which compares it to an anchor (Heb. 6,19). This image reminds us that hope is rooted in my daily reality. On the theological level, our hope finds its finality in our salvation and is therefore associated with faith: since we believe in God, we have the hope of eternal life. But hope also touches our daily lives, it pushes us forward, allows us to rise up with joy in our hearts, makes us believe in the future.

All the dominant figures in the Bible have experienced hope: they believed and hoped, even if at times they only greeted from afar what they had placed their trust and hope in (Heb. 11,13, 1). The apostle Paul goes even further when he says that only three things remain: faith, hope and love (13,13 Cor. XNUMX). Hope is not an illusion, for it has one foot in faith and another in love. Hope believes, and grows, because it loves.

A notion that fluctuates?

Hope is this certainty that everything can always change, that there is no fatality. Sometimes our hope is a hair's breadth away and it takes a lot of courage not to be desperate. At other times, on the other hand, hope is great and bright as a spring morning. But its strength does not depend on its greatness. It depends on our trust in God and in others, and on our ability to love: to love ourselves, to love those around us and simply to love life!

V.Rochat

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Article originally published in October 2021.