Hope and Trust: in whom and in what?

A blessing on the man who puts his trust in the Lord, but a curse on the man who puts his trust in man! [cf Isaiah 17:5-8] Here we find all our trust issues and it is this issue of trust that underpins the virtue of hope for hope is dashed when that in which we trusted has betrayed us or let us down! So let us consider what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say on the theological virtue of Hope in paragraph 1817:

Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit. "Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful" [Heb 10:23].

Consider that Hope is a virtue requiring it to be practiced over and over again until it becomes a habit; but it is only a virtue if it is a hope in what is good and not in what is evil. The virtue of Hope that makes it theological is based on us desiring the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as the foundation of our true and lasting happiness, but it is also based on the knowing of promises that were made and knowing that those promises were kept. Here this desire requires of us to think about heaven and eternal life, to visualise them, to meditate on them, to dwell on them, to read about them, to imagine them but also to know about the promises that God made and how he kept those promises.

Peter Kreeft using C S Lewis’ writings said that many Moderns do not find heaven interesting and he explains why:

The glory has departed. We moderns have lost much of medieval Christendom's faith in Heaven because we have lost its hope of Heaven, and we have lost its hope of Heaven because we have lost its love of Heaven. And we have lost its love of Heaven because we have lost its sense of Heavenly glory.

Medieval imagery (which is almost totally biblical imagery) of light, jewels, stars, candles, trumpets, and angels no longer fits our ranch-style, supermarket world. Pathetic modern substitutes of fluffy clouds, sexless cherubs, harps and metal halos (not halos of light) presided over by a stuffy divine Chairman of the Bored are a joke, not a glory. Even more modern, more up-to-date substitutes—Heaven as a comfortable feeling of peace and kindness, sweetness and light, and God as a vague grandfatherly benevolence, a senile philanthropist—are even more insipid (‘Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Heaven - But Never Dreamed of Asking’ by Peter Kreeft, [1982, Ignatius Press])

The subject of Heaven is only kept alive and kept before our minds, hearts, bodies and souls through Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture wherein the Church has it carved, painted, signified, symbolised, printed, ritualised, prayed, publically or personally celebrated, taught, explained, proclaimed and preached. In so doing the heart is painted by the colours, contours, forms, shapes and sounds of that far distant country that is at the other end of all our horizons and from which Christ has come, who was sent from that seemingly Far Kingdom at his birth and returned from the seemingly Far Kingdom after his death when he rose like the new dawn of a new sun to show us all what lies beyond the veil that separates this world from the next. John Henry Newman wrote the following about the veil that separates the Visible World from the Invisible World where the term ‘numberless objects’ referred to angels etc (in his PS vol.iv, sermon 13):

“…..in spite of this universal world which we see, there is another world, quite as far- spreading, quite as close to us, and more wonderful; another world all around us, though we see it not, and more wonderful than the world we see, for this reason if for no other, that we do not see it. All around us are numberless objects, coming and going, watching, working or waiting, which we see not: this is that other world, which the eyes reach not unto, but faith only.”

So hope also touches on the invisible realites through the theological virtue of Faith. But the currency of this hope is trust. Moderns are brought up on a motto derived from the French Mathematician, Rene Descartes, ‘I doubt in order to believe’, not surprisingly his philosophy of methodic doubt, like many moderns today, never got him out of his head! But Mediaeval thinkers formed working men and peasants, stone mansons and carpenters to go out of their heads and stretch out into the heavens to make the soaring spires of Gothic cathedrals because their minds were formed by philosophers like St Augustine, St Anselm and St Thomas Aquinas who had a different motto based on an intellectual principle of trust: Credo ut intelligam [I believe in order to understand].

Now if the Biblical principle of trust is supported by this intellectual principle of trust, the Biblical principle of trust is founded on the concrete history of the God who keeps his promises which Scott Hahn wonderfully describes in his book ‘A Father Who Keeps His Promises: God’s Covenant Love In Scripture’ [1998, Published by Servant]. It is the story of salvation revealed in the Scriptures and continued through the History of the Church in which Our Lord Jesus Christ, as the Word made Flesh, fulfills the promises of his Heavenly Father and continues to fulfill these promises in the life and members of the Church of God as both Our Lady and the Saints testify in both their lives and in their appearances to the Holy People of God down through the ages.

Talking of trust as the currency of hope, we find that the phrase ‘In God We Trust’ had been put on American coins since the civil war but in 1956 President Eisenhower made it the motto for America and soon after that it was printed on all paper currency in the US. However, to trust in God is for many very difficult because we cannot trust what we do not know. Many do not know what is and what is not meant by the term ‘God’, many do not know God, many do not know the story of God who acts in history and many do not know the full story of salvation. A story where the prophets announced God’s promises to the first born of the nations, the Jews, and announced also that these promises would draw in all the nations. It is this that Our Lord Jesus, as true God and true Man, came to realise and fulfill for both Jew and Gentile so as to forge together a new Israel, a new People, a new Creation which would be the Church; the Empire of Christ the King and Our Lady, the Queen [Gebirah].

Now if we do not know this story then how can we trust the Lord? And if we do not trust the Lord then we will end up trusting something else. And if we follow such false trusts we will always end up in the valley of tears, as Isaiah himself warned when he prophecied, and not just described, the destinations that false trusts will bring us to at the end:

‘A curse on the man who puts his trust in man, who relies on things of flesh, whose heart turns from the Lord. He is like a dry scrub in the wastelands, if good comes, he has no eyes to see it, he settles in the parched places of the wilderness, a salt land, unihabited’ [Isaiah 17:5-6].

We all have trust issues. Our trust issues often come from an experience of parents who hurt us and who did not keep their promises. But all parents hurt their children and when we come to be parents [be it natural or spiritual], we too will hurt and disappoint our children. But woe to the woke generation who wallow in that victimhood where they never let go of the pride of the wounded ones, for they end up never forgiving, never forgetting and never growing up. All because they never face the fact that they too have hurt others, done wrong to others and they too have disapppointed others - starting with their own parents and family members!

Growing up starts with recognising our own part in the problem of evil, of injustice, of hurt and of disappointments and it is called Original Sin. When we face our part in the evil that bedevils the world than we can first recognise our real guilt and our real powerlessness. It is then that we will come to know that no worldly power, no pleasures of the flesh and no fame or glory will free us from this guilt and this powerlessness. We need to look up for a higher power, as every member of any addiction support structure knows. When we search for this higher power we may begin to look up from this world and look through the veil of this world and discover what the prophets knew and proclaimed and what Our Lord came to show and prove, namely, that it is our Heavenly Father who alone does not break his promises but fulfils them and he alone it is who saves us from the perenniel problem of evil, sin and death.

It is only when we do this, and only then, that we begin to grow up! For trust in God takes us out of ourselves, out of our adolescent narcissism and wokeness and up and out into that reality that the prophets knew and that Our Lord Jesus proved by his life, death and resurrection. Life is not about you! But Life is about what God has in store for you and for me, if only we put our trust in him and actively hope in him in every breath we take and every move we make and upon every day we awake.