Faith-Filled Reflections at the Beginning of the Jubilee of Hope
By Ryan Brady
“Whatever our state of life, we cannot live without these three dispositions of the soul, namely, to believe, to hope and to love.”St. Augustine
Could there be any other kind of pilgrim but a pilgrim of hope? I do not believe so. What, except hope, is the mysterious pull on the pilgrim towards his goal? What is the blood in his veins, the light in his hand, the aid to push on to his journey’s end, if not hope? If hope were not given to simultaneously pull and push him on through the worst of days, he would never make it to the end. The pilgrim cannot go on without hope. He might not even be able to start.
I’ve walked many miles as a Creatio missionary guide, leading many pilgrimages, and each and every time, I knew that I could make it to my goal. I knew that one way or another, I’d make it through, and the need to push through tired feet and sore muscles would end on the steps of whatever church I was walking to. But I could not conjure up hope for my own salvation. I had hope on a pilgrimage, but I could not conjure up much hope on the pilgrimage.
The Church understands hope both as a basic appetite and as an infused virtue. The former is something like an emotion that may or may not spur us on to the hoped-for thing, and the latter is a Divine gift by which we respond to what we know of God’s goodness. To the extent that hope is that natural appetite, it lives within the realm of natural possibility. To the extent that it is the true, highest theological hope, it can bring us beyond what is natural and into God’s infinite, brilliant promises.
That hope is given and is absolutely necessary if we’re going to be brought beyond our limited, fallen nature.
Sometime last year, on a long walk through Spain, I met a man I’ll call Lawrence (name changed). Lawrence was a good man and, in many ways, a great participant to have on a Creatio trip. However, he hardly participated in group activities and seemed to shy away from engaging with the spiritual parts of the trip (prayer, Mass, formation talks, etc.). One day, about midway through the trip, I thought it best to stick with him for the morning. Though light, the conversation was fine for a while. But it eventually hit a wall. Despite our physical motion forward, there was quite clearly something standing between us and Santiago de Compostela, our end goal.
Lawrence slowly, yet frankly, revealed that he was mired in his attachment to a particular recurring sin. As a result, he could hardly see a way to engage with what he knew to be good and true in the faith. Countless confessions, prayers, techniques and tears later, he had not shaken off the chains in the slightest and made it quite clear that he saw no way it would ever happen when he said he’d mostly stopped going back for God’s apparently endless but powerless mercy and didn’t “know if [he] even believe[d] any of this stuff.” On that day, with many miles behind us but many more to go, I found myself walking next to a pilgrim without hope.
What followed from that moment was one of my more dramatic moments as a missionary guide, and whether it has truly borne fruit for him, only God knows. Regardless, it was my honest attempt to speak to someone in a position I had found myself in many times before. I practically yelled at him. Facing down this despair, finally from the outside rather than within, I broke out in a kind of passion I had scarcely expressed before. By the grace of God, it managed to come out in a manner that stirred up the beginnings of true hope in each of us.
The particulars of what I said ranged from an expression of brotherhood in the struggle to helpful resources. Still, they ultimately crescendoed into the only thing that actually matters: Christ meant all that he said, has the power to achieve it, and is, therefore, the supreme and transcendent hope of every single solitary human being from the holiest to the most depraved.
Lawrence, for all his sin and struggle, desolation and despair, was still walking the Camino. He was still called ever onward and upwards by Christ, his king and redeemer, and so was I. After tasting even just a moment of that hope, which both of us often struggled to see in our meager faith, he made it to the cathedral in Santiago with a joy he had not had at the beginning, a joy which brought him straight to both the confession and communion lines for the first time in months. Many people make it to the cathedral plaza — and that’s the physical end — but pilgrimage ends in Christ, and Lawrence would not have gotten there without hope. He would not have gotten there wallowing in that strange, sad mix of shame, disbelief and despair in which the limits of his natural strength — and natural hope — had left him.
This year, I have no doubt many will visit Rome and walk through the Jubilee doors on a whim, without knowing what they are doing. Our churches and holy sites have been filled with this spirit for a long time. But once again, I do not think there is any such thing as a pilgrim without hope — not a true pilgrim, at least. The Christian does not reach his destination without hope, even just the smallest morsel of it. It is absolutely and utterly necessary for the journey, no matter his physical effort. How would he even know where he was going without it? Human hope can get you to Rome. Hope can get you lots of places. It can sustain you for most accomplishments in this world. But it cannot get you any farther; it cannot bring you beyond guilt, despair and death to the heights of holiness and sanctity.
If we are to be “pilgrims of hope” this Jubilee year, it must be that highest hope. We must have the kind of hope that sees beyond the end of the year’s pilgrimage and to the glorious, shining destination of the pilgrimage, for there is no true Christian pilgrim without hope.
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