Again Jesus spoke to them saying, “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
—Jn 8:12
[A]nd hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
—Rom 5:5
We’ve spoken frankly so far about the American landscape as we now know it. Some of the words have been difficult. But candor is not an enemy of love. And real hope begins in honesty.
The current spirit of our country inclines us to be troubled. It’s a sensible temptation. How can any one person or small group of people make a difference? How can we change and renew things so that our children grow up in a better world? We come back to a question suggested at the start of this book: How can we live in joy, and serve the common good as leaven, in a culture that no longer shares what we believe?
The answer to that question springs from a simple historical fact: On a quiet Sunday morning two thousand years ago, God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. This small moment, unseen by any human eye, turned the world upside down and changed history forever. It confirmed Jesus’ victory over death and evil. It liberated those living and dead who lay in bondage to their sins. An anonymous ancient homily for Holy Saturday, speaking in the voice of Jesus Christ, reminds us of the full import of his resurrection:
I am your God, who for your sake [has] become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants, I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.
Jesus rose from the dead so that we could be joined to him and his victory. Believers know that Jesus was not only victorious then, in Jerusalem. He’ll also come in royal glory at the end of time, when he will judge the living and the dead. At Christ’s second coming, his kingdom will fully arrive. His reign will be complete. The time in which we find ourselves is an interim one. We may struggle as we seek to follow Jesus, but we also remember the great victories of our King: the victory in the past and the victory certain to come. And those victories give us hope.
Hope is how we as a Church, and as individual Christians, continue along our journey on earth when we face obstacles and our own shortcomings. But many of us don’t really understand hope. We talk about “hoping” to get a certain gift or a promotion. We think of hope as a good feeling, or a kind of optimism. But real Christian hope is the fruit of faith and the seed of charity. It’s also a breath of life from the Holy Spirit that fills our lungs to sustain both our faith and our love. We’re at a point, then, when we need to look at what hope is and what it isn’t. We need to reflect on the traditional sins against hope: presumption and despair. Finally, we need to take a closer look at that common secular cousin of hope—faith in the inevitability of progress—in contrast with the Christian understanding of God’s providence. Reminding ourselves of hope’s nature is important because it keeps us focused on God. True hope depends not on our own efforts, but on the grace of a loving Creator, on whom we must rely if we seek to serve him and build his kingdom in our time.
So, what exactly is hope? The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes it as “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.”1
Let’s unpack that step by step. First, hope is a virtue. That means that it’s not just a feeling, nor is it optimism. As the late priest and scholar Richard John Neuhaus put it, “Optimism is simply a matter of optics, of seeing what we want to see and not seeing what we don’t want to see. Hope is only hope when it is hope with eyes wide open to all that challenges hope.”2 Upbeat feelings are fickle. They don’t last long if we look hard at the problems in our own lives and the world around us.
Rather, hope is like a muscle or a skill that, with practice, lets us throw a fastball or play the piano. Moreover, it’s a theological virtue, a gift from the Holy Spirit that enables us to do what we couldn’t do on our own. So while we’re correct in saying that hope is something we cling to, we also need to remember that hope is something we first receive as God’s gift. It can’t be founded on our own striving. It rests on God’s strength and the truth about Jesus Christ.
This gift of hope creates in us a desire for heaven and eternal life as our happiness. It’s an act of trust in God’s future. In other words, it points our lives in the right direction. Hope refocuses our gaze away from passing pleasures, money, power, fame, and possessions, and toward living with God forever. It shows us what makes us truly happy, and it helps us to want that deeper happiness instead of the many other things that society tells us—and we too often think—will make us happy.
The Catechism explains this more fully: “The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men’s activities and purifies them so as to order them to the kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity.”3
When we hope, therefore, we align our wants and our wills as God intended. We’re able to love the things of the world rightly instead of clinging to them selfishly. We’re able to work for the kingdom of God and not our own glory, because we’re confident that our final happiness lies in union with God, and that this union will come about through the power of the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ, the conqueror of death. In 1 John 3:2–3, we read: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.” Believing that God loves us and has made us his children, and hoping to see him as he is, purifies our hearts and minds.
We also start to see here how hope connects to the other theological virtues, faith and charity. As Romanus Cessario, O.P., notes, faith, hope, and charity represent the order of actual development in the life of a mature Christian.4
First we believe in Jesus Christ and the truth about him, what he did for us, and the happiness he promises us in union with God. Then we come to desire Christ and union with God. Finally, God gives us his own charity, which allows us to take part in that union even now.5 In the words of the twelfth-century monk William of St. Thierry, faith posits the existence of God, whom we love. Hope promises us that because God is merciful, he will allow that love to come to fruition.
Or, as Father Neuhaus put it, “hope is faith directed to the future.”6 To oversimplify, faith is a matter of the head. Hope is a matter of the heart. Charity is the pledge of the love we believe in and hope for. In that sense, charity is like an engagement ring. It’s the first act whereby God begins sharing his life with us now, an act that begins the full sharing of the divine life that we will know in heaven.
Because God is a trustworthy bridegroom, we can have hope in the promise that he will bring us to perfect union with him in heaven.7 As Paul says in Romans 5, we can rejoice in suffering because suffering produces character, character produces hope, “and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” In this way, Romanus Cessario notes, the virtue of hope allows us to take part now in the salvation that is to come. It’s a confident movement toward the future, a preparation for receiving the love of God fully, but it also allows us to receive that love right here, right now.8
In his great encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope), Pope Benedict XVI expands on this theme. He writes that faith is not merely a matter of reaching out to something absent, but it gives us “even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a ‘proof’ of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a ‘not yet.’ The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.”9 And because faith and hope allow our future happiness to break into our present moment, Benedict writes, we can spend our lives generously and fearlessly for God.
Benedict tells us that early Christians did not find their security in possessions or their ability to support themselves. They had confidence in God not because their beliefs shaped the culture around them, nor because they were able to win elections, nor because people thought they were wise or important. In fact, none of those things were true. Early Christians were despised and persecuted. Because they loved Jesus, people confiscated their possessions and tortured them. Those who remained faithful had to have a more secure substance by which they lived. Their lives had to be founded on Jesus Christ, whom they claimed in faith and hope.
Furthermore, those who founded their life on Christ in faith and hope experienced a new freedom. The more they relied on Jesus, the more they were able to live joyfully and follow him. We see this in the lives of saints like Francis of Assisi, who stripped himself of all possessions except for the Lord. We see it in women and men who consecrate themselves to Christ under religious vows, and in couples whose radical generosity leaves them rich in love even if their bank accounts are small. In the eyes of the world, these men and women love foolishly. By the calculus of the world, they often seem crazy. But the eyes of faith and hope make perfect sense of their sacrifice.
These men and women live in the assurance of what they hope for; they’re filled with the conviction of what they don’t yet see (see Heb 11:1). They understand that, as Blessed John Henry Newman put it, “our duty as Christians lies in this, in making ventures for eternal life without the absolute certainty of success.”10
Faith, Newman continues, “is in its very essence the making present [of] what is unseen; the acting upon the mere prospect of it, as if it really were possessed; the venturing upon it, the staking present ease, happiness, or other good, upon the chance of the future.”11 Believers understand that the Christian life can be an adventure embarked on with joy because faith, hope, and love hold us close to Christ. They see clearly that a genuinely Christian life involves risks, that if we are in fact wrong about Jesus, and our hope in him is false, “we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:19).
So the Christian life is a dangerous wager. But as believers, we know it’s a wager worth making. Because we’ve received the love of God, because Jesus did rise from the dead, and because he wants us to live with him now and forever in heaven, our hope won’t be disappointed. So it is that hope enables us to risk what we have for Jesus, even in a world that grows more hostile by the day. We don’t do this rashly or lightly, Newman says, but “in a noble, generous way.” We don’t fully know what we will lose or what we will gain. Rather, we walk forward “uncertain about our reward, uncertain about our extent of sacrifice, in all respects leaning, waiting upon him, trusting in him to fulfil his promise, trusting in him to enable us to fulfil our own vows, and so in all respects proceeding without carefulness or anxiety about the future.”12
The men and women who do this glow white-hot with the Spirit. They live to the full what Richard John Neuhaus called “the high adventure of Christian discipleship.” Their lives are hard. Living the Christian life requires sacrifice and self-denial. But those sacrifices lead to greater love and joy than many in the world have ever known.
* * *
OF COURSE, THERE ARE other paths we can take instead of hope: despair and presumption. Whereas hope is rooted in faith and gives birth to love, despair and presumption are rooted in pride.13 When we hope, we trust in God. When we despair or presume, we choose to trust ourselves instead. In a way, despair seems to make sense. It’s a logical response to the problems in the world and in us, and to our inability to fix either on our own. It sees, quite clearly, that the things of this world can never fully satisfy us. But despair makes sense only if God is not merciful and Jesus did not rise from the dead. That’s why despair is a denial of the mercy and the justice of God and of the possibility of redemption. If hope says that our true and final happiness lies in heaven, then despair says that there is no New Jerusalem. It says that this world is all that we have, and that we can never attain true peace and happiness.14
In a striking insight of psychology, Thomas Aquinas names spiritual sloth and unchastity as the most common causes of despair.15 Since living the Christian life—especially a chaste Christian life—seems to get harder by the year, it’s no surprise that we can feel inclined to despair. But this is a trick of the Evil One. We can’t surrender to our discouragement. We can’t become a people of cynicism and inaction.
If the temptation of some Christians is to fall away from the faith when it becomes difficult, the temptation of many other Christians is to grow angry or bitter. We complain about how sexualized the media are, but do we pay attention to how angry they are as well? We can readily worry about sexual content in the media and how it excites the unwary, but what about that special and delicious rush we get from being outraged? Neither rage nor inaction acknowledges that Jesus Christ is Lord. Neither relies on his power to help us, or his desire to save us. Neither remembers that Jesus will ultimately be victorious, in his own time and on his own terms.
Moreover, we can see what despair looks like when we look at our wider culture. We’ve become a nation of despair in our flight from the real problems all around us. So often, when faced by violence abroad, division in our own country, and the breakdown of families and neighborhoods, our response is to turn inward. Most of us can’t afford gated communities, but we put up fences around our hearts.
Instead of helping the poor, we go shopping. Instead of spending meaningful time with our families and friends, we look for videos on the Internet. We cocoon ourselves in a web of narcotics, from entertainment to self-help gurus to chemicals. We wrap ourselves in cheap comforts and empty slogans, and because there are never enough of them, we constantly look for more. We enjoy getting angry about problems that we can’t solve, and we overlook the child who wants us to watch her dance, or the woman on the street corner asking for food.
We need to break out of ourselves. Augustine famously described someone caught in sin as curved in on himself. We need to ask God to hammer us straight so that we can look at him, and at the world he created around us, in the light of his truth. We need to hope in God and in heaven not as heartwarming pieties but as our real and final home. When we do, we’ll see that there’s no more room for despair, no time for sloth, but an open vista of joy before us.
If despair anticipates the failure of hope, then presumption anticipates its fulfillment in an equally perverse way. Presumption says that the open vista of joy comes without a cost. If despair says, “I can never get better,” presumption says, “I’m pretty good just the way I am.” Both of these mistakes are deadly. Like despair, presumption comes from relying on ourselves and not having faith in God.16 It thinks that the path to heaven is a first class flight where we can just sit back and relax. We can get to heaven on our own because, all things considered, we’re already good enough. We can sin as much as we want because God is always there to dispense forgiveness.17
We can see presumption alive and well in our own churches. How many of our homilies and hymns subtly stroke our vanity? How many of our prayers say, in effect, “God, thank you for making us the swell people you’ve made us to be. Help us to become even better than we already are”? And we see presumption alive and well in our country’s naive optimism that a certain leader or a certain group of people can finally bring us what amounts to salvation. “We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,” we’re told. We can bring about a more or less just society based on our own power and performance.
The truth is that while we’re often good and just in our actions, we’re also selfish, mean, and greedy. We can’t make heaven here on earth because, given the people we are now, “heaven” would be a long way from pleasant, let alone perfect. We have to trust that God will bring about his kingdom in our hearts and in the world in his own time, and we have to remember that this will require sacrifice if we’re going to serve his plan. Furthermore, we can, in fact, fall away from the path to heaven and end up unhappy forever. We tend to forget about it, but hope is both “the confident expectation of divine blessing and the beatific vision of God,” as the Catechism puts it, and “the fear of offending God’s love and of incurring punishment.”18
That’s not to say that we should ever be afraid that God might turn against us, or that he’s eager to find reasons to punish us. No loving human father would act that way, so how could a loving God? But holy awe is a healthy thing. It recognizes that God is Lord and we’re not. “Fear of the Lord”—a gift of the Holy Spirit—involves a prudent respect for his justice. If he were less than just, if the gulf between good and evil in our actions made no final difference, then God would not really be God, and his word could never serve as a sure foundation of our hope.
Despair and presumption, in their equal evasions of God, are the subtle and very peculiar parents of the secularized religion we call progress—a kind of Christianity without Christ. The great Harvard historian Christopher Dawson noted that progress is the “working faith of our civilization.”19 And the historian Christopher Lasch described that faith
not [as] the promise of a secular utopia that would bring history to a happy ending, but the promise of steady improvement with no foreseeable ending at all. The expectation of indefinite, open-ended improvement, even more than the insistence that improvement can come only through human effort, provides the solution to the puzzle that is otherwise so baffling—the resilience of progressive ideology in the face of discouraging events that have shattered the illusion of utopia.20
Americans talk about progress with an odd kind of reverence. Progress is the unstoppable force pushing human affairs forward. And it’s a religion with a simple premise: Except for the random detour, civilization instinctively changes for the better. And it’s up to us to get on board or get out of the way; to be part of the change or to get run over by history if we try to obstruct it. Hence we Catholics are routinely warned that we’re on the wrong side of history. Critics tell us that our view of human nature, especially human sexuality, will one day be treated with the same enlightened scorn as the so-called scientific racial theories of a century ago.
Of course, such voices tend to gloss over the fact that it was “progressives” who pushed those racial theories—theories that led to massive suffering abroad and vulgar bigotry here at home. In the name of progress, activists like Margaret Sanger vigorously promoted contraception and eugenics. In order for the world to improve, their logic went, we need the wrong kind of people—people from the wrong kinds of races—to stop having babies. Sound familiar?
This idea of progress does have its appeal. As the economist Sidney Pollard put it: “The world today believes in progress because the only alternative to the belief in progress would be total despair.”21 We might go a step further: Clinging to a belief in progress is actually a product of despair, generously seasoned by sloth. History is cruel, social change is difficult, and a relationship with God involves a lot of unpleasant truth-telling—especially about ourselves. Better to just shift the burden of living in a flawed world at an imperfect time onto some positive force that will bring about the change we want “some” day.
It’s a heartwarming delusion. But that’s all it is: a delusion. A brief glance at the twentieth century destroys the myth. In just a few decades, “progressive” regimes and ideas produced two savage world wars, multiple murder ideologies, and the highest body count in history. And yet, as Christopher Lasch noted, people still cling to the religion of progress long after the evidence wrecks their dream.
The cult of progress is the child not only of despair, but also of presumption. It’s a kind of Pelagianism, the early Christian heresy that presumed human beings could attain salvation by their own efforts without the constant help of grace. Hence the philosopher Hans Blumenberg says that what separates the progressive idea of history from the Christian one is “the assertion that the principle of historical change comes from within history and not from on high, and that man can achieve a better life ‘by the exertion of his own powers’ instead of counting on divine grace.”22
While we can and should work for social improvement—an obviously worthy goal—we’re too riddled with sin to ever build paradise on earth. As Benedict XVI put it, authentic progress doesn’t come automatically. In every age, human freedom must be weaned over to the good.23 And because our freedom can be used for good or evil, progress is always ambiguous:
Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling possibilities for evil—possibilities that formerly did not exist. We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man’s ethical formation, in man’s inner growth (see Eph 3:16 and 2 Cor 4:16), then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.24
Ironically, it’s the religious subtext of progress that makes it so attractive. Again, as Friedrich Nietzsche and many others observed, progress is a kind of Christianity without Jesus and all the awkward baggage that he brings. The Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr saw this years ago when he wrote that “the idea of progress is possible only upon the ground of a Christian culture. It is a secularized version of Biblical apocalypse and of the Hebraic sense of a meaningful history, in contrast to the meaningless history of the Greeks.”25
This contrast is crucial. Ancient peoples like the Greeks and Babylonians had a far darker view of history than Christians do. They saw humanity as controlled by fate, whose dictates could not be resisted. Greeks and Romans also had little hope of heaven. Many ancients believed that at death, human life ended. Hence the emperor Hadrian, one of Rome’s most cultivated and humane rulers, would write of his soul: “Poor ghost, my body’s friend and guest / Erewhile, thou leav’st thy home; / To what uncertain place of rest / A wanderer dost thou roam? / Pale, cold, and naked, henceforth to forgo / Thy jests among the sullen shades below.”
One of Christianity’s key contributions to Western civilization was to give men and women a sense of freedom from the whims of fate, a hope for life after death because of the victory of Jesus Christ. And over the centuries, that confidence in life beyond the grave has taken vivid form in the here and now.
* * *
THE CASTEL SANT’ANGELO IN Rome, the old papal fortress near the Vatican, is also the tomb of Hadrian. Visitors can find Hadrian’s poem about his soul on the wall. But walking eastward in Rome, the pilgrim will come to a very different meditation on death. The Capuchin Franciscans have an ordinary-looking church on the Via Veneto. But its crypt contains a series of rooms decorated with human bones—thousands of them.
The ceilings look like those of a baroque palace, except that they’re made of vertebrae. There’s a clock built of arm and finger bones. Skulls and femurs create decorative arches and columns. Through unbelieving eyes, it can easily seem ghoulish. It’s certainly a sobering encounter with our mortality. But it’s also very Franciscan. It takes death, that thing we fear most, and literally plays with it. And that couldn’t happen without a firm faith that Jesus Christ had crushed death, turning it from our ancient foe into what Saint Francis called “Sister Death,” the gateway to eternal life with God. The Capuchin bone crypt is uniquely Christian because beneath its somber appearance, it offers—for those who believe—a firm and joyful hope about what we find in Christ.
The Christian alternative to the cult of progress is not only hope, but the idea of providence. Providence is the understanding that God has a plan for each of our lives and for the whole world, and that for each of us, his plan is good. As Paul writes in Romans 8:28, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.” Whereas progress might claim that history has an inevitable arc, faith in providence has confidence that the Lord of history will one day make all things right. A healthy understanding of providence and a lively hope should be united to a thirst for justice, and to the assurance that God will provide justice on the Last Day.
What about those who blame God for the injustices of the world? Our failed attempts at doing good show us that only God can create justice. Faith gives us the certainty that he does so. A world without God, Benedict XVI writes, would be a world without hope.26 This is why faith in the Last Judgment is an integral part of hope.27 One day God will judge the world justly. Wrong will be made right. The wicked will answer for their crimes and be punished, and those whom Christ has redeemed will be led to eternal life. Without a final vindication of right and wrong—and without a just judge to do the vindicating—we would live in a world where good and evil have no meaning.
As Christians, we believe that Jesus Christ is that just judge. He’s not only the guide of history, but its focal point. He makes sense of history and frames the story of the world.28 Paul tells the Ephesians that God “has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:9–10). This unity in Christ of all things in heaven and on earth is one of the truths we mean when we talk about the kingdom of God. And as members of the body of Christ, we Catholics are called to work for that reign of Christ even now.
We know how the story ends, and that it ends well. And because we have confidence in our future with Christ, we should live differently. By faith and hope, we’re given new life.29 Longing for heaven doesn’t make us lose interest in bringing Christ’s love into this world. We’re called to work for progress understood in the light of Christ, which means, as Neuhaus put it, that we are “free agents who are capable of participating in the transcendent purpose that, being immanent in history, holds the certain promise of vindicating all that is true, good, and beautiful.”30
That may sound complicated, but it means that Jesus’ promise of bringing justice at the end of time is present even now in our own time. Christ’s kingdom doesn’t come because of an inexorable, impersonal force. It comes because God builds it with our hands. Christian hope compels us to be faithful to our spouses and care for our children, to feed the hungry and welcome immigrants, to visit prisoners and sit by the dying right now. Augustine is often quoted as saying, “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.” The words are apocryphal. There’s no real evidence that Augustine ever wrote them. But their content is clearly true and worth remembering as a guide to Christian discipleship.
That doesn’t mean we’ll succeed in our efforts. And it doesn’t mean our work will be easy. But even in the face of failure and hardship we maintain our hope because it’s founded on Jesus Christ, not ourselves. As Pope Benedict so beautifully said:
It is important to know that I can always continue to hope, even if in my own life, or the historical period in which I am living, there seems to be nothing left to hope for. Only the great certitude of hope that my own life and history in general, despite all failures, are held firm by the indestructible power of Love, and that this gives them their meaning and importance, only this kind of hope can then give the courage to act and to persevere. Certainly we cannot “build” the kingdom of God by our own efforts—what we build will always be the kingdom of man with all the limitations proper to our human nature. The kingdom of God is a gift, and precisely because of this, it is great and beautiful, and constitutes the response to our hope. And we cannot—to use the classical expression—“merit” heaven through our works. Heaven is always more than we could merit, just as being loved is never something “merited,” but always a gift.31
Our action and cooperation are essential, but Benedict is right: The kingdom of God, such as we can advance it now and when it comes fully in heaven, is ultimately a gift. It’s not our project; it belongs to the Lord. And that should be an immense source of consolation.
A hundred years ago, the French poet Charles Péguy penned a book-length poem called The Portal of the Mystery of Hope. It’s a haunting meditation. Péguy writes that hope is the most difficult of the theological virtues. Faith sees what is, and charity loves what is, but hope sees and loves what will be.32 In our “carnal” and “vagrant” hearts, he writes, we are called to preserve the word of Christ so that it does not fall silent.33 He envisions men and women passing held water from hand to hand and says that likewise, we must hand on God and hope.34
That, in the end, is our calling as Christians: to make Christ known in the world. To hand on the hope that fills our hearts. To work for God’s justice in our nation, honoring all that remains beautiful and good in it. And always to do so knowing that we’re on a journey to our final homeland. Longing for that life inspires us along the way. It’s hard to imagine what eternal life with God would be like, and maybe that’s why it can sometimes be so hard to hope in it.
Heaven certainly won’t be boring or a series of humdrum days. Benedict XVI imagines what it will be: “something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy.”35
That’s the end goal of the Christian life. That’s the gift that Jesus Christ offers us and makes it possible for us to attain. And that is our greatest reason for hope.