HOPE

It is difficult to describe hope. When we have hope, we think of a positive outcome. If we lack hope, we can see nothing good. It is often difficult to describe. In her poem entitled HOPE, Emily Dickinson captures its elusiveness:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all.

'Christ Our Hope' is the theme of Pope Benedict's visit to the United States. In his second encyclical, Saved in Hope (Spe Salvi), our Holy Father lays out the true nature of Christian hope, 'To come to know God--the true God--means to have hope.'

Hope is not a matter of getting something or somewhere, it rather about new situations and new beginnings. This is true because we are always on a journey of faith.

...we need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain. The fact that it comes to us as a gift is actually part of hope. God is the foundation of hope: not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety. His Kingdom is not an imaginary hereafter, situated in a future that will never arrive; his Kingdom is present wherever he is loved and wherever his love reaches us. (Spe Salvi, #31)