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Pilgrims of Hope

Today marks the last Sunday of the year in the liturgical cycle of our Church, with next Sunday being the first in Advent. As we look towards the new year, I am reflecting on hope since not only is it is the theme for the First Week of Advent, and it also happens to be the theme for the upcoming Jubilee Year 2025: Pilgrims of Hope, announced by Pope Francis in May of 2024. I have also been reflecting a lot on hope in my own life, and I think the entire world is in need of hope.

In his Papal Bull Pope Francis wrote “hope does not disappoint,” and prayed that it might help us recover “the confident trust we require in the Church and in society, in our interpersonal relationships, in international relations, and in our task of promoting the dignity of all persons and respect for God’s gift of creation.”  

I hope for many, many things, but I am not sure my faith has anything to do with my hope that I will have my winter tires installed before the first snowstorm. It seems frivolous when you look at it alongside hope from a Christian standpoint.

According to Pope Francis:

…Hoping is waiting for something that has already been given to us: salvation in God’s eternal and infinite love. That love, that salvation that gives flavour to our lives and that constitutes the hinge on which the world remains standing, despite all the wickedness and nefariousness caused by our sins as men and women.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann seems to view it similarly only in a condensed format; “…Trust in what God has done and will do, in spite of evidence to the contrary.”

These are great definitions of hope, I am inspired by both. Pope Francis description is beautiful and filled with light, while Walter Brueggemann’s definition enables me to wrap my head around it in a more tangible way.

We are reminded repeatedly to maintain hope and not allow ourselves to fall into despair, which is simply put but I have found can be difficult to put into practice at painful and turbulent times. These next two examples I will share may not sound hopeful but I thought they were good examples of finding hope in hopeless situations.

We learned my father’s cancer had relapsed in 2016, Stage Four. What hope was there for him or us? A few weeks after turning 50 (which I was actually quite hopeful about) a close family member with dementia one day went missing in the woods without a trace and was never found.  

My father’s health had been declining rapidly and the oncologist said he had a few months to live when we received the Stage Four diagnosis, so realistically I could not place my hope in a healthy recovery, but I could maintain hope that God remained with my father during his illness with our family through the pain of the experience.

When Brian went missing, we first hoped to find him within a few hours, at least before dark. Not finding him, we hoped he would be located by the end of the next day, and by the end of the week when there was still not trace of him, our hope was and still is today in recovering his remains, pretty much the bottom of the barrel of all things hopeful. When we were not able to accomplish what we wanted, finding him, I maintained hope because I believed God was with Brian as well as those searching for him and everyone who knew him.  

In neither situation the casual way I might use hope in conversation would not fit. I struggled but was somehow able to find hope by trusting in what God had done and was doing and that this was not the end of the story. What the rest looks like is up to God. Sometimes it is challenging to admit God is in control and not me.

The 2025 Jubilee Year of hope closely follows heals the end of the Synod on Synodality, which itself is an emblem of hope for us in a church that has become increasingly polarized.  In the final Synod report For a Synodal Church:  Communion, Participation, Mission, Pope Francis wants us to continue our synodal journey supported by this Christian hope “that does not disappoint.”

~Trevor Droesbeck