A friend of mine wrote to me on my post about Spe Salvi, where I’d written
B16 begins with a discourse about the nature of Christian hope and how it intersects with faith. He talks about the “certainty of hope,” which sounded paradoxical to me at first (isn’t hope something that concerns the thing you might experience, not the thing you will experience?), but I think I get it now…
My friend wrote me that the tension between the certainty implied by perfect faith and the uncertainty implied by hope has made it difficult to understand.
In my reply, I quoted the passage below:
A further point must be mentioned here, because it is important for the practice of Christian hope. Early Jewish thought includes the idea that one can help the deceased in their intermediate state through prayer…The belief that love can reach into the afterlife, that reciprocal giving and receiving is possible, in which our affection for one another continues beyond the limits of death-this has been a fundamental conviction of Christianity throughout the ages and it remains a source of comfort today. Who would not feel the need to convey to their departed loved ones a sign of kindness, a gesture of gratitudeor even a request for pardon?
…So my prayer for another is not something extraneous to that person, something external, not even after death. In the interconnectedness of Being, my gratitude to the other–my prayer for him–can play a small part in his purification. … It is never too late to touch the heart of another, nor is it ever in vain….Our hope is always essentially also hope for others; only thus is it truly hope for me too.
Almost as an afterthought I added this note of my own:
This helped answer, for me, “What need is there for hope, if one has faith?” Well, there are probably other aspects of it, but certainly we need to hope for others, whose faith only *they* know. Don’t you think?
I’ve been musing about this for a while, centering hope in its rightful place between faith and charity. Yes, hope is at least partly directed towards other people, hope in God for others. Why wouldn’t it be, since charity is pretty much completely directed towards other people? Not really the self, and the love we have for God (at least in English) doesn’t seem to be properly described as “charity,” caritas.
Faith and hope and charity are an odd little trinity, with a sort of progression, aren’t they? And aren’t the three relationships among God, neighbor, and self an odd little trinity of relationships too? (I love the number three, the way it inverts upon itself like a six-pointed star, there being a trinity of relationships among a trinity of persons). If faith is about the relationship between self and God, and Charity about that between self and other, is hope somehow between: some strange way the soul perceives God and the other, or God in the other? Perfect faith implies certainty; charity needs no certainty at all, we can be completely lost inside and still have the power to practice it; is hope somehow between: some strange place we can be certain and uncertain at the same time?
Perhaps hope resides in uncertainty because there are things that we can not know. We can’t know the interior of another’s soul. However strong our faith, it’s a misplaced faith if it pretends to be certainty about anything other than God Himself. Not even the most comforting beliefs can really be “faith” if they’re unrevealed. Is your loved one in Heaven? Will you get there someday? With few, few exceptions you cannot know, not even with perfect faith.
And there are terrible things that might be, but aren’t certain, too. Hope is an acknowledgment of that uncertainness. Even perfect faith will never give us the certainty that a particular soul is lost, no matter how much we fear it might be true or even wish it were true in our darker moments.
If hope is an uncertainty, it’s a blessed uncertainty.
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