By Fr. Thomas Brouillette
Vicar General
God the Father is nonetheless very confident in the human situation. Because of the Father’s confidence, we have reason to have hope.
We are all planning to recall the first pilgrims and those blessings for which we are grateful for in our nation and our lives on Thanksgiving. The destination of those first pilgrims was a new land and freedom. As God’s pilgrim people, our destination is also a promised land and a new freedom in Heaven.
In the next few weeks and months, you will likely see in the Southern Nebraska Register an introduction by Bishop James Conley and others on this coming jubilee year that has as its theme “Pilgrims of Hope.” The ‘year’ begins Dec. 24. A jubilee year is a year of special graces and has a special focus. So I share a few thoughts about hope on the Way.
We all want our lives to be fruitful, and our Lord reveals to us the central truth of our faith in the gospel about fruitfulness in the spiritual life: “Whoever loves his life in this world will lose it, and whoever hates his life in this world, will save it.” Unless we die to self, we cannot bear fruit. St. Augustine says the part of our lives that we must hate is that part of our lives that is disordered, the corruption that is in each person as a result of original sin. “We must hate that,” Augustine says. That part of ourselves that we must love is the presence of God in each of us, and we must love Him so much that it overcomes all else.
Friendship with Christ is a very beautiful and magnificent thing, and in the friendship, no matter how far we may fall away, or no matter how often we may stray, our Lord always invites us back and always extends his friendship, as long as we hate that part of ourselves which is sinful and love that part of our selves which is the image of the triune God within our souls. This is the key to bearing fruit in the spiritual life.
It’s not easy to be a Catholic these days. The Church is going through a period of purification, and you and I are, too. But if we trust in our Lord, this purification, this dying to disorder and corruption will bear fruit. The Church, and you and I, are going through this to prepare us for times to come. Only the Lord knows the reason.
God the Father is nonetheless very confident in the human situation. Because of the Father’s confidence, we have reason to have hope. Hope has to be based in reality. The theological virtue of hope received in baptism is not just some mindless optimism. Where does our hope come from, and the confidence of God the Father come from? It comes from the fact that God the Father knows that the Son not only spoke these words about dying to self but gave his life as the ransom for the many.
So, it is the reality of the self-sacrificial love of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, on the cross, which provides the reason for God the Father’s confidence and gives us the reason for hope. He invites us to imitate him. If you want to bear fruit, die to yourselves. No matter how heavy the cross that any person is asked to carry, they carry it on the via crucis, the way of the cross, with Christ. In carrying our crosses, we should be cheerful, generous in dying to self and service to others.
Paragraph 28 and 29 from Pope Benedict’s encyclical ‘On Hope’ (Spe salvi), describes St. Augustine’s dying to self, service to others, and his hope:
28…..“Terrified by my sins and the weight of my misery, I had resolved in my heart, and meditated flight into the wilderness; but you forbade me and gave me strength, by saying: ‘Christ died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died’ (cf. 2 Cor 5:15)”[21]. Christ died for all. To live for him means allowing oneself to be drawn into his being for others.
29. For Augustine this meant a totally new life. He once described his daily life in the following terms: “The turbulent have to be corrected, the faint-hearted cheered up, the weak supported; the Gospel’s opponents need to be refuted, its insidious enemies guarded against; the unlearned need to be taught, the indolent stirred up, the argumentative checked; the proud must be put in their place, the desperate set on their feet, those engaged in quarrels reconciled; the needy have to be helped, the oppressed to be liberated, the good to be encouraged, the bad to be tolerated; all must be loved”[22]. “The Gospel terrifies me”[23]—producing that healthy fear which prevents us from living for ourselves alone and compels us to pass on the hope we hold in common. Amid the serious difficulties facing the Roman Empire—and also posing a serious threat to Roman Africa, which was actually destroyed at the end of Augustine’s life—this was what he set out to do: to transmit hope, the hope which came to him from faith and which, in complete contrast with his introverted temperament, enabled him to take part decisively and with all his strength in the task of building up the city. In the same chapter of the Confessions in which we have just noted the decisive reason for his commitment “for all”, he says that Christ “intercedes for us, otherwise I should despair. My weaknesses are many and grave, many and grave indeed, but more abundant still is your medicine. We might have thought that your word was far distant from union with man, and so we might have despaired of ourselves, if this Word had not become flesh and dwelt among us”[24]. On the strength of his hope, Augustine dedicated himself completely to the ordinary people and to his city—renouncing his spiritual nobility, he preached and acted in a simple way for simple people.
May God bless you with new hope, not only in the Huskers for a bowl game, but in Jesus Himself on your pilgrimage to the promised land.
