Hope in Despair

Advent is coined as the season of hope. This year, at least for me personally, it feels a little different. When I look around at our society and our world, I see a lot of despair. Hatred and violence seem to still be the main navigators on our journeys. It’s been hard for me to find hope during this season this year.

Where does hope come from? I think despair comes from a continued role of things going poorly, of things not going the way we would like them to go or how we expected them to be. It can be easy for us to say that hope is just the opposite of this, that hope comes from things continually going well, going the way we want. But I think it goes much deeper than this.

Hope, being a feeling, comes from deep inside of us, a place we cannot fully explain. I’ve always thought that feelings come from or are a part of our souls, something that is fully integrated into who we are and helps to shape who we are. Our soul also is what draws us out of ourselves and towards what’s around us, whether it be another person or something found among creation. This again is something that we cannot fully explain, it’s something that we just determine is a part of us. We like what we like because we just do, we find joy or peace or beauty in it.

And so, hope, being part of our soul, was originally given to us at the moment we were created, shaped and formed out of divine beauty. I believe this is why we often feel drawn closer to something that is beyond us or beyond our own understanding of things.  Hope then becomes part of the what makes us incarnational beings. It helps us to see that while life may be full of hard times, we are drawn to those around us who remind of being part of the beauty of the incarnation. Each of us individually, through hope and recognizing the uniqueness of the incarnational beauty each of us has, play a role in lifting each other up, that they may recognize divine love through us. And how blessed we are to have a creator who we are not only drawn to, but is drawn to us as well, as the first thing that God says to humanity in scripture is, “Where are you?”. My hope lately has come from thinking of this, but also seeking out the incarnation in those around me.

Oftentimes, I think we forget that we are incarnational beings, sculpted out of divine love and beauty. It is through recognizing the incarnation in each other that we begin to turn the despair that engulfs our world today into the hope of a new world that we can created out of love and beauty.

Picture: Remains of the Nativity Fresco, Master of St Clare, Basilica of St Clare in Assisi