How to hope

I am always trying to learn about hope. It has always seemed to me to be this ephemeral thing I can't quite wrap my mind around, an intangible that has no solid definition. Throughout different phases of my life, I find myself coming back to the questions: What is hope, and how do I do it?

"To hope is to remember," Father Ralph Huse said recently, and it struck me this is the definition I have been searching for, something concrete that makes sense to my mind and heart. Hope -- which deals with the future -- is the bridge that joins the future to the past, as we look back and remember all the visible ways God has already been faithful to us, giving us hope for what is still invisible and yet to come.

It's one of the reasons I love the opening of John's Gospel so much, especially verses 3-5, because it goes back all the way to "in the beginning." It invites us to remember "What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

What triumphant words that usher us in to the mystery of the already and the not yet, as we learn how to merge reality and dreams like Joseph did. He hoped what God said to him in his dreams could be true, and he worked to make it so, believing in God's faithfulness to him and having faith in God's ability to provide. And God worked it out.

Let us each look back at our own lives and make a record of the times God has shown God's faithfulness to us. Let these assurances give us hope and help us press forward in our present as we work to allow God to become incarnate in and through us, too.

And let us believe: Each of us are special, yes, but let us not think we are so spectacular we would be the one person our God would change his nature for so as to not be faithful to us. We know and believe God does not change, so let the history we hold within our minds and hearts and the testament of those who have come before us in Scripture and tradition bear witness to the fact God will be faithful to us, too, to the fact God is being faithful to us, too. And let our remembering of this -- our hope -- bear witness to all that is not yet.

"At present, we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face," Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:12. "At present, I know partially; then, I shall know fully, as I am fully known."

Bearing witness to the ways God has been faithful as we hope for that same faithfulness in the future: This is why we celebrate Christmas.