It’s a new year! A time to turn the page on 2023, make some resolutions and look forward to the next 12 months.
At the start of the new year, we’re also often encouraged to be optimistic about what lies ahead, to have positive thoughts about what life has in store for us, no matter what happened in the past year.
Got fired in 2023? You’ll find your dream job in 2024.
Been unlucky in love? Romantic bliss is right around the corner.
Had some health struggles? Expect to be full strength in no time.
Now, I’m all for a little positive thinking, especially when compared to the alternative: pessimism and despair. Having an optimistic outlook doesn’t just make us think good things will happen to us — it’s been shown to positively contribute to our health, productivity and relationships.
But it’s also true that optimism, at the end of the day, isn’t enough to face life and all its challenges. It’s not enough, because optimism, a kind of self-reliant resiliency, can never give us what we truly need and desire: the promise of life in the face of death.
In fact, the Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton compared optimism to the sin of presumption, which unjustifiably assumes that things will work out.
The problem with unbridled optimism is that, if taken to the extreme, it gets reality wrong. Countries are at war. The economy is volatile. Our nation seems to be on the decline. Friends and loved ones are taken away from us by freak accidents and sudden illnesses. Optimism can’t account for the finitude and fickleness of human life. Or it does so by ignoring the whole picture.
In fact, optimism has even been described as a kind of false cognitive bias, a mental trick we play on ourselves. Optimism, it is said, is a human delusion, while the optimist is someone who lacks information.
If optimism offers us “soft soap and wishful thinking,” to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, the Christian virtue of hope offers us something else: the confidence that even if things around us are a disaster, everything in our lives is still conspiring for our ultimate good.
Pope Francis reflected on the difference this past year at World Youth Day.
“Christian hope is no facile optimism, no placebo for the credulous: it is the certainty, rooted in love and faith, that God never abandons us and remains faithful to his promise: Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me.”
Christian hope, the pope makes clear, is inherently relational. It is not a product of our own making. Rather, it is divine gift, the desire for God’s kingdom and the trust in the faithfulness of his promises, precisely because the one who makes the promise is with us today.
As the late Pope Benedict XVI wrote in “Spe Salvi,” hope is “the expectation of things to come from the perspective of a present that is already given. It is a looking-forward in Christ’s presence, with Christ who is present, to the perfecting of his Body, to his definitive coming.”
Therefore, while hope is a gift, it is also a virtue we can cultivate. We can become more hopeful by being more dependent and closer to the one who is both the object and the source of hope: Jesus Christ.
And because hope involves the presence of Christ, it isn’t only something that looks ahead, but something that transforms everything we experience — including suffering — into an opportunity to be united with him.
“The saints were able to make the great journey of human existence in the way that Christ had done before them, because they were brimming with great hope,” wrote Pope Benedict.
So no, hope will not necessarily get you your dream job. It will not guarantee you romantic and relational success. It doesn’t promise you a clean bill of health.
Hope offers us something more resilient and realistic, but also more satisfying: the certainty that no matter what happens to us in 2024, Christ is not only leading us to an eternity of happiness, but also is with us every step of the way.
Liedl, a Twin Cities resident, is a senior editor of the National Catholic Register and a graduate student in theology at The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St. Paul.
