Watchmen of hope

During my agribusiness career, leadership at self-improvement seminars or CEOs at planning meetings would often say something along the lines of “hope is not a strategy.”

Whether I was stacking bags of animal feed, selling nutrition or animal health programs, implementing sales and marketing campaigns and so forth, I suppose that notion applied to executing a strategic plan in a natural sense. You must do more than hope things work out; you have to move forward and make things happen to succeed.

Hope as a theological virtue, however, provides a supernatural vision of something eternal to hold onto. Tucked in between the virtues of faith and love, hope has a disposition of being on the move toward eternity. To Catholic Watchmen, as with all Christians, this future of eternal life is their home with God, the saints and angels. Through all the difficulties of the temporal world, hope is what ignites Watchmen to lead their families and friends to press on via their earthly pilgrimage to their true home in heaven.

In this “Year of Hope” as announced by Pope Francis for this 2025 Jubilee Year, it is timely to think about this as a pilgrimage, and indeed, its challenges on the path of life to our heavenly home. Watchmen are obedient to the Church and its leaders, hence, providing, protecting and leading those we care for on that path is our duty as spiritual fathers and brothers. So, it is important to differentiate natural and supernatural hope. Saints like St. Joseph — our patron saint of the Watchmen — integrated faith, hope and love in taking care of the Holy Family. He certainly had faith (trust) to follow God’s plan, yet he also had the hope (vision) to see it play out through all difficulties and challenges of that time.

The saints could certainly relate to the hope of the promise to come. They also lived in difficult worlds of trials and tribulations, understanding the joys and sorrows in life as followers of Christ. The great 20th century Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper perhaps best described our existential human condition: status viatori, or man on the way. The saints chose the supernatural hope that comes from God amidst all the challenges in the world, as pilgrim leaders on the way to heaven. St. Teresa of Avila, a Carmelite contemplative, great mystic, reformer and doctor of the Church said, “We always find that those who walked closest to Christ were those who had to bear the greatest trials.”

Certainly, walking close with Jesus as one of his disciples was difficult. The Lord sets the stage for those following him. Denying himself, taking up his cross, losing his life for the sake of Christ were the requirements (cf. Lk 9:23-26). Christ shows the world how to live a life of self-sacrificial love. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Christian theologian and Church doctor of the 13th century, said that the transfiguration of Jesus — found in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke — was meant to give a burst of hope to all followers of Christ making their way through life’s difficulties. For those who kept faith in Jesus, this hope was the promise to be with him in eternal glory. This illuminating moment on the mountain gave Jesus’ inner circle — Peter, James and John — a burst of supernatural hope that surpassed reason.

“All human beings live by hope … and thus the line between natural and theological virtue is not quite so clear as it might at first seem,” Richard John Neuhaus writes in “American Babylon.” Hope is not without its dangerous opposition: despair and presumption. Neuhaus explains the two extremes “may appear to be opposites, but on close examination, they are revealed to be two sides of the decision against hope” (p. 218). We may witness or recall examples of both despair and presumption in our life experiences: visiting the terminally ill, those with substance use disorders, prison inmates, those in broken families or those grieving the loss of a loved one. We may see tragedies or choices that cause despair and the loss of all hope. People who cannot forgive themselves and don’t trust in the mercy, the justice, the love of God, can fall into despair. At risk is their salvation.

As Catholic Watchmen, we need to protect, guide and nurture those we care for away from this despair. Once it takes over the mindset, it makes the situation seem unforgiveable. Yet there is the other extreme Watchmen must look out for: Presumption, as Neuhaus describes, has its “smugness, a supercilious complacency incapable of entertaining the thought either of final catastrophe, as in damnation, or of radical transformation, as in final glory.” One who presumes his eternal bliss is a cinch may learn of an eternal, hell-bent fate. Judgment, as we are taught by our Lord, is the business of God. We can plant seeds of virtue, and we hope for the best that there is a transformation of heart from either extreme.

Judas chose despair and hung himself. Those who placed Jesus on trial, witnessed against him and led him to his crucifixion and death chose presumption. If anyone could lose hope in his outcome, it certainly could have been Peter after his three-fold denial. Instead, he chose to hold onto the virtue of hope. And eventually he was chosen to lead Christ’s Church, which prevails against the gates of hell yet today.

Deacon Bird ministers at St. Joseph in Rosemount and All Saints in Lakeville and assists with the archdiocesan Catholic Watchmen movement. He can be reached at gordonbird@rocketmail.com.