Can We Trust in Hope?

On the first Sunday of Avent, we explore the true meaning of hope — and whether or not it's a reliable tool to guide our lives.

Starting today, Letters from Leo offers daily Advent reflections each morning through Christmas exclusively for paid subscribers, exploring what it means to follow Jesus in American civic and political life. I hope you’ll journey with me as we welcome the light of Christ into every corner of our lives this season.

“It is the hour now for you to awake from sleep. For our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.” (Romans 13:11)

Today’s Readings

Today, on the first Sunday of Advent, the Church begins a new liturgical year: a journey that commemorates Jesus’s first coming even as it points toward his ultimate return. Advent holds this double vision: we look back to Christ’s birth in Bethlehem and ahead to his coming in glory. That perspective fills the season with urgent expectation.

Expectation is a thoroughly human experience and flows through the entirety of our lives. We wait for a child to be born. We wait for a friend to visit. We wait to hear the outcome of a job interview. We wait to meet the man or woman whom we will marry.

Humans are alive as long as we wait and as long as we hope.

In this sacred season in which we prepare for Christmas, each one of us can ask: what am I waiting for? What, at this moment of my life, does my heart long for?

So too can our families, our communities and our nation ask similar questions: what are we waiting for together? What unites our aspirations and bring us together?

As highlighted in today’s first reading from the prophet Isaiah, in the time before Jesus’s birth, the expectation of the Messiah was very strong in Israel. The people expected a hero who would at last set the people free from every form of moral and political slavery. They expected someone who would “beat spears and swords into plowshares and pruning hooks” and end the scandal of war.

This was the dream and the promise that God put in Isaiah’s heart. God is always faithful to his promises, but he often surprises us in the way he fulfills them.

Christian hope reminds us that so much remains unseen and thus unknown, and thus uncertain. Hope does not merely project our present beliefs into the future, it acknowledges that despite all we do see, so much remains unseen — in the present as well as in the future.

When we walk in faith but that faith wavers, and we cannot be sure we are on the right path, all we can do is hope. Hope is the attitude of heart that is most humble because its very presence tells us that in this life, there is more than meets the eye. Perhaps we’ve unintentionally been living without hope.

Perhaps that explains the success of a political campaign built on this oft-neglected theological virtue. No matter one’s political allegiance, it is striking how eagerly vast portions of the country desire to hope, their fervent wish to be moved by something new and expansive, the confidence that such hope is not false at all, but active and inspiring.

The question posed to us is this: Can I really trust in hope?