{"id":317,"date":"2007-11-30T09:02:22","date_gmt":"2007-11-30T09:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/11\/what-is-hope.html"},"modified":"2007-11-30T09:02:22","modified_gmt":"2007-11-30T09:02:22","slug":"what-is-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/11\/what-is-hope.html","title":{"rendered":"What is hope?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first concrete, personal example that Benedict uses to illustrate the reality of hope:
\n(Note: I am breaking this up into paragraphs which aren’t in the Vatican version. It just makes it easier to read.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet at this point a question arises: in what does this hope consist which, as hope, is \u201credemption\u201d? The essence of the answer is given in the phrase from the Letter to the Ephesians<\/em> quoted above: the Ephesians, before their encounter with Christ, were without hope because they were \u201cwithout God in the world\u201d. To come to know God\u2014the true God\u2014means to receive hope. We who have always lived with the Christian concept of God, and have grown accustomed to it, have almost ceased to notice that we possess the hope that ensues from a real encounter with this God.
\nThe example of a saint of our time can to some degree help us understand what it means to have a real encounter with this God for the first time. I am thinking of the African Josephine Bakhita, canonized by Pope John Paul II. She was born around 1869\u2014she herself did not know the precise date\u2014in Darfur in Sudan. At the age of nine, she was kidnapped by slave-traders, beaten till she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan. Eventually she found herself working as a slave for the mother and the wife of a general, and there she was flogged every day till she bled; as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life.
\nFinally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul Callisto Legnani, who returned to Italy as the Mahdists advanced. Here, after the terrifying \u201cmasters\u201d who had owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different kind of \u201cmaster\u201d\u2014in Venetian dialect, which she was now learning, she used the name \u201cparon<\/em>\u201d for the living God, the God of Jesus Christ.
\nUp to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave. Now, however, she heard that there is a \u201cparon<\/em>\u201d above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her\u2014that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme \u201cParon<\/em>\u201d, before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited.
\nWhat is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her \u201cat the Father’s right hand\u201d. Now she had \u201chope\u201d \u2014no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: \u201cI am definitively loved and whatever happens to me\u2014I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.\u201d Through the knowledge of this hope she was \u201credeemed\u201d, no longer a slave, but a free child of God. She understood what Paul meant when he reminded the Ephesians that previously they were without hope and without God in the world\u2014without hope because <\/em>without God. Hence, when she was about to be taken back to Sudan, Bakhita refused; she did not wish to be separated again from her \u201cParon<\/em>\u201d.
\nOn 9 January 1890, she was baptized and confirmed and received her first Holy Communion from the hands of the Patriarch of Venice. On 8 December 1896, in Verona, she took her vows in the Congregation of the Canossian Sisters and from that time onwards, besides her work in the sacristy and in the porter’s lodge at the convent, she made several journeys round Italy in order to promote the missions: the liberation that she had received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her which had \u201credeemed\u201d her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first concrete, personal example that Benedict uses to illustrate the reality of hope: (Note: I am breaking this up into paragraphs which aren’t in the Vatican version. It just makes it easier to read.) Yet at this point a question arises: in what does this hope consist which, as hope, is \u201credemption\u201d? The essence…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat is hope? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/11\/what-is-hope.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What is hope? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The first concrete, personal example that Benedict uses to illustrate the reality of hope: (Note: I am breaking this up into paragraphs which aren’t in the Vatican version. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}