The past few years of my life, although they have been amazing, have been riddled with anxiety. The kind of anxiety that doesn't seem to have any purpose, no beginning or "why" it started in the first place, or what it was trying to tell me. The Christians would say that I am anxious because I don't trust God enough, or that I must have done something to deserve it, that I made a wrong decision or something. The degree to which the above statements are true is debatable -- although I do not doubt that anxiety can often be an internal marker that tells us when something is wrong.
Another source of suffering, lately, has been arthritis. At 30 years old, I have debilitating arthritis that prevents me from working the jobs I enjoy, or doing some of the activities I used to love. But before I start giving you a sob story, I want to mention that it wasn't until I began to suffer like this that I began to understand the virtue of hope.
Hope is strengthened by despair and suffering. Rather, it is strengthened by the choice to move forward in spite of despair and great suffering. Pope John Paul II, when he addressed the people of Communist Poland, he told them to do two things: hope and pray. There, was a people who had been crushed and oppressed by an unjust Communist occupation of their precious homeland. They had nothing left but a will to live, and here was Pope John Paul II reminding them to do only two things, two things that would liberate them from Communist oppression: to hope, and to pray. So they did. Inspired by John Paul II's exhortation, the Polish Solidarity Movement pushed back their oppressors and paved the way for the destruction of Communist Russia -- only because they did two things: they hoped, and they prayed. They hoped in spite of their suffering, and they prayed in spite of the apparent death of God.
"Even though I walk through the valley of the shaow of death ..." (Ps. 23)Hope can be strengthened by disappointment, only in so far as we move forward in spite of it. We move forward in spite of our dreams being crushed; in spite of our goals, thwarted; and in spite of our joys, dampened. Hope strives to struggle and reach for the things that seem so fleeting.
This is the gospel paradox, isn't it, that we need to enter into the passion of Christ, before we can enter His resurrection. That we need to embrace suffering before we can truly hope. The passion of Christ, our "passion," our "way of the cross," is Hope's garden. The torment, the anxiety, the uncertainty, and the apparent despair of this garden is what nourishes Hope and what allows it to blossom. It is watered by the pierced heart of Christ, tilled by his dragging cross, and pruned by his death.
All I want is to "know Christ, to know the power of His resurrection and to share in His sufferings, so that I may become like Him in death, in the hope that somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead" (Philippians 3:10,11). "If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me" (Mark 8:34).
