Our Future and Our Past

One

The Joy of Youth

Hope and youth are concepts closely connected. Every time a speaker addresses a graduating class he’ll probably say something about their bright, hopeful, young faces. Why? What do hope and youth have to do with each other? 

It’s pretty simple, really. Hope is connected with youth because each young person, each person who isn’t fully grown, hasn’t yet tasted the fullness of human life, they can very reasonably hope that the best is yet to come.

That’s why the theological virtue of Hope really is the secret to eternal youth. Because no matter how difficult or joyous this life has been, the Christian can look towards transforming union with Jesus in this life and Heaven in the next and say, “The best is yet to come.”

Two

Fighting Cynicism

Hope is therefore the antidote to cynicism and a pessimistic view of life and this world. 

The danger of reading or listening to the news is that we begin to see the world and other people as bad. We become cynical, we act like everything is broken so what’s the use?

Cynicism sees self-centeredness underneath all charity. It sees pain and boredom as being at the conclusion of all joy. It sees the pointlessness of death at the end of all human life.

Christian hope rejects that. It resists the pull to pessimism, to gloominess, to the lie that “the true story” is always the ugly one. Yes, there’s death and selfishness and pain. Those are part of the human experience. But behind all of it, and at the end of all of it for those who want it are joy and love and the Good God waiting for us.

The Christian view of reality is this: a good God created a good world, and He made you very good and He is guiding all things to a good conclusion. That is the correct view of reality that should inform our lives. That is the hope we live.

Three

Overcoming Nostalgia

Nostalgia is another attitude which threatens to rob us of hope and cheerfulness.

Hope says the best is yet to come. Nostalgia says that the best is behind us. But, of course, if we’re honest, we know the past wasn’t perfect. That’s why we were always so impatient for whatever was next, why we constantly imagined what we hoped our life would be like. Because it wasn’t perfect the way it was. 

Part of the proof that we were made for Heaven, and that this life isn’t it, is that when we’re young we eagerly look forward to the future and when we’re older we pine for the past. Nostalgia shows us that we long for a perfect life but there’s no sense looking for it in the past, we’ve already looked there and we didn’t find it. 

Our attitude should be forward, always forward, everywhere forward. But toward what? Toward union with God. That is what we desire, what we are striving for, what we hope for. And it’s going to be greater than you can imagine. 

Four

Contemplation and Hope

Hope is the virtue that says, “The best is yet to come!” And the “best” thing coming is transforming union with God. But we don’t have to wait until after we die. We can begin to experience Heaven on earth. 

The whole Catholic Tradition and Saints like Faustyna tell us that this union with God that can be experienced here on earth, “the soul drowns entirely in God and experiences a happiness as great as that of the chosen ones in heaven.” (771)

We are talking about infused prayer or contemplation which is a direct intimate experience of God. In contemplation, Jesus comes to us in a way that we can experience Him. We really get to do as the Scriptures say, “We taste and see how good the Lord is.” 

Therefore, it is the closest thing in this life to the experience of God we will have in Heaven. So, contemplation is the beginning of heaven on earth.  

This union with God which Tradition calls Contemplation cannot be achieved by human effort alone. It is a gift from God when the soul is ready. We get ready by going to the Sacraments often, by the habit of daily meditation and a resolution which results in our deeper conversion and growth in love. 

But the fact is, if you commit to this and don’t stop, you can look forward to contemplation, the beginning of the experience of God and your own transformation in this life. 

And hope is to desire this and to strive after this!

Five

Preserving the Past

One thing that makes it harder, especially for older people, to let go of the past, is that they worry it’ll all be forgotten. And if it’s totally forgotten, if one day nobody remembers past sacrifices and joys, the stories and the tragedies and the heroic and beautiful moments, if it’s totally forgotten then it’ll just be swallowed up by nothingness. It’ll be annihilated. It’ll be like it never happened.

So old people, in desperation, repeat the same stories over and over, they scrapbook and they try to remind people. They try to save the past, keep it alive, and rescue it from oblivion. Because it’s so sad that all that history, all that goodness, all that beauty, should be lost forever.

And the thing is, if there’s no God and no Heaven, all the past will be lost forever. One day the world will end, human life will be over, and there will be no one left to remember anything. And then it’ll be like the entire human thing, the triumphs and the trials and the drama of every person and every family and every story, it’ll be just like none of that ever happened.

Everybody knows that if there is no God, and no Heaven, then we have no future. But actually, if there isn’t a God, and if there isn’t a Heaven, then our past is also doomed to oblivion.

But Hope knows that there is a Heaven. And that God not only has an unimaginably glorious future for us, He also preserves the full celebration of the past. One of the things that the Church teaches us about Heaven is that everyone who goes there will be able to see and appreciate all the details of human history. We’ll be able to relive all the good times. We’ll also be able to appreciate all the good that God was accomplishing in the midst of the hardest times.

So we don’t have to worry obsessively about clinging to the past or preserving the past. The home video collection in Heaven is complete. We’ll be able to enjoy it for eternity. The important thing now is to focus on getting to Heaven. Once we’re there, we can delight in the beauty of the past as we experience an endless future of perfect happiness.