(originally a homily given at Pluscarden Abbey, 3 February 2025)
I
Spes non confundit (Rom 5:5), hope does not disappoint, won’t shame us, won’t let us down or make us laughing stocks. It won’t leave us sad and bitter at having entrusted our lives to the Lord. Hope, says St Thomas, moves unerringly to its goal. It relies chiefly not on any grace we currently possess, but on the omnipotence and mercy of God, who can give grace, and hence eternal life, to those who do not yet have it.
Spes non confundit…hope won’t fail us. St Paul is picking up on Ps 22 (21): 6. “In you our [ancestors] trusted and were not put to shame.” Did he know that the Lord had prayed this same Psalm on the Cross? Was he thinking of how God had changed that abandonment into resurrection?
Spes non confundit. This re-echoes the ringing last line of the Te Deum: “In te Domine speravi non confundar in aeternum”. I’ve never forgotten years ago hearing Anton Bruckner’s setting of those words, the last, longest and climactic movement of his Te Deum. It doesn’t leave you in any doubt.
It is this resounding Pauline-Petrine-Letter to the Hebrews-New Testament hope that this Year of Grace wants to reawaken in us all: in the sometimes drooping, compromised hearts of Christians, in the limping Church, the weary clergy, the religious tired of diminishment and scandal. This Hope deserves a capital letter. It fulfils the “hope of Israel” for which St Paul was imprisoned (Acts 28: 20). It’s the “hope of the Gospel” (Col 1:22). The first Christians and their spokesmen felt they had been surprised by this great gift: a hope which is “living” (1 Pt 1:3), “good” (2 Thess 2:16), “blessed” (Tit 2:13), “better” (Heb 7:19); these are the adjectives they use. They “rejoiced” in it (Rom 12:12). They blessed God for it (1 Pet 1:3) It had regenerated them (1 Pet 1:3). It had saved them (Rom 8:24). Objectively, though its content often not unpacked, it evokes especially the coming of Christ, his Parousia, which brings all else in its train. Subjectively, in us, it becomes the theological virtue of hope, that infused gift of grace which, for St Paul, we just heard, is founded i) on the awareness of God’s love for us, his fatherliness ii) on the salvific death and therefore resurrection of Christ and iii) on the gift of the Holy Spirit – a hope fed and watered by the ever-flowing heart of the Trinity. It releases us from the thrall of the visible (Rom 8:25; 2 Cor 4:18); it “enters into the inner place, beyond the veil” (Heb 6:19), anchoring us in times of turbulence. It gives joy, eliminates timidity, emboldens, even before God. It has power to purify. It makes us patient and able to endure in time of trial.
Spes non confundit. Yes, some hope that can do all this in the poor human heart! St. Paul deliberately uses understatement here, knowing the inadequacy of words to grasp this new abundance.
This New Testament, new Covenant Hope can take and rise above life’s inevitable disappointments, even while feeling them. It stalks us. It’s always “at us”. “It flows eternally, it gushes eternally, it springs eternally”, says Charles Péguy.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (nn. 1817ff), this hope “is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit”. It responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in every human heart. It takes up our natural hopes, purifies them, orders them to the Kingdom of heaven. It keeps from discouragement; it sustains during times of abandonment; opens the heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. It buoys up, preserves from selfishness, leads to the happiness that flows from charity. It fulfils the hope of the chosen people which Abraham so magnificently exemplifies, hoping against hope.
This is the hope for which the French language uses a special word, not just espoir which suggests something aspirational, mundane and conjectural, but espérance which, even as a word, has a spring in its step and a carefree certitude. No wonder a French poet imagined Hope as a young skipping girl, between the two stately matrons of faith and charity, her big sisters. Small, unlike faith and charity able to sleep well at night and rising every morning with “bon-jour” on her lips, “good-day.”
Spes non confundit…
II
This Jubilee Year, the Jubilee Prayer, this Jubilee Mass is a prayer that this hope be reawakened in us too, who are called “consecrated”.
Without hope, our religious life would be silly. Hope begins, sustains and ends it.
According to St Athanasius, the 18-year-old Anthony of Egypt on the way to the church where he’d hear the Gospel that would change his life (and Church history) was already turning over in his mind “what and how great a hope was stored up in heaven” for those who leave everything and follow the Saviour. Hope begins our religious life.
When a Benedictine makes profession, he or she sings the Psalm-verse: “Receive me Lord according to your promise and do not disappoint me of my hope”. This is the monastic theme-song. The monk’s whole life is lived, in a phrase elsewhere in St Benedict’s Rule, “secure in the hope of a divine reward” (RB 7:39), even or especially when the going is hard. He is told “never to despair of the mercy of God” (RB 4:74). At Profession, we’re not handed a certificate of exemption from the battles that are part of every human life. It may even be part of our vocation to feel some of them particularly acutely, uncushioned, “in the raw”, for the sake of others. There will be disappointments. There will be a journey to make from the possibility of despair to the security of hope. And yet hope’s melody is not to be silenced. Hope sustains the journey.
And hope will take us home. It’s in this hope religious hope to make the final transition to the One they loves, often indeed with a sense of hope already fulfilled. “”It’s incredible, St. Therese of Lisieux told a doctor six months before her death, “all my hopes have been fulfilled.” Hope brings us to “the end without end.”
In the cemetery of Pluscarden Abbey, you’ll see a cross – of a layman – on the back of which is a Latin phrase “singulariter in spe”. The phrase was the man’s own choice for his Cross. As death approached him, he’d recite Compline each night, and that phrase from Ps 4 leapt out at him: singulariter in spe. “For you alone, Lord, have established me in hope.” The Lord alone had given him specifically a hope. And so he could die. Spes non confundit.
III
So how can this Hope not become our vocation? Are we not, by appointment to the “true King, Christ the Lord”, purveyors of fine hope?
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour”. Can’t we quite soberly say that the good news, the liberty, the recovery of sight, the year of favour, the Lord initiates can all be abbreviated to one word: hope? Proclaim, proclaim, proclaim, 3 times the English says it. Proclaim what? Be a herald of what? Why not of hope? Spes non confundit. It has been pointed out that as early Christianity spread from the Jewish to the Gentile world, the emphasis of its proclamation shifted. What struck a fervent Jew like Paul about the Gentiles was that they “have no hope” (1 Thess 4:14), are “without hope and without God in the world” (Eph 4:12). And so St Paul prays that the eyes of hearts will be opened to know the “hope to which he has called you” (Eph 1:18) and St Peter tells diaspora Christians to be ready to give a reason “for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet 3:15). As then, so now: in a world without hope or limited to low or unworthy hopes, or worshipping the idols of false hopes, and yet still hoping for good, it is the God of hope (Rom 15:13) we must proclaim.
Why not, then, simplify ourselves and our mission to this? If I were lying wounded on a battlefield and a nurse or doctor appeared, wouldn’t hope break out in me? Wouldn’t I choose life, not death? Hope is so innate to us. “Everyone knows what it is to hope”, says Pope Francis. The wick is there just waiting for the flame to touch it. Birdsong, a snowdrop, a star, a song, a presence, a smile, a kind word, a cup of coffee, any of these can rekindle it. Religious must be flamethrowers – not just of natural cheerfulness, helpful though that is, not of unthinking optimism, illusions, excuses for evil – but of a hope at once rooted and real and yet passing through the veil, thrown open to the infinite. I’m sure when a sister enters a classroom to catechise, or takes a meal to a homeless person, listens to a troubled teenager, discusses with students, or when a monk says to someone grieving, the Community’s praying for you, or just when we pray – I’m sure that wicks are lit and what began in the synagogue of Nazareth is going on. This is hope as a chosen attitude, a personal decision, and so as a gift to offer and convey. This may be expressed as small encouragements, staple consolations, commonplaces even, but anointed by the Spirit: small hopes opening to greater hopes, and implicitly at least to capitalised Hope, to that omnipotent mercy that doesn’t give up on any of us and will wipe every tear from our eyes.
May Mary, star of hope and mother of “holy hope”, show us the way!
