Honing Hope

Human beings aspire to happiness. Most people achieve happiness for periods during their lives, but many things arise to prevent happiness, from natural disasters and economic or political crisis to the stresses of work and the labors of managing a household and raising children. Marriage in particular is often a source of happiness, but marriages all go through periods of dullness, or worse, of anxiety and mistrust in which the marriage itself becomes a source of unhappiness.

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If marriage is a series of peaks and troughs, hope is the virtue through which we remember the peaks while mired in the troughs. Hope in marriage is rooted in a commitment to a future better than the present, but it is also expected to be realistic: couples hoping that once they “get through this”—whatever the current this is—they will live happily ever after are wishing, not hoping.

 

In Dante's Paradiso, he is questioned about hope by St. James. Dante's companion in heaven, Beatrice tells St. James that no one has more hope than Dante, because in addition to his hope for salvation, he also has a great earthly hope: to return to Florence, the city of his youth, in triumph, praised by his fellow citizens and crowned with the laurels of an acclaimed poet. He was late in his life when he wrote these verses and must have known the odds of a return to the city that exiled him for his political beliefs was unlikely. Still, he hoped.  

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St. James poses to Dante three questions that cut to the heart of what hope is and how it works: What is hope? Where does hope come from? Does it illuminate you? These same questions are worth carrying into our marriages.

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• What, precisely, do we hope for as a couple?

• From where do we draw the resources to sustain that hope through the dark seasons of married life?

• And does our hope illuminate the life we share with our spouse?

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The rest of this chapter moves through each of these questions in turn.

 

Hope is a memory of past happiness and a vision of future happiness, but it's also more than that. As a virtue, hope is understood in Church teaching to be a positive, active force in our lives. Hope is about the recognition of opportunities to move forward in love. Hope inspires us to find activities that will move us more quickly toward those peaks, and while we are in the midst of dark periods in our lives, hope orients our activities to the direction of love.

 

Hope is not optimism. In fact, studies suggest that the two are not even very closely related. According to psychologists such as C.R. Snyder, optimism describes our belief that things will get better, or work out for the best, while hope is a commitment to action based on an ability to envision a way forward.

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“Simply put, the optimistic person believes that somehow—either through luck, the actions of others, or one’s own actions—that his or her future will be successful and fulfilling," reported one study. "The hopeful person, on the other hand, believes specifically in his or her own capability for securing a successful and fulfilling future.” 

 

While optimism is positively correlated with many other successful behaviors, most studies suggest that when things get really bad, hope is more strongly correlated with successful outcomes. And while individuals’ senses of hope and optimism usually don’t show any correlation, one study of couples struggling with a spouse’s PTSD revealed that when the spouse with PTSD was hopeful, it improved the other spouse’s optimism.

 

The Pilgrim’s Three Questions: What Do We Hope For? Where Does Hope Comes From? How Does Hope Illuminates Us

 

There is a very old legend of a widow of Milan who converted to Christianity along with her daughters. The mother took as her new name Sophia (Wisdom); her daughters chose the names Pistis (Faith), Elpis (Hope) and Agape (Charity). The family moved to Rome to join the larger Christian community there, but the three daughters were martyred under the persecutions of the Emperor Hadrian and were interred on the Aurelian Way, after which they were venerated together as saints. Whether or not the legend is true, Christians have long pointed to these saints as symbols of the intimate connections between faith, hope and love.

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In Christian teaching, hope is almost always closely linked to faith. It’s easy to see why: Hope is the willed belief that things can get better. Faith is the ability to act as if things will get better. Hope thus informs faith; faith puts hope into action in everyday life.

 

The apostle Paul makes the connection between these three virtues: “So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). St. Thomas Aquinas builds on this to try to explain the connections. He writes that hope, the capacity to envision the coming good in the depths of unhappiness, sustains faith, while love makes faith incarnate.

 

Yet there is a reason that in Dante’s poem the pilgrims pass first through faith, then hope and only then finally to love. In his view, we fall in love because we come to believe that a person is good for us. Believing our loved one to be good, we develop hope in that person and then proceed to love them.

 

Hope is thus a bridge between being “in love” — believing someone is good for us,  and will bring us happiness—and loving them: being willing to sacrifice our needs and desires to do what is good for them.

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St. Thomas also insists that like faith, hope is never irrational: there is no need for hope if we can easily get what we want, but there is also no reason to hope when what we desire is completely beyond our grasp. Pope Benedict XVI discusses this in an exegesis of Hebrews 11:1 (“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”) by explaining that “assurance” is not actually the best translation; “substance” might be better because what we hope for is already present in the hopeful vision.

 

We can know in our darkest marital moments that happiness is possible because we have been there before. We can reasonably hope, therefore, to be happy again.

 

What both St. Thomas and Pope Benedict want us to understand is the distinction between wishes created by our unreasonable desires and the actual virtue of hope. While we can wish for superpowers, or that our movie star crush will somehow fall in love with us, or for an easy way out of our current woes, we cannot hope for these things. What we can hope for is the vision of a better future that we know (have faith) can be attained through hard emotional, mental, spiritual or physical work. Our hope can move us to faith in a plan of action that will take us there.

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When we woo our partners, we both put forward the best version of ourselves we can be. As a result, we may become disillusioned when the irritating behaviors and character flaws, big and small, are exposed over time.

We have hope that they can again become the person we fell in love with. We have hope that we can love them into that best version of themselves. But we cannot change our partners. Our love can be a catalyst for change but cannot force change. Our spouse must come to embrace it.

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For Catholic couples, these connections between hope, faith, and love are not merely philosophical—they are sacramental. The marriage vow itself is an act of hope: when spouses promise fidelity “until death do us part,” they are making a claim about the future grounded in the conviction that the grace of the sacrament will be sufficient for the road ahead. The vow does not pretend that the future will be easy; it trusts that it will be livable, and more than livable, in love. Every renewal of that commitment in the dailiness of marriage is an act of hope renewed.

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The sacrament of Reconciliation is hope enacted. When a spouse seeks absolution for the failures, resentments, and small cruelties that accumulate in even the best marriages, they are acting on the Church’s deepest conviction about human possibility: that the past does not seal the future, that what has been broken can be healed, and that the door to a better marriage is never finally closed.

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Pope Francis has described the confessional as a “tribunal of mercy”—and nowhere is that mercy more concretely needed than in the intimate warfare and tenderness of married life.

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The Eucharist, too, is a sacrament of hope. Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Spe Salvi, connects the Eucharist directly to Christian hope: in every Mass, the community of faith receives a foretaste of the banquet that awaits. Couples who receive Communion together are drawing from a source of hope that no technique or self-help practice can replicate.

 

Into the Dark Wood

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When Desiree was thirty-four years old, her father took his own life. Suffering from PTSD for years, he finally lost his battle with depression and trauma. Two weeks later, her Ob/Gyn told her that blood tests revealed that her baby had Trisomy 18, a terminal birth defect and she would, quite probably, miscarry or the baby would die within days after birth. A few weeks later she began cramping, and within hours, lost the baby. In the process, she also lost herself. She lost hope.

 

Two weeks later, lying on the couch in her pajamas, she told her husband, Charlie, “Maybe, just maybe, my dad made the right choice.”

 

Charlie spun from the kitchen sink where he was doing the dishes and stared at his wife.

 

“I dunno,” she continued somberly. “Maybe there is just too much sadness in the world, too many people who don’t care. Maybe there isn’t enough good to raise a family.”

 

Charlie walked over to her and sank down on the floor beside her. “Desiree, this is heavy. I’m worried about you.”

 

“Charlie, my heart is broken. I just don’t think I can stand any more disappointments.” Desiree’s eyes began filling with tears. “I feel sick with sadness, and I don’t think there is an end to the tears I can cry.”

 

“Des, I know it’s really dark right now. I really liked your dad. I am so torn up about our baby. But I have hope, babe. We gotta trust in the Lord. He’ll do us right.”

 

“I don’t know what to do, Charlie. I think I’ve come to the end of myself. If I don’t get some relief, some help, some injection of hope, I think I might end up like my dad.”

 

Charlie nodded at his wife, struggling to hide his dismay. “Let’s see what we can find. Maybe, the hospital. They said something about postpartum depression…post-miscarriage. Go take a shower and I’ll call them, and Father John. Maybe the Church has some advice.”

 

Desiree lifted herself from the couch and went to take a shower. When finished, she put on actual clothing for the first time in days. Then she combed her hair.

 

Charlie looked up as she came back into the kitchen. “Father John said that there is a psych unit at the hospital. He seemed confident they would be able to see us right away and get you some support. But first I’d really like you to eat some of the lunch I just set out.”

 

Desiree forced herself to eat. Then Charlie grabbed his car keys and drove her to the hospital. Within an hour she was talking with Gina, a therapist, after which she was checked into the facility for a short stay.

 

A couple of days later Desiree’s therapist convened a meeting to plan for follow-up support as Desiree was being released from the hospital. Gina, her therapist, wanted to assemble a support group for her. Charlie was there, as was Father John and Desiree’s mother.

 

“I’m glad you all are here to support Desiree as the first few days back at home can be very difficult,” Gina began. “We’ll want Desiree to have a support person with her 24/7. Perhaps we can have some input as to who else along with yourselves could do that.”

 

Father John spoke up. “Our parish has an Elizabeth Ministry with volunteers who would be able to visit Desiree at her home, if she is comfortable with that.”

 

“I’ve heard of them, but I was uncomfortable discussing my personal situation,” Desiree said. “After coming through these past few days though, I’ve learned that’s a good idea. So yeah, I’d like to be put in touch with them. Thanks.”

 

Gina gave a slight smile to Desiree. “Grief is a scary thing,” she said. “You don’t know how to handle your emotions, and they can pull you down into a dark place. Women often come to believe that when they’ve had one miscarriage, they are doomed to miscarry again. Coming on top of the death of your father, I’m sure you weren’t sure you would ever see the light of day again.”

 

“I read that the likelihood of another miscarriage is low. Maybe about one percent of women?” said Charlie.

 

“Yes, Charlie, that’s right. But for many women, a miscarriage can knock the wind out of their sails. They lose hope. Although rationally the likelihood that one miscarriage will follow another is low, emotionally speaking anxiety about future disappointments can be overwhelming. Desiree had two devastating losses within a few weeks. She told me that she’s been afraid to hope.”

 

“I feel like I’ve failed,” Desiree said. “I’ve failed Charlie, I’ve failed my marital vows. I didn’t create life as I promised. I’m afraid I may never start a family.”

 

Father John took Desiree’s hand. “You two are a family. You became a family when you exchanged your vows. A baby doesn’t legitimize that, nor does loss of a baby diminish it. Go ahead and hope for another pregnancy. But remember that not all marriages are graced with the gift of children. Today as many as one in eight women experience some form of infertility. I’ve seen couples blame one another and split up over infertility, after a miscarriage, or the death of a child. Don’t let that be your and Charlie’s story.”

 

“As you go forward, your life will be different,” he continued. “You will be much less certain about what’s going to happen. Recognize that within your uncertainty is room to act, to hope. We don’t know what will happen, you certainly can’t control the outcome. Embrace the unknowable and believe that what you do matters. You are important. What you do matters, even though how and when it matters, who and what it may impact, are not things you can know ahead. History is full of people whose influence was only understood after they were gone. Stay with us, Desiree.”

 

“I need you to stay with me, Desiree, and help me through this,” Charlie said. “We’re in this together. I’ve been waking up every day since we lost the baby wondering how I will face the day. All I’ve been able to do is trust that God is working it out. When you wonder how you can get through, all I can say is that I’ve been going through the motions. I’ve just put one foot in front of the other, taking it one day at a time.”

 

“Christian love is grown not in spite of, but because of suffering endured together and for the good of the beloved,” Father John added. “The Christian ideal is a love that never gives up.”

 

Desiree bit her lip and smiled tentatively.

 

“Honey, I miss your father too. Terribly,” her mother said. “I have begun every day since Daddy’s death turning my grief over to God. In return God is giving me hope that there is a purpose to my life. Hope is bringing me out of the darkness. Hope is giving me the courage to go on. Hope will help you face the devastating loss of Daddy and your baby. But baby, you are mine. I would be so heartbroken if you followed your father’s path and ended your life.”

 

“Grief is a new road,” Gina said. “It will take Desiree time to learn to walk that road. Time, and a lot of support, so she doesn’t stumble and fall irretrievably. I think the volunteers from Elizabeth Ministry, who have had their own experiences of loss, will probably be your most helpful guides. Who knows, in time, you may be hope for others.”

 

Hopelessness came to Desiree with the tragic loss of her father and unborn child at the same time. Desiree lost simultaneously one of the good things she looked to in the past, and the thing she most anticipated with happiness for her future. Desiree’s revelation to her husband that she was contemplating suicide led to an immediate move to professional and pastoral care. Her road to recovery would require her to recover hope. It is possible that in her struggle with grief her present will not be as happy as the good things she looks back at. But those memories can help her acknowledge that there can be new good ahead.

 

Whether our marriages are flourishing or struggling, we are always in the midst of writing their story. The narrative we tell ourselves about our shared past, whether we frame it as a series of defeats and injustices or as a complex journey containing both suffering and grace, becomes the ground from which hope either grows or withers.

 

To tell our marital story honestly, generously, and with an eye for the good that has genuinely been there alongside the hard: this is itself a spiritual practice, and one of hope’s most practical forms.

 

What the Dark Wood Teaches

 

Perhaps the most important role of hope in our marriages—and in our lives—is in dealing with fear. Hope and fear are alike in one way: both are founded in our past realities. But where fear focuses on all the things that have gone wrong in our lives, hope offers a vision of the past that secures you in the present to struggle for a better future. Hope sees light in the darkness; hope illuminates our way so we can move forward in faith.

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But while hope sees the light, it is not the source of light. Love itself is the source of light.

 

A family friend is a policeman who trains other police in crisis de-escalation. To help his colleagues avoid allowing implicit biases to lead them into unnecessary violent conflict situations, he teaches them that while the risks taken by police are very real, statistics show that these risks are far less than they feel to most police during confrontations.

 

Our friend builds part of his training using the acronym F.E.A.R.: False Evidence Appearing Real. He’s not the only one to use this term. This acronym has become popular among many therapists and self-help professionals because it drives home the point that most of our fears are self-created. Our anxieties are created by our anticipation that things will turn out badly, leading us into fight, flight or freeze responses that can harm our relationships. Our fear derives more often from the stories we tell ourselves about what will happen than what actually happens.

 

Fear makes us helpless. By blinding us to reality it leaves us cowering in the dark afraid to move. Hope illuminates our lives and gives us choices and control. It is empowering.

 

When we fear, we are not just planning for what steps we’ll take if the worst case scenario happens, as the virtue of prudence would have us. Instead, we are assuming the likelihood, or even the certainty, of that scenario. In theology, hope is viewed as the opposite of despair and of the presumption that our current woes define our lives.

 

But hope is not just an issue of “thinking positively” or seeing the glass as half full instead of half empty. Theologians also differentiate between the passive aspect of hope—refraining from fear and despair—and the active aspect of hope: exercising hope through our words and our actions.

 

Hope is living with the understanding that I can become a better spouse. Hope is living with the understanding that my spouse can become better. Hope is living with the understanding that our marriage can become better. And hope involves acting on those understandings of our marriage.

 

How do we enact hope? In our marriages, we exercise hope in two ways: as individuals contributing hope to the marriage, and as couples sharing hope.

 

As a partner in the marriage, we seek to bring hope into our marriage. This means helping your partner find hope when they are anxious, fearful or in despair. But it also means focusing on the hopeful in your family difficulties so that you do not lead one another into despair.

 

One of the greatest strengths of a strong marriage is that in our coupleship, we do not hope alone, we hope together.

 

Hope requires people who want our good and who help us along our way. We have far more reasons to be hopeful when we have friends to rely on. If our hopes are centered only on what we can do for ourselves, then our hopes will necessarily be cautious and limited. But if there are people who love us and thus want what is best for us, and will help us achieve it, then our hopes can be much more daring and expansive. Hope is a choice, an act of the will.

 

Into the Dark Wood II

 

Caroline and Kirk had been together for 40 some years. They had been through the highs and lows of marriage and ironed out their path to a fairly smooth one, counting their blessings all the way. Then Kirk was diagnosed with lung cancer.

 

Kirk fell into depression but refused to talk about his cancer or his feelings. Publicly, he put on a false front, pretending that everything was fine. Although they told their grown children, they kept the news from their friends. Worse, Kirk wouldn’t talk to Caroline. When they were alone, he grew distant and silent. Finally, Caroline couldn’t contain her thoughts and feelings any longer.

 

“Kirk, I’m having an extremely hard time knowing how to interact with you. I’ve been your cheerleader. I’ve given you space to process what’s happening for you. But I feel shut out. I want you to talk to me.”

 

“What’s to talk about?” Kirk asked. “I’ve got terminal cancer. I’m trying to get everything in order so you will be financially set when I’m…gone.”

 

Caroline’s eyes filled with tears. “I appreciate that you are preparing for the worst,” she said. “I just hoped we’d also discuss your treatment options and how we’ll pay for them. You don’t have to solve all our problems on your own. I’m here for you.”

 

“Look, sweetie, I’d like to be optimistic, but I’ve always been a realist. Lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer deaths for men. It causes more deaths in total than the next three leading causes combined.”

 

“I understand that you are afraid of the odds. But have you talked yourself into giving up?”

 

“I’m not giving up. I’m just not as optimistic as you are.”

 

“I’m not optimistic either. But I’m trying to be pragmatic. Maybe you’re feeling despair? You’ve read the statistics and you’ve decided your prognosis is really dark?”

 

“Yeah, I suppose. I’m sad, and I don’t know what to do with that. And I’m angry, and I have to struggle with that. And I guess I’m afraid too. It can be overwhelming. I’m just not good company, so I go off by myself.”

 

“Honey, neither of us knows what the outcome will be,” Caroline said. “No one can know before the treatment is completed. If you give in to despair beforehand, you assume that the outcome is predetermined. I’m choosing to hope because I can’t predict the future.”

 

“Part of the problem is that I feel guilty being a burden. I even feel guilty about dying. But even apart from that, the future looks bleak from my position.”

 

“Well, I have a few things to say. First, I am determined to overcome despair and trust in the Lord for the outcome. Maybe hope will flourish when the odds aren’t in our favor. I don’t know. I need you to accept that I’m with you in what you are feeling, and we’ll face this together no matter what happens.”

 

“I understand that sweetie. It just isn’t welcoming to be in my world right now.”

 

“I’m sad to hear that. To be completely honest I’m resentful that this has happened to you…to us. We’ve lived our lives so that we wouldn’t be here right now. Intellectually, I know ‘bad things happen to good people,’ but it’s easier to accept platitudes like that when it’s not us.”

 

“I know,” he replied. “I keep telling myself that ‘God doesn’t give us anything we can’t bear.’ It’s not helping. I don’t know how I’ll bear this, and if the situations were reversed, I can’t imagine how I’d bear your death. That’s the silver lining, I’m going first.”

 

“Oh my God. You didn’t just say that. This, this cancer,” Caroline said the word with distaste, “must mean something even if we don’t understand it. Maybe there’s meaning in how we journey through this. Maybe we’re supposed to become more sensitive to suffering and evil in the world?”

 

“‘Oft hope is born, when all is forlorn,’” replied Kirk. “Tolkien wrote that. But hope takes strength that I just don’t have right now.

 

“Forget the quotations and the platitudes, then,” Caroline said. “It comes down to how we live. Right now, you feel hopeless, and because of that you are cutting me out of your life and I’m tired of it. Okay, you are going to die. Even if you win the six percent survival lottery, it only means you’ll live about another five years. So, what do we do about that? Do we wake up every morning for the rest of your life in darkness because of these ugly facts? Or do we live in hope, and love one another until whatever happens happens?

 

“I’m not choosing hope because I’m an optimist. I’m not pretending you will get better. I’m choosing hope so I can get through my days. And I’m asking you to do the same. You need to stop taking all the mental and emotional burdens on yourself when you are the one suffering physically and need your mental strength to fight the cancer. Talk to me. Share the burden. Tell me what you’re feeling no matter how worried and dark you become. Because if you shut yourself off from me, and the kids, and our friends in order to live in your little pit of despair, you might as well already be dead. And I want you here with me, alive, for as long as possible.”

 

The circumstances of a cancer diagnosis can be so grim that it seems reasonable to give in to despair, as Kirk does when he looks ahead to his struggle against almost overwhelming odds. Caroline recognizes the realities of the situation, but she tries to cultivate hope because she understands that abandoning hope is accepting despair.

 

There is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy at work here: Kirk’s belief that his terminal cancer diagnosis means the end of his life is dark with despair, but it is all the darker because of his arrogance, which proceeds from his certainty. Despair flourishes when rooted in pride, while hope grows in an attitude of humility.

 

What Caroline recognizes and tries to communicate to Kirk through her stark confrontative statement, is that hope is not primarily about willing yourself to believe that you can have the best outcome. Hope is about choosing how to live in the face of fear and despair when the odds are against you. Hope is a choice—a choice to choose love.

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Examining the Journey Together

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The questions below are offered for use together, as a couple. We suggest reading through them side by side, perhaps sitting with each one in a few moments of quiet prayer before sharing your thoughts with each other. There are no right answers. The goal is not agreement but honest, compassionate conversation, the kind of conversation that hope makes possible and that, in turn, strengthens hope.

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One central theme of this chapter is that being able to be hopeful depends strongly on your ability to see the good things in your relationship during the good times, and to be able to base your hopes on these. The following questions will help you assess part of your own capacity for hopefulness.

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• When you reflect on the story of your relationship, do you see it primarily in positive or negative ways?

• Where are you in relation to your spouse? Are they side-by-side with you? Do they play a central role in your planning and decision making? Do you feel equally yoked?

• How often do you reminisce with your spouse about the past?

• Do you celebrate your family’s successes and triumphs? How, and how often?

• Where are you and your spouse in relation to God? Is God side-by-side with you? Does God play a central role in your decision making? Or is God just on the periphery of your life?

• God is, or should be, the light in our darkness. But God reaches out to others through us. Are you close enough to God that you can reflect God’s light to your spouse? Are you close enough to your spouse that you can see by their light?

• When you imagine your marriage five years from now, what do you see? Is that a wish or a hope—and what is the difference? What would need to be true for that vision to be a genuine hope rather than a wish?

• Where has fear disguised itself as realism in your marriage? What have you been telling yourself is impossible that might simply be difficult?

 

A Couple’s Examen for Hope

 

The Examen is one of the most reliable tools of Ignatian spirituality: a structured, prayerful review of a day or week in the light of God’s presence. The following adaptation is offered for couples who wish to pray through the virtue of hope together. It can be done in fifteen to twenty minutes, at day’s end or at the start of the week. One person may lead, or you may move through each movement together in silence and then share. Begin and end with a moment of stillness.

 

Gratitude. Where did we experience God’s goodness in our marriage this past day or week? Name one moment—however small—when you were glad to be walking this road together. Receive it as a gift.

 

Review. Where did fear or despair gain ground in our life together? Was there a moment when we closed off the future by assuming the worst? Were there words we withheld, or words we spoke, that narrowed rather than opened what is possible between us?

 

Sorrow. Was there a moment when we stole hope from each other—through our words, our silence, or our expectations? We bring these quietly before God and ask for the grace of repair. This is not a time for accusation, but for honest, tender acknowledgment.

 

Renewal. What is one specific hope we hold for our marriage in the coming week? Not a wish for things to be easier, but a genuine hope rooted in what we know, by faith, is possible. Speak it aloud to each other.

 

Resolution. What one action will we take together this week to move toward that hope? Name it concretely. Ask God’s blessing on it, and on each other.

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Provisions for the Pilgrimage

 

Pray the daily Examen together. As described in the section above, the Ignatian Examen is among the most powerful and practical spiritual tools available to a Catholic couple. Unlike generic gratitude practices, the Examen does not ask you simply to count your blessings; it asks you to notice where God has been present—and where you may have moved away from God—in the specific texture of your shared day. Couples who practice even a brief version of the Examen together consistently report that it transforms their awareness of grace in the ordinary and creates a quality of attentiveness to each other that no other practice quite replicates. Begin with five minutes. You may find you want more.

 

Practice gratitude. Central to hope is a clear-eyed sense of the world, with its positives as well as its injustices. For many of us, it is all too easy to let the bus you missed or the things you failed to get done at work color your day, and to take for granted the things that went right. One way to help balance your vision is to spend some time being grateful. Take ten minutes before bed or early in the morning. Begin by humbling yourself and accepting that for all your hard work, much of what you have is determined by circumstances. Then begin an inventory of all the things you have to be grateful for, whether it's a job, children, a loving spouse, or maybe just the fact that you are alive and the sun is shining.

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Focus on three good things. Management productivity guru Stever Robbins once described how, after years of coaching people, he discovered that all his tips and techniques for getting more things done more effectively weren’t actually improving the quality of life for most of his clients. He realized that for most people, no matter what rung of the ladder they are on, there is always more to do than they can accomplish, and on any given day many items on the to-do list will go unchecked. Instead of focusing on what went wrong, he began suggesting that at the end of the day clients should list those accomplishments that actually moved them toward one of their personal or professional goals. While there will be genuinely bad days where nothing significant gets accomplished, any day in which you can point to three things that in some way contributed to your goals, can be called a good day, no matter what didn’t get done.

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Act Grateful. Express gratitude whenever possible. Thank your coworkers when they do their jobs well in ways that affect you. Thank the clerks at the stores who waited on you. Leave thank you notes for your spouse or children for doing their chores--yes, they are supposed to, but isn’t it nice when they do it well, or without being reminded (or, miraculously, both!). And consider taking it up another notch and paying your gratitude forward by doing random acts of kindness for family, friends, coworkers, and even complete strangers. 

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Feed your mind a balanced diet. During the Covid-19 pandemic, an epidemiologist noticed that the news media in the US was far more negative about the pandemic than the what was published in scientific journals. He teamed up with some specialists, and they used computers to analyze news about the pandemic. Sure enough, while scientific journals, which are evidence based and peer-reviewed, were only 61%  negative, national news media was 84% negative. This was true whether the media were associated with liberal or conservative viewers. But even sadder was the fact that the people consuming the news skewed even more negatively when the researchers analyzed which stories they chose to share on social media. There is a lot of bad news and injustice in the world. We need to know about it, and to fight against injustice in whatever ways we can. But if we distort our view of the world by only looking at the bad news, we risk locking ourselves into dark and hopeless places.

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Express your hope. Hope is contagious. When your family discusses problems, face all the realities and risks honestly with them. But also articulate the possibilities, emphasize potential, and express your willingness to act. Your spouse and children will almost always respond. What’s more, when you express your hope publicly, it helps you feel it more strongly in your own heart.

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The Pilgrim Who Was Not Disappointed

 

Dante Alighieri died in Ravenna on September 14, 1321 without ever having seen Florence again. The earthly hope that had animated much of his epic poem remained unfulfilled at his death, as so many earthly hopes do. And yet today Florence commemorates Dante almost everywhere you turn, from sites tied to his life to monuments, plaques, and a day of commemoration every spring. He is remembered as one of the greatest poets of European literature. a man who hoped his way to a glory he had not imagined when he first stepped into the dark wood.

 

This is the wager that hope makes in our marriages as well: not that every hope we carry will be granted in the form we have pictured it, but that grace is at work within it, often most powerfully in the places where we have least expected it. The romance that faded gave way to a steadiness that sustains. The fertility we grieved eventually opened into a family we could not have planned. The illness that darkened every morning became the passage through which two people learned, at last, what they had always meant to each other.

 

We do not know, when we begin, what shape our hope will take in the end. We know only that we are not making this journey alone. We have each other. We have the grace of the sacrament that sealed our vows. We have grace, and forgiveness, and the promise that there is light at the end of the dark wood. And it is better than anything we have yet imagined.

 

For Further Reading

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Alarcon, Gene M., Nathan A.Bowling, and Steven Khazon. 2013. Great expectations: A meta-analytic examination of optimism and hope. Personality and Individual Differences 54(7): 821-827. This landmark psychological study that confirms the distinction at the heart of this chapter: hope, unlike optimism, becomes most powerful precisely when circumstances are at their worst. Recommended for readers who want to explore the research behind the hope-versus-optimism distinction.

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Sacerdote, Bruce, Ranjan Sehgal and Molly Cook. 2021. “Why is all Covid-19 News Bad News.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 28110. A revealing study showing that news media reported the pandemic significantly more negatively than the peer-reviewed scientific data warranted. Useful for anyone who wishes to examine the relationship between media consumption and negativity.

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Snyder, C. R. 2009. “Hope Theory: Rainbows in the Mind.” Psychological Inquiry 13(4): 249-275. This psychological work establishing hope as an active, goal-directed capacity rather than a passive feeling. Snyder’s framework—that hope involves both a clear goal and genuine confidence in one’s ability to pursue it—complements the theological understanding of hope explored throughout this chapter.

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Weinberg, Michael, Avi Besser, Virgil Zeigler-Hill, and Yuval Neria. 2016. “Bidirectional associations between hope, optimism and social support, and trauma-related symptoms among survivors of terrorism and their spouses.” Journal of Research in Personality 62: 29-38. Research demonstrating that a spouse’s hopefulness directly strengthens the other’s resilience, even in extreme circumstances such as recovery from trauma. It’s the study behind this chapter’s discussion of hope as among the most important gifts one spouse can offer the other.

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