December's Great Hope
By Emma Restuccia
As December commences, the season of Advent dawns this year. Fittingly, December 1 marks two beginnings, making one think more clearly of Advent as a beginning. As the month moves on, the year dies, but the Christian, in this dying, strives on in hope, in anticipation of Advent’s end and a new birth - the birth of the Savior at Christmas. December indeed is the season of hope.
This cycle of birth and death, beginning and ending, writ large both in this last month of the year and in the beginning of the new liturgical season, educates the soul on the theological virtue of hope and its needfulness for the spiritual journey. As we wind down the year and look on to the birth of a new one, let us meditate on hope and the grace it gives in the transitional seasons of life.
The word advent comes from the Latin word adventus, meaning “arrival” or “appearance.” In the weeks of Advent, the faithful are most obviously preparing for the appearance of the Child Jesus into the world and into our hearts. We wait and celebrate God appearing as and becoming man. But can one not also further consider Advent a step to soul’s arrival at God, to creature becoming as God? The quote from the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, here comes to mind: “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.”
Hope is the fitting virtue for man’s sojourning state toward becoming a “partaker in the divine nature.” The journey and the arrival at this union is made possible only by hope.
In his work “On Hope,” German theologian Josef Pieper writes of the Christian as a viator, or “on the way,” moving toward the possession either of eternal beatitude or eternal nothingness. Hope is the only answer that corresponds to man’s creaturely experience of being on the way: “The virtue of hope is preeminently the virtue of the status viatoris; it is the proper virtue of the ‘not yet.’”
Hope’s place and essence as the second theological virtue illuminates its role as the “not yet” virtue. It resides between faith and love, the middle virtue. Pieper, relying heavily on Aquinas, states that hope takes precedence over love but follows faith, and, in order of dissolution, “love is lost first, then hope, and last of all faith.” Hope is between faith and love in order of perfection. Faith challenges us to hope, which in turn guides us on to love, the greatest virtue. Hope is a moving on virtue. Pieper beautifully quotes: “The theological virtues flow back upon themselves in a sacred circle: the one who is led to love by hope has thereafter a more perfect hope.”
In Advent, we see a condensed version of the pilgrimage of life and of salvation history. Throughout the season, Old Testament readings tell of the sages of Israel prophesying of the coming Messiah. In the New Testament, we hear of the preparations for Christ’s birth, of John the Baptist, and of the Second Coming of the Messiah. All of history points to Christ. We so clearly can see hope at work throughout history - in the waiting, preparing, enduring, looking ahead while remaining in the present.
Christmas is only the beginning of the story. It opens the story of Christ’s human life. But it also begins again our journey of hope toward eternal life. With each lighted candle of the Advent wreath, hope strengthens and grows with the anticipation of the long-expected light of the world overcoming the darkness. With Advent and Christmas, we renew our commitment to hope. In the dark silence, we find hope.
Let us see this Advent season as a setting for learning, practicing, and reviving our hope for the trails ahead. At the end, we make our beginning. In the darkness, we bask in the light. At the death of the year, we find a new birth in hope. May we see with the eyes of hope during Advent and truly recognize our entire journey as an advent as we progress from our pilgrimaging “not yet” state toward the end of the adventure - the eternal attainment of beatitude in the true light of our heavenly homeland.