Ordo Praedicatorum

Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., an instructor in dogmatic theology at the Dominican House of Studies, preached the following homily on what St. Therese can teach us about the meaning of Christian hope.  Fr. White will offer the presentation on Intellectual Life and Formation at the upcoming Vocation Weekend, October 17-19.

Fr. White’s Homily for October 2, Memorial of St. Therese:

There is a lot of talk in our culture these days about hope. But what is hope, anyway? If we transcend superficial intellectual instincts, we have to admit that hope is not something we just already understand, or that we readily know the definition of. In fact, the problem of human hope is a mystery and it is a deep mystery—that burns in the very fibers of modern culture.

We’ve recently lived—in the 20^th Century—through an age of false hopes, of Marxist delusions of hope—not primarily in our own culture, but in many cultures in the world. And we see now a mirror image of this hope that has been deceived: its place is taken by the culture of relativism, which is a culture of despair, in a certain sense, because it is increasingly difficult to hope today that we can find common truths that unite us.

At base hope is a mystery that concerns the deepest aspirations of the human heart. What is it that we should long for and what is it we should love? As long as we don’t know, or if we know wrongly, we remain a puzzle to ourselves, a locked prison that can only be opened from within. “Tell me what you hope for, and I will tell you what you are.”

The genius of Therese of the Child Jesus is that she could reinvent hope, or renew hope, in a vertiginous fashion. From the death of her mother, that drove her in hope into the arms of the Blessed Virgin, to the illness of her father, in whom she perceived in hope the emergence of a martyrdom, to her struggle in the Carmel, and her terrible bout with tuberculosis and her dark night of the soul…she found as if through the tunnel of darkness a shinning cord of light. It was the light of faith, and it was the cord of hope, the hope of Christ and his crucifixion, that had come to embrace her, to sanctify her, and even to bring to completion in her a mission on behalf of the Catholic Church. And so, as she suffered, and eventually as she lay on her bed in agony, on her Cross, she was joyous. St. Therese was filled with happiness, because of her hope in Christ.

Her mission was in fact, just that: her testimony to hope, to the joy of faith, amidst the darkness and unbelief of the 20th century. Her little way was the tightrope of faith she walked on, through illness and obscurity, over the abyss of meaninglessness, and into the heart of God, and she did that with joy. The theological virtue of hope is directed toward God alone as its final end, who alone can satisfy the hidden longings of the human heart (resolving the puzzle of what a human being is) and fulfilling the human desire for the truth. And genuine, Christian hope is also directed therefore to the means of salvation- means not of our own making (such as the pseudo-messianic hopes of Marxism) but means of divine institution, and of God’s providence, of God’s choosing and of his giving in his Church and through holy obedience. This is hope on God’s terms.

Each of us commonly confronts at least two dilemmas before the trial of hope, looking across the narrow way, and down into the precipice below, and each of which can lead to despair. One form of temptation is to fail to believe in the means, because God’s way seems too difficult. We are two weak, and the way is too high. Salvation if it were by faith alone, without works, might be amenable, but faith working in love is too demanding. The way is too narrow, the cost is too great. Love and the sanctification it brings are beautiful, but they are rare, and they are too rarified for me. I’m suffering from high altitude sickness.

The second temptation concerns the end itself and it is more common. Who could really hope to see God face to face, anyway? Heaven is a dream, or at least it’s a risk. Let’s abandon this way (overtly or implicitly), and in little or great ways, let’s make our permanent home in this world. At least it’s proportioned to our uses, even if ultimately it offers only the most modest of fulfillments. In short, transcendence is alienating. Please keep it away from me.

What is intriguing about St. Therese, and what we have to continue to learn from her, is that she didn’t perceive the problems this way. And in fact, one gets the sense that her perceptions are much closer to those of divine wisdom, who sometimes gives understanding to children. It is not because the way is high and steep, that is to say difficult and costly, that I am supposed to become perfect, so as to be adequate to the task. Rather, for St. Therese, because the way is too great for us, only Christ can be that way, and only Christ can make us proportioned to his commandments and his promises. Our weaknesses, then, are themselves assets, if only we make them so, if only we perceive them in hope as the occasions of the divine purchase of our lives. What really fails us is not our strength, but simply our desire. To desire Christ is enough, and all of our combats, or limitations, and even our falls, can become the occasion for a deeper redemption of our hearts by grace. St. Therese is a prophet of desire, which is the truest and most profound sign of hope. The Christian is the being of desire, par excellence, one who, no matter how weak, is linked by desire to work of Christ.

And secondly, Therese, who never read a word of Friedrich Nietzsche, doesn’t flee from the nihilism of her age, the temptation to abandon all quest for meaning. Is life meaningless? In fact, moved by the grace of God, she not only intuits that this is the question of her age, but she even embraces it as her own, within her faith, to use it as the occasion of a greater love for Christ, to redeem it from within, as it were, as if, to paraphrase her own claim in the Autobiography, she would accept to go into hell itself, so that God might be loved even there by at least one human heart.

The terrible truth is that our mission to our contemporaries does not lie somehow outside of or after they have resolved their struggles with meaning. On the contrary, St. Therese’s life of hope suggests that at times at least, their struggles are to become our own, and are meant to be redeemed from within, in the night of faith, and the mystery of the crucifixion. But St. Therese gives us hope and encouragement even here, as our older sister, or perhaps as our younger sister, as if to say, if I could struggle through these circumstances, so can you. If God can make me holy, one who is so frail, he can do so for you as well. And if I can find the joy of Christ, and pass through the night of faith and death in peace and in the serene triumph of love, then so can you. This is the little way of Jesus, and this is my way. You need only to hope in God.

Indeed, St. Therese, pray for us, that we may be saved in hope.

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