“Praying in Joyful Hope”

Praying is hard. Not only is this the common experience of nearly everyone who tries it, the fact is confirmed by no less an authority than St. Paul: “We do not know how to pray as we ought.” (Rom. 8:26). I have experienced this in my own prayer life. As soon as I settle down to pray, my mind is overcome with distracting thoughts. Struggle turns into frustration when I see others in prayer. From the looks of it, some of them have an easier time with prayer than me. I suspect that I am not the only person who has this difficulty. How, then, should we deal with the frustrations that we experience when we try to pray? A part of the answer lies in cultivating the virtue of hope.

Fresh Possibilities

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that 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, relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (1817). Let us unpack this definition.

When God reveals Himself to us, and enables us to believe in that revelation by the grace of faith. He throws open fresh possibilities for our lives, possibilities that our minds could never conceive of on their own. As St. Paul says, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him, God has revealed to us through the Spirit” (1 Cor 2:9-10). Without faith, we can only know of enduring hardships and fleeting joys in a life that is all too short. But with faith we know that the Son of God became the Son of Mary to save us from death by His death and resurrection. By faith, we know that we have received the Holy Spirit so that we might become adopted sons and daughters of God, co-heirs with Christ the Son of God to an eternal inheritance: life with the Blessed Trinity for all eternity.

Because of the fresh possibilities opened up for us by faith, our lives can never be the same. It is the virtue of hope that renders the possibilities known by faith active in our lives. But how does this work? A comparison with our ordinary human hopes can help us to understand. Suppose a person has a serious illness. The discovery that his illness is curable and that there is a physician who can cure it will bring about two hopes in him. First, since he knows that his disease is curable, he will hope for a restoration of health. Second, since he knows that there is a doctor who can cure him, he will hope in the doctor, trusting that the doctor can cure him. Similarly, the theological virtue of hope does two things. Based on what we know by faith, we hope for eternal life and we hope in God, trusting that He will give it to us. Just as faith strengthens our intellects so that we can believe the things God has revealed, hope strengthens our wills so that we can expect the things that God has promised. As St. Thomas Aquinas says, “Hope makes us stand to God as to a good to be obtained finally and as a helper strong to assist.”

“Trust in Him and He Will Act”

All of this means that hope should produce an attitude of confidence in us with respect to the spiritual life. The person who has faith not only believes in the promise of eternal life; he also believes in a God who is omnipotent and merciful. Because He is omnipotent, He is able to give us eternal life. Because He is merciful, He wants to give us eternal life. Thus He is constantly active in our lives, working to remedy our miseries with the blessings of His grace. The person who has hope trusts in this omnipotence and mercy, and these are the sources of his confidence. The person who has hope finds deep consolation in the words of Sacred Scripture: “Trust in the Lord, and do good; so you will dwell in the land, and enjoy security. Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act” (Ps. 37:3-5). “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jer. 29:11).

“Hope Does not Disappoint”

Therefore, difficulties and frustrations in prayer are opportunities for us to grow in hope. Every time we are frustrated by our progress in prayer, we can recommend ourselves anew to Jesus and again throw open the doors of our hearts to the Holy Spirit. We do this because we know that an omnipotent and merciful God is constantly at work in our lives. We can gaze on the Crucified and confidently assure ourselves, “A God who would do that for me will not abandon me now and have it all count for nothing! Jesus, I trust in You and Your work in my life. Lord, come now, have mercy on me and make me holy.”

Such an act of hope turns the distractions and frustrations of our prayer into occasions for growth in prayer. For the more we place our hope for sanctification in the omnipotent and merciful God, the more we begin to realize that sanctification is not something that we are responsible for all by ourselves. Rather, it is God who sanctifies us according to His generous mercy. It is our job, enabled by His grace, to give Him permission to work in us. This is what St. Paul means when he says, “Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Rom 5:5).

This hope also helps us to make it through periods of desolation in prayer. By hope, we trust in a God who is constantly at work in our lives. Desolation in prayer, then, must be but another way that God is at work in our sanctification. God may seem absent, but really He is present in a different way. We may not fully understand God’s ways with us, but we know Him well enough by faith that we can reliably place our trust in him. Therefore, the way through desolations in prayer is also through making acts of hope.

Thus we can see a way past our initial difficulty. It is true that “we do not know how to pray as we ought.” But by yielding to the action of the God who works wonders, by making acts of hope in the omnipotent and merciful God, we will discover that “the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8:8) and we will grow in prayer.