Let us help the man of our time to "bring out" the dormant hope ...
by Rosanna Tabasso
When the Lord thought about it, he entrusted us with hope as his gift to live in our time. We discovered it in the 1980s, when Italy was devastated by the violence of terrorism. There were those who shouted, those who demonstrated, there were kidnappings, killings and the omen of a hidden design that could change the life of the nation forever. We gathered in the squares of Turin and chose silence, prayer, from which a profound and confident serenity emerged, the hope that helped us to look ahead. People observed us and confirmed this characteristic: "Always ready to answer anyone who asks you the reason for the hope that is in you" (1Pt 3,15). It wasn't flour from our sack, nor superficial judgment, but a feeling of which we were only an instrument. We understood there that hope is a gift from God. He gives it to those who seek answers and cannot find them in themselves.
It is the gift that is given to the humble of heart in Scripture. Creatures who live the bond with God not to propitiate it but as the essence of their daily lives: work, family, service, difficulties and great trials of life, everything is for them an encounter with Him. These people communicate hope because they live with God. Those who approach them learn to "bring out the dormant hope in their hearts". John Paul II confirmed this mandate to us in 1978. Those who live in this way discover a dimension of hope that few have the courage to face: the mystery of the Kingdom of God which advances and will come to its fulfillment. We are familiar with God who makes himself one of us, with us, much less with his promise to make us like Him, in Him. Yet it is the greatest promise: the Lord, risen and alive, will return to bring his Kingdom to fulfillment and it will be for eternity. The Christian communities of the first centuries lived waiting for his coming and often invoking him: "Come, Lord Jesus!". It was not a way of saying, they felt the precariousness of their life, they knew they were not enough for themselves, they were persecuted for the faith ... The expectation of Christ's return, the fullness of his Kingdom where the poor are blessed, where those who mourn are consoled, where the persecuted receive the reward (Mt 5), where "love and truth will meet, justice and peace will kiss" (Ps 85,11) has nourished the hope of generations along the history of salvation.
And what does it say to us? We moderns are far from this expectation: why look for something we don't know the nature of if we are already satisfied? Just the suffering and the inevitable experience of death shake us, but we are moments that we try to move away quickly and then return to live. Moments in which often, instead of opening ourselves to the hope of the already and not yet, we rebel against God: why have you allowed this pain, this slander, this unjust death, because you who are God? Why don't you intervene? Often we Christians are the most distant from hope, those who feel betrayed for not having received an answer to their prayers, the most deaf to the word "Blessed are you when ...", those most strangers to waiting. Of course, we must not fall into indifference to the present, taking refuge in a passive waiting for what will be, but also not losing the daily and working sense of waiting. God has given us the resources necessary to subjugate the earth but nothing belongs to us and everything is in the making. Hope is God's response to what we still do not see, do not have, do not understand. At the expense of the progress of which we were the creators, the times we live in offer us no more tranquility or certainties. These are times to return to God wholeheartedly and begin to hope again for what we do not see. Perhaps the invocation of the Apocalypse, "Come, Lord Jesus!" Will become more familiar to us. (Ap 22,20).