Every year we spend most of the season of Advent uttering this prayer: “May inherit the great promise in which now we dare to hope.” Why is hope a dare?
Hope can be understood as a kind of reaching out for something in the future perceived as good, and for the anticipated fulfilment that comes once it is possessed.
What goads hope is a sort of “real absence”. In his encyclical on hope, Spe Salvi (“Saved in Hope”) Benedict XVI stresses how it is endemic to the human condition to feel driven to what we would really like – to true life. Yet, even though we do not know what that thing is toward which we feel driven, we cannot stop reaching out for it. What is more, this Ultimate Something cannot be reduced to anything we can personally accomplish. “This unknown ‘thing’ is the true ‘hope’ which drives us,” he writes.
