Mary Adamski: In search of hope amid hard times

View from the pew

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast.”

It’s the sort of statement that seemed profound, lifted from a shared memory of folk sayings, or like a proverb, something possibly biblical.

It is the kind of common wisdom people shared, an old-school version of a modern trend to quote from movies or popular songs as wisdom, expletives not necessarily deleted.

I am running low on hope these days, as are people I know. After basking in the brightness and warmth of the Christmas season, the new year ahead seems dark and cold, heavy with fear and anxiety about physical, familial, financial and especially political concerns.

So I pulled that hopeful quote out of the memory bank and spread it around. It fell flat like the tired platitude it is.

I checked and it is not biblical but the words of 18th-century English writer Alexander Pope in his “An Essay on Man.” Don’t bother memorizing it, it doesn’t work!

Still searching for something to reset my dim and flickering spirits, I read about 2025 being designated as a Jubilee Year of Hope.

The Catholic Church has a tradition of declaring a “jubilee” year as a way to emphasize aspects of Christian teaching and inspire prayer and pilgrimages. It has been done since the year 1300, every 25 to 50 years, oftentimes responding to troubled or tumultuous times in the secular culture of our world.

Pope Francis launched the Jubilee Year by opening the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. This is the first year that the church extended that traditional ceremony to include dioceses around the world. Our Bishop Larry Silva opened the Jubilee Year during Christmas midnight Mass at the Co-Cathedral of St. Theresa in Honolulu.

The pope mentioned folks most desperately in need of hope, such as homeless people, prisoners facing interminable dreary days and residents of places desecrated by war, as well as the urgent need to protect the environment and the planet.

Pope Francis, at a Jan. 11 audience at the Vatican, also emphasized that hope is not merely a character trait but rather a theological virtue — along with faith and charity — that represents “strength to be asked for” from God, according to a Catholic News Agency online story.

He highlighted how the Latin word “virtus” translates to strength and reminded the crowd that hope comes as a gift from God. “Indeed, the jubilee is a new beginning, the possibility for everyone to start anew. With the jubilee we start a new life, a new phase.”

It would be great to get more of that spiritual cheerleading closer to home as the year passes.

I have been asking God, during a year of dark clouds on my personal horizon, to steer me to a new phase. I feel like I’ve been so whiny, so demanding, so “poor me” that God has tuned me out.

At my best of times down through the years, I’ve felt comforted and in communication with the Lord. But losing confidence about being on firm ground, I’ve lost my balance.

That’s a physical fact which is probably at the root of my mental and spiritual perspective. I should probably be out shopping for a gym open to the old, the halt and the lame. Or the spiritual adviser equivalent.

But I am a spinner of words. At a time when I’ve lost my way, I typically seek words from someone wiser than me.

When I set out on this reflection, I looked at the Oxford English Dictionary website for synonyms for hope. Not that compiling a list helped: desire, expectation, dream, aim, aspiration. Yearning and longing and hankering, oh my.

I know what it is, but how do I find it again?

Roaming around in the Google world, I found an interesting website, “Guideposts.” It describes itself as nonprofit and nondenominational, and is based on a magazine of the same name which was founded decades ago by the late Norman Vincent Peale, author of “The Power of Positive Thinking.” Peale was a Protestant minister whose book title became a platitude itself, and whose book was a bestseller among self-help books for years.

Wandering through what I consider the antithesis of the internet’s “dark web,” you can find no end to sites based on Christian teaching. I meandered into Catholic territory to revisit Bishop Fulton Sheen, author, teacher, Emmy winner and sainthood candidate.

Hard for current generations to believe, the late Catholic clergyman was a celebrity on radio and later network television shows. I remember my parents, who had little time for television back in the day, could find time when it was Sheen speaking. He died in 1979.

The American bishop was considered a prophetic voice about challenges to religious faith brought by forces and ideas roiling the world. His was a warning voice about the evil set loose by Adolph Hitler, whose perception of being superior to other people drove his vengeful campaign to conquer countries to bolster his ego and also, to try to wipe from the face of the earth, millions of Jews and others he perceived as inferior.

For years after World War II ended Hitler’s evil reign, Sheen continued to call out other forces he believed were turning people away from God — Communism, materialism, the focus on wealth and power that turned people away from charity, mercy, conciliation, cooperation, peace.

The prophet-rock star-bishop’s words were both comforting and disturbing to a seeker for a quick fix of hope. His on-camera homilies were lectures about what was wrong with the world decades ago. And those evils are still here, though the names have changed.

In a 2021 blog post, National Catholic Register reporter Joseph Pronechen said that Sheen spoke as if foreseeing today when he said: “Modern man has been humiliated; neither his proud expectation of progress nor of science turned out as he hoped. Yet he has not quite reached the point of humbling himself. He is still imprisoned in the self, and able to see nothing else beyond.”

The reporter pointed out Sheen’s book “Hope is the Anchor,” which foresaw “our greatest days are ahead, though in-between intervenes the purging, where we will learn that as the rays cannot survive without the sun, so neither can we prosper without God. This hope can be translated into victory in either of two ways: by prayerfully remaking our hearts or by being brought within an inch of disaster, until from the depths of our insufficiency we cry out to the goodness of God.”

I realize that my fanatical focus on the subject of hope has been a distraction I deliberately set for myself.

I’m writing this in the first week of our new world order which has brought me and many to a crisis of hope. I have stopped watching or reading the news in an effort to shield myself from despair. I clap hands over ears if someone wants to discuss breaking news of vendetta and retribution.

One morsel of news — I didn’t duck in time — caught my attention. It was the words of an Episcopal bishop, speaking at a prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., following the presidential inauguration.

Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, head of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, said, “I ask you to have mercy on people in our country who are scared now.” Her remarks were directed at President Donald Trump, who sat in the first row.

She spoke on behalf of children born in this country to parents who are illegal immigrants, and of LGBTQ people — both groups have been singled out in executive orders signed by Trump.

Finally, in my search for hope, I found a glimmer of light as I reread a national story in the Jan. 17 Hawaii Catholic Herald.

Thanks to Pope Francis, who is wise and wily in navigating sectarian politics of the world, we do have an American Catholic bishop who will “speak truth to power,” as human rights activists call it.

Just two weeks before the inauguration, the pope assigned Cardinal Robert W. McElroy as archbishop of the Catholic diocese of Washington, D.C. (He will be installed in March.)

Cardinal McElroy, as previous head of the San Diego diocese which borders Mexico, has stood in support on immigrants’ rights. During a Jan. 6 news conference at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, he said that “wider, indiscriminate, massive deportation across the country” would be “incompatible with Catholic doctrine.” He said that while the church teaches that a country has the right to control its borders, it also teaches the “dignity of every human being,” according to a New York Times report.

The prelate holds a doctorate in political science from Stanford University. While other Catholic bishops have made abortion their pre-eminent political issue, he has argued that it is one of several critical priorities of Catholic moral issues.

“Our political society has been poisoned by a tribalism that is sapping our energy as a people and endangering our democracy. And that poison has entered destructively into the life of the church,” he wrote in America magazine, a Jesuit publication, in 2023.

Dire though that statement may be, I think that I have found a flicker of hope. If we just have one strong voice crying out in the wilderness, perhaps he will bring courage to others.

I’m not going to return to fanatical news and commentary reading and watching anytime soon. My wise old Irish cousin retreated, too, and says his days as a “news junkie” may be over.

Instead, he turned to music. He mentioned listening to Andrea Bocelli’s singing “Phantom of the Opera” songs. That did not ring my bells.

Meanwhile, I’m turning from grim to giddy. On a whim, I tuned into a recording from the Broadway musical “Damn Yankees.” One tune is this:

“You’ve gotta have heart. All you really need is heart. When the odds are sayin’ you’ll never win, that’s when the grin should start.

“You’ve gotta have hope. Mustn’t sit around and mope. Nothin’s half as bad as it may appear. Wait’ll next year…and hope.

“Get your chin up off the floor…you can open any door, there is nothin’ to it but to do it.

You’ve gotta have heart, miles and miles of heart.”