A Faith Worth Believing by Tom Stella

Author:Tom Stella
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Some people imagine that hope is the highest degree of optimism, a kind of super-optimism…. A far more accurate picture would be that hope happens when the bottom drops out of our pessimism. We have nowhere to fall but into the ultimate reality of God’s motherly caring.3

True hope is always related to belief in the constancy of God’s motherly embrace. The awareness that there is a divine presence that can “break our fall” rescues hope from being synonymous with optimism and places it in the arena of courage, where it belongs.

It is hope at work when a woman, despite her fear and insecurity, reenters the workforce after years spent raising her family. It is hope enfleshed when a man with a terminal diagnosis refuses to give up on life but instead continues, without denial of his circumstance, to pursue his goals with all the energy he can muster. And it is hope when a person carrying the wounds of a relationship gone sour chooses to become vulnerable again for the sake of living life to the full. Hope is not wishing things were different; it is choosing to make the most of our lives given the given—that is, accepting the reality of our circumstances and the reality that the strength of a “motherly” presence accompanies us.

I sense this hopeful, nurturing presence in Mother Nature as well as in human nature. I see it especially in the rebirth that is the season of spring. Nature teaches us that the winters of our discontent, failure, and loss are not as lifeless as they appear. Within the stems and branches of our being resides the undying wherewithal to be born again, and with each new spring there can be a sense that life is even better than it was before.

I experienced the brand of hope I now embrace while on the faith-journey mentioned in the previous chapter. I spent the first year of a three-year leave of absence from the priesthood in San Francisco. As I neared my destination after days of driving, I felt both excitement and panic. I had, years earlier, lived in Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco. I had friends there, but I had no job now. I had places to stay, but I had no home. I had ideas about how life would unfold for me, but I had no certitude that my ideas would come to pass.

Despite my fears and the gnawing sense that perhaps I should have remained who and where I had been, I felt that I couldn’t fail even if I failed to arrive at the clarity I sought about myself. It was right to have ventured forth. I was living in sync with the Spirit. What would happen was less important than the fact that I was living from my heart. I was not so much hopeful about what might happen as I was hope-filled. I was not alone, even though I was by myself.

I was confirmed in my sense of rightness when, as I was about to cross the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, I passed a field of “junk art.

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