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Hope that Enters Our Humanity
An Advent reflection by Fr. Jim Caime, SJ
“Hope is a dimension of the soul… an orientation of the spirit… anchored somewhere beyond the horizon.” — Václav Havel
As part of my regular prayer life, I subscribe to an app called Ritual. One section, hosted by Matt Bloom and called “The Joyful Life,” recently used this quote from Václav Havel as the focus of its weekly reflections. For me, Advent is exactly that: a training of the soul to look beyond what is immediately before us, not because the world looks promising, but because God is faithful.
Ignatius offers us a profound way to pray into that hope in the Meditation on the Incarnation. He asks us to imagine the Trinity — Father, Son, and Spirit — gazing upon the world, the real one: nations in conflict, people harmed and harming, families strained, the poor forgotten, hearts weighed down by fear, grief, or loneliness. Ignatius invites us to hear the cries, the confusion, the longing, the broken promises, the unmet hopes. In that divine gaze we recognize our own world and, if we are honest, our own lives.
And then comes the most astonishing movement. The Trinity looks at this world in the shape it is in, and the response is not anger, not abandonment, not resignation, but a decision rooted in love.
“Let us send the Son.”
Hope rises because God sees us clearly and comes anyway, entering our chaos and our fragile humanity from within. Advent invites us to hold this mystery in our hearts, to look at the world as it is, to look at ourselves as we truly are, and still trust the God who draws near in mercy.
Maybe that is what it means for hope to be a dimension of the soul. It is the interior space where the Incarnation is always happening again, where God’s decision to draw near finds room in us. It is the orientation of a heart that trusts the One who stepped across every boundary to be Emmanuel, God with us.
I invite you to continue your Advent reflection by praying with the song “Day of Peace” by Janèt Sullivan Whitaker, a piece that longs for the healing, hope, and mercy God still desires to bring into our world.
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