One More Day Alive

Hope vs. Faith

Hope: Expectations for the future

Faith: Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing. Belief in a set of principles

“Don’t lose hope,” said the waitress to one of the regulars at a little cafe I frequent. The patron had just poured her heart out to the waitress about losing her job.  The property management company she worked for lost their shirt in the real estate crisis, and the thirty-something single mother of two got laid off. “Keep the faith,” I muttered as she left the cafe. She smiled and thanked me for my concern.

But can such platitudes offer any meaningful comfort or direction when we are at the end of our rope?

Unemployment is still in the stratosphere. Most economists say we had better get used to that because we won’t see that number coming down for years.

Foreclosures are still out of control and may see another rise. Experts say the worst of this is behind us – but that really doesn’t make anyone who has been foreclosed upon feel any better.

Oil and gas prices are through the roof.

Everywhere you look nowadays the papers are filled with stories of people struggling to make ends meet.

So what do we all do about it? Don’t lose hope and keep the faith? But what does that actually mean?

Well maybe hope –looking forward to better times to come – makes it easier to keep going. Psychologists and common sense tell us we can endure anything for a limited time, as long as the end is in site, and we know that better times lie ahead.

But how do we know that good times lie ahead – and how do we deal with the ones we got.

That’s where faith comes in.

Maybe hope without faith is missing the point of our lives – that there is a great value to finding some solace in the situations we are in – even the worst of them. 

If you believe in what you are doing and why you are doing it, you can endure more than you ever imagined.

But faith can help us find happiness within the experiences of our ordeals themselves and how we deal with them?  Because tough times make us realize the value of our lives can’t all be measured, understood or based on our prosperity, our fortune, misfortune, or end result at all.

Our value is wrapped up in the way we live, the people, the principles and the God we live for. And in turn those are the reasons to endure the toughest times life can offer – to keep going – for all those principles and people that we love.

And we will get through.  But when we do, we will have much more than our rediscovered prosperity?  We will have the knowledge and know-how it took us to get there.  We will have the confidence in our ability to weather tough times. Most importantly, we will know better what we value, and who.

We will all keep working hard.  Because that’s what Americans do. In fact, when the chips are down, you can’t beat our spirit, our ingenuity and our faith in each other, in ourselves, and in our God to see us through.

We keep going because we know that every day, every hour, every second that we spend helping spread God’s love through our own compassion, our understanding and our endurance gets all of us one step closer to making the Lord’s Prayer a reality – “Thy will be done – on earth as it is in Heaven.”

And I HOPE none of you give up on that.

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It’s that time of year again to rejoice in the coming of Christ, Who redeemed us from sin and offers eternal love.

It’s also when many “non-practicing” Catholics return to church for their annual visit out of tradition, family duty or habit, even though their hearts aren’t in it and some may be questioning the existence of God altogether.

Let’s all support them because you never know when that thread of faith will pull them up from the abyss of despair and ultimately inspire the rest of the world too.

Case in point: Anne Rice, the best-selling author of “Interview with the Vampire” and the “Vampire Chronicles,” had an amazing awakening after decades mired in despair and a career devoted to writing about the undead and the damned.

She recently shared a few thoughts with me about her rich Catholic upbringing and how suddenly in the summer of her 18th year, she inexplicably lost her faith. There was no major traumatic event; it just happened.

What followed was an extraordinary career writing the fictional accounts of a vampire named Lestat, a desperate soul searching for meaning in an eternity doomed to darkness. Rice married the love of her life, endured the horrible loss of her daughter to leukemia, then the miraculous birth of her son.

Faith rediscovered

But just as nothing made her lose her faith, nothing particular brought it back; the latter just happened — one day in December of 1998, right before Christmas.

“I wanted so desperately to get back to God,” revealed Rice. “I was running around so afraid and in such a state of despair for so long. I wanted to stop running from things and run to God.”

But Rice had struggled for years with “deep sociological questions.”

“How could I believe in God if so many bad things happened in the world?” explained Rice. “I wondered if the Church was right on one issue or another. Then I realized I didn’t need to know all the answers. All I needed to accept was that I loved God and wanted to reconnect with Him through the Church. I could surrender to Him in His infinite mercy. It wasn’t about avoiding questions; it was about love.”

She went to confession that day, and received holy Communion afterward. She remarried her husband in the Church. Soon her random loss and rediscovery of faith started to make some inspiring sense.

“Catholicism wasn’t just a religion for me,” said Rice, “it was a way of life. It influenced everything that I wrote even when I was away from the Church. I thought I was an atheist writing that book [“Interview with a Vampire”] but why did I write about someone who was grieving for loss? Why did I write about someone who was lost and searching? It was me searching for my faith, searching for what I had lost.”

That faith guided her, even when she was “lost,” and eventually led her back to the Church.

“When you grow up Catholic you feel that you have to be connected to the meaning of life,” said Rice.  “When you break away from your faith, you still have that yearning. I never lost my desire to understand what the point of my life was.”

Since then Rice has devoted her life and career to the Lord. In her recently released “Angel Time,” she examines redemption, hope and the merciful, healing love of Christ for a hit man who retains an ounce of faith and is pursued by an angel until he comes to his soul’s senses — an experience Rice identifies with metaphorically.

“Coming back to the Church allowed me to replace a quasi despair about everything with optimism. I am no longer running around every minute afraid. Now I don’t feel like I am running at all. I am calm yet driven. I feel like life is a celebration.”

Hopefully this holiday a few “lost” Catholics can take solace in Rice’s redemption and might even celebrate their own. Merry Christmas!

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