Hope is one of the seven virtues and is not a cardinal virtue, but a theological one. As such, non-believers have no hope to worry about (just kidding). No, the hope I refer to is the hope in the promise God have given us.
Remember how I said that life is nothing but a struggle. I said that a man struggles against the world and that woman struggles against man. Generally, this is the case among all of us, whether we believe in God or not. Hope is there to help us understand that there is more after this life and that the struggles now are nothing compared to the joy we will have.
With hope, we are continually looking forward to the eternal world and not engaging in wishful thinking. For everyone has a desire for Heaven within them, otherwise we wouldn’t have secular Utopians trying to ram their twisted worldviews down our throats.
Anyway, this desire is found in so many things in our own lives. We find in the fulfillment of our jobs and finding something we enjoy doing. We find in love for others. We find it in entertainment. But ultimately, all these things give some level of disappointment.
No matter how much you love your job, there is always that day where it is like any job you might hate. No matter how much you love your spouse, there are always days where you’d rather not be around him or her, unless it is necessary. And no matter how entertaining something is, at the end of the day it isn’t the reality of your life.
And so, despite that tinge of longing, we often find ourselves disappointed in Earthly things. Now, I am not calling for you to abandon such things, just because they are perfect. Indeed, you’ll still have the desire to engage in such things and those lesser desires will be filled.
But the greater desire will remain. This desire for heaven is innate in all of us and drives us to do extraordinary and sometimes horrible things. As Christians, we have to recognize that this desire was placed in our hearts by God. Call it His strategic invasion into the spiritual world. Our world, after all, is ruled by Satan, by sin and disobedience to him.
Yet He has planted on our hearts a desire for Him, a desire that cannot be satisfied by any Earthly thing. Instead such things arouse this desire and make it burn even more.
And so we must hope for the satisfaction of that desire. This is the hope that I speak when I refer to this virtue. It is what Paul writes about when he mentions hope. It is not silly, trite, or delusional, but Godly.
Western Christians are not taught this virtue because we have so much wealth and tend to lack nothing of substance. Poverty is non-existent in the United States, only people with misplaced priorities in their spending and working habits. As such, we live a life of leisure and comfort, not having to worry about chopping wood so that we can heat our bedrooms, wondering where our next meal will come from, or wishing that our roof wasn’t made of hay.
While there is certainly a great benefit to all this and I wouldn’t trade any of it unless God told me to, it does diminish this heavenly virtue because we become complacent in our lives. While we still have the desire for Heaven in us, we lack the training to properly deal with it.
This is probably the biggest problem with secular schooling for us. It has caused us to focus on the earthly things rather than heavenly things. To understand that this existence is temporary and that greater things are to come.