There is a village on the French side of the Pyrenees named Bugarach. It is very small, with a population of only around 200 people. It sits at the foot of a mountain bearing the same name – the Pic de Bugarach. In recent times, tourists of a very special breed have been coming to Bugarach, tourists who believe that when the world ends on December 21, 2012, a few months from now in this new year, as predicted by some ancient Mayan calendar, in a manner still unknown, all humankind will be wiped out, except for those who will find themselves in the area around Bugarach and its magical mountain. They believe that extra-terrestrials live in the mountain, and when the great cataclysm comes, the mountaintop will open, and spaceships that had been hidden inside the mountain will lift off, bringing along with them whoever might be found in Bugarach at that moment.
Whether or not Bugarach is verified, it points to a problem – a loss of trust. It tells us that there are people in this world who have really given up on humankind, and have turned their gaze to some other new life out there, some new world on some new planet. And there are other types who would rather not depend on the human capacity to do good – astrologers who have instead counted on the movement of the stars, the superstitious who would rather depend on supernatural signs and spirits, crystal balls and tarot cards, gamblers who have decided to just take their risks on some lotto ticket, or any other game of chance.
These clutch at straws, at some illusion, some imagined good out there. They fail to see that hope is not out there. Hope is in us, planted deep in the human heart. It is this hope inside us that makes us capable of considering what Ignatius proposes for us in the Spiritual Exercises, and so restore order to our lives.
This fundamental hope manifests itself in two distinct but complementary movements. The first movement of hope is seen in what we can do.
By the grace of God, the Spiritual Exercises are built on the premise that it is possible for us to still transform our lives and our world, no matter how desperate it might feel at times. And the hope in our heart springs to life in the everyday. What is inside overflows and translates into action. We plan, we push, we produce. We toil and train. We study scenarios and set schedules. We plot policies and procedures, and take positions based on principle. We change if we have to. We rest if we have to. We explore new avenues. We solve problems along the way. But the important thing is that we persist. We run the race to the end. We make things happen. Hope pushes the bearers of Ignatian spirituality to be effective, whether that’s teaching in the classroom or preaching a retreat or fund raising for a cause or administering the sacraments.
Now and then, we are dragged to despair. When we look at the problems in the Philippines, and in many of our countries in Asia, we are tempted to water down our hopes because the maladies never seem to go away – the corruption, the injustice, the greed. We can become so jaded. We can retreat to our little corners and think little and settle for what is customary or comfortable or convenient.
There is a saying attributed to St. Augustine, which is probably not his, but which is worth reflecting on. It speaks of hope having two daughters, and their names are anger and courage – anger that things are the way they are, and courage to bring them to where they ought to be. When we are wearied by the big problems of our world, we lose our sense of righteous anger at the situation and the determination to do something about it.
If we are not careful, the dynamic of action can trick us into believing that it is enough that we do well what we do well. But the spirit of Ignatius cannot be smothered. We are challenged to stop every so often, to look to the horizon, and ask what else has not been done, who else has not been reached, where else can the Gospel be made to touch lives – and recover our anger and our courage, and so renew our hope. Some call it frontier. Some call it magis. Some call it a sense of renewed mission. And our hope lives on.
But there is a subtler second movement of hope. If the first movement is manifest in what we can do, the second movement is seen in what we cannot do. It is the hope of the helpless.
The images of this second movement are many. A family waits in worry at a hospital as doctors help their mother fight a major heart attack. An office worker high up in the South Tower of the World Trade Center when the planes hit on 9-11, decides to walk down instead of climb up. A father watches his addicted son shake violently crying out for relief. A factory worker trudges to work, day in and day out, even if he knows he can never really earn enough to feed his children. An aging and ailing Arrupe says with so much clarity, “More than ever I find myself in the hands of God… the initiative is entirely with God…” The second movement of hope is helplessness, and the experience of radical dependence on God.
It doesn’t feel like hope, but it is hope. It has to do, not with feeling good, but with recovering meaning. Father Timothy Radcliffe says that to hope is “not just to bet on goodness being stronger than evil. It is not just our confidence that God will have the last word, like some hero” who shows up at the last moment to save us. More importantly, hope is the certainty that the Lord’s movements in this world – his birth in Bethlehem, his poverty in Nazareth, his pains on Calvary, his embrace of humanity in its completeness, from birth to death, through joys and pains, in company with friends and foes – make sense. All this makes sense and have meaning. They are an acceptance of all the darkest that this world has to offer and making it bear fruit. “So there is nothing in human history that cannot somehow, in ways that we cannot anticipate, be embraced ….” Indeed, Christianity offers no road map. It gives us a story that brings life and gives meaning. Rowan Williams, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, points out the paradox when he says, “The light is at the heart of the dark; the dawn breaks when we have entered fully into the night.”
“Walay pasko karon … there is no Christmas at this time,” said Mayor Emano of Cagayan de Oro, after the floods that hit the city which claimed the lives of so many and caused so much pain and destruction. And the mayor is right, if you define Christmas mainly in terms of celebration and feasting, caroling and lights blinking, gifts wrapped and ribboned, and tables teeming with food. But if Christmas is really about that silent night when the census brought a homeless couple to Bethlehem to bring the son of God to birth into a suffering world of hungry shepherds and violent kings, then maybe December in the evacuation centers of northern Mindanao is really closer to what it was really all about in the first place, than what many of us have gotten used to all these years.
The hope of the helpless. If you think about it, that must have been what Mary saw when the shepherds came to visit, what she treasured in her heart of hearts – not just the surprise of having strange visitors pay tribute to her son, but also the realization that this makes sense, that it has meaning. And as the Nazarene enters his public life, we come to realize that his name, Yeshua, meaning “salvation,” the name that Ignatius chose to give his least Society, is not so much about the miracles that marked his ministry, but more about the meaning he gives to our lives.
Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president says it well: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
The year is 2012. Whether the world ends or not in a few months doesn’t matter. What will matter is that we become agents of hope – working out as best we can what we can do, and at the same time knowing that the more important thing is to realize that we are always in God’s hands and that this give our human lives, superhuman meaning. Amen.
- Fr. Jojo Magadia, SJ
Provincial Superior of the Philippine Jesuits
