"I saw the rain, dirty valley You saw Brigadoon..."

Without a doubt, of the three theological virtues, hope is the most slippery. It is a mistake to think of any of the three in isolation. This is why I often link them by insisting that hope is the flower of faith and charity is their fruit. We also make a mistake by thinking of faith as belief. In reality, faith, to borrow Brennan Manning's phrase, is "ruthless trust." We make perhaps an even bigger mistake when we reduce hope to optimism, seeing it as a kind of hyper-optimism.

In reality, just as faith is not mere belief, hope is not optimism, let alone hyper-optimism. As I am also wont to note with some frequency: hope lies beyond optimism. Brother David Steindl-Rast, in his book Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer, which is my daily spiritual reading right now, provides the best treatment of hope I have ever encountered.

Anemone Rosea

Brother David begins with this stark statement: "Hope is realistic." In the next sentence, he insists "The realism of hope is humility." From there he points out that both optimism and pessimism are unrealistic. He goes so far as to assert that "Optimism and pessimism pretend. But hope shows concern." He sees hope as that virtue that "integrates," helping to make us whole.

Hope, Brother David writes, is what "happens when the bottom drops out of our pessimism." Hope is when we have nothing or no one to turn to except God. Here he cites Saint Paul: "tribulation leads to patience; and patience to experience; and experience to hope" (Romans 5:3ff). Experience, which is still too little valued among Christians, is the fire in which the "dross" of pretense is burned away.

At its core, Brother David believes each spiritual is an exercise in purgation. "Discipline," he notes, "is not so much a matter of doing this or that, but of holding still." Stillness "is not a shutting up. It is the stillness of the anemone wide open to the sunlight." The stillness called for by hope is one's "perfect focusing of energy on the task at hand."

Derived as it is from the word humus, which refers to earth, as in soil, humility, which is what makes hope what it is and not optimism, is also related to the words "humor" and "humanity." It is the essence of being human to obtain the kind of earthiness that enables me to laugh at myself, not in a jeering or demeaning way, but in a good-hearted manner. This makes me human.

Today's tradito is Fiona Apple's lovely cover of The Waterboys' "The Whole of the Moon." The song's lyrics are a kind of dialogue between optimism and pessimism, thus providing a glimpse of hope.