“Stay thirsty,” so we are advised by the most interesting man in the world. It’s better, however, to phrase this as a question before employing it as an exhortation. So, existentially speaking, Are you thirsty? If you are thirsty, what are you thirsty for?
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that our humanity largely consists of our desire, our longing. We desire, we long for, health, fulfillment, contentment, achievement, love, influence, satisfaction. It’s often the case, to quote the Rolling Stones, despite trying and trying, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” One thing to point out about the list above is that some of the things we long for are at odds with other things we desire.
Desire is the genesis of hope. Hope is perhaps best defined as desire properly directed. All earthly things fade away: money, possessions, accomplishments, even lovely sunny days at the beach. In his letter to the wealthy widow, Proba, after noting that “so far as this world is concerned, [you are] noble and wealthy, and the mother of such an illustrious family, and, although a widow, not desolate,” Saint Augustine commends her for “wisely” understanding “that in this world and in this life the soul has no sure portion.”1
In other words, this wealthy Roman widow lived in hope, which flowed from understanding what she truly desired. But to be precise, it is not a what but a who that is the proper object of human desire: Jesus Christ. It is Christ and him alone who provides the living water welling up to eternal life. Eternal life, as Augustine so emphatically points out multiple times in his letter to Proba, is the life that is truly life. It is the life we desire, a life without lack.
To understand this, to want this, to believe this, and live according to this is what it means to receive the gift of hope, which, along with faith and charity, is a theological virtue. While faith, hope, and charity are gifts from God, you can and should cultivate these virtues, just like you cultivate the natural virtues. One way to cultivate the virtue of hope is to understand that, just as eternal life is fully realized beyond death, hope lies beyond optimism. As statesman, playwright, and philosopher Vaclav Havel observed:
Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons2And so, every disappointment, every loss, every sorrow, every moment of emptiness and pain is an opportunity to cultivate the theological virtue of hope as we, Eve’s poor banished children, make our way through what is quite often a valley of tears.
Immediately preceding the verses from the fifth chapter of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans that comprise our second reading, we hear that, as Christians,
we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, endurance proven character, and proven character, hope and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the holy Spirit that has been given to us3
Woman at the Well, by Carl Bloch, 1865-1879
We can safely say that the woman Jesus encountered at the well in Samaria did not lack desire. After all, she had been married five times and was now living with a man to whom she was not married. It seems quite clear that she didn’t lack optimism either! Nonetheless, she was not entirely without hope.
Her hope is evidenced by her pointing to the coming of the Messiah, who “will tell us everything.”4 Imagine her disorientation when she heard Jesus say, “I am he, the one speaking with you.”5 His claim was made plausible by his telling her the truth about her life, telling her things about herself that there was no way he could know because she had never met him before.
Jesus Christ is our hope. He opens the door to eternal life. He is the one, as Saint Paul writes, “through whom we have gained access by faith to this grace in which we stand.”6 This “grace in which we stand” is nothing less than God sharing divine life with us.
God’s primary means of imbuing us with his very life, which is nothing less than his very self, are the sacraments. This is most clearly manifest in the Eucharist, which “is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows.”7
Baptism, which is strengthened (i.e., “confirmed”) by confirmation, is the gateway to the Eucharist. In baptism, you don’t merely drink from the well of eternal life, you are immersed in it, it becomes the grace in which you not only stand but in which you live, move, and have your being. To use a metaphor to describe what the great theologian Karl Rahner pointed out in his Meditations on the Sacraments, we swim in grace like fish swim in water.8
The difference between you and a fish is that you are capable of living this as a conscious reality, which is what it means to live a graceful life, a hopeful life. Baptism is not just a gaining of the new moniker “Catholic” or “Christian.” It is Jesus calling you forth from the tomb like he called his friend Lazarus, but that is to get ahead of ourselves.
Through the waters of baptism, as Saint Paul points out in the very next chapter of Romans in a verse that is part of our epistle reading for the Great Easter Vigil, preparation for which is what today’s scrutiny is all about, by the power of the Holy Spirit, you die, are buried, and are raised to new life in Christ. Eternal life is not only the life you hope for after death. Eternal life begins with your sacramental death and resurrection enacted through Baptism.
In this life, the Christian daily lives the tension between the already and not yet of life eternal. It is the Eucharist, that is, Christ himself, that fills your emptiness and quenches your thirst. So, until the day your hope is fully realized, stay thirsty, which is to say, remain hopeful.
1 Saint Augustine. Letter to Proba, an2154, 1.1.↩
2 Vaclav Havel. Disturbing the Peace, pp 181-182.↩
3 Romans 5:3-5.↩
4 John 4:25.↩
5 John 4:26.↩
6 Romans 5:2.↩
7 Second Vatican Council. Dogmatic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy [Sacrosanctum Concilium], sec. 10.↩
8 Karl Rahner. Meditations on the Sacraments, Introduction.↩
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