 So why don't we go ahead and begin with a prayer? In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, holy Mary, Mother of God. Pray for us soon as now and at the hour of our death. Amen. In the name of the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Amen. All right, so as I mentioned last night, the title of this talk is a little bit grim. It's the worst is yet to come, but the second part hopefully is more hopeful. Christian hope has been an increasingly hostile world. And I imagine if you guys were to sort of poll my siblings or my parents or close friends, they would probably find it quite amusing that I am the one giving a talk on hope. It's not a virtue that comes easily to me. And so the talk that I'm gonna give is, in many ways the talk that I've written for myself, and it's a talk of people like myself, and I'm hopeful that other people might find it helpful. My favorite, Christmas Carol, by quite a long way is Oh Holy Night. And there's that line, a thrill of hope this weary world rejoices. And that's always spoken to me. So for any of you who feel a little weary with the state of the world, the state of the church, or maybe you know somebody who's in that situation, I hope in the next 45 minutes to offer just a couple of thoughts or a couple of insights that might be helpful for you. I wanna begin by just stating the obvious, which is that we all have suffering in our lives. We all have darkness that we go through. In this room of this size, there will certainly be people here who have experienced tremendous suffering, who've gone through very acute times of darkness and desolation. And that alone to me is a very humbling thought. I have been blessed that I've had my share of suffering, but nothing extreme, nothing super out of the ordinary. But to know that I'm in the presence of people who have been through those places, it is very humbling. And that is very much what the body of believers is made up of, right? Is that we're united in this mystical body and we all have our kind of different journeys that we're on. And some people will experience really great trials. Some will experience trials that are deeper and harsher than others. And I think it's when in life, I think all of us sooner or later we're gonna have those times where we feel like we're experiencing trial after trial or deal after ordeal, where we're in a bad spot and then things don't get better, they actually get worse. I think that's something that we all do go through at one point or another or those that we love go through that. It's in those moments and those experiences that these questions about hope become very pertinent. What is Christian hope? What does it mean? What does it give me? I think Father Kirby spoke very eloquently last night about the meaning of Christian hope. And I hope to just really, in a very modest and humble way, try to just piggyback on that and try and add a few more thoughts. Many of us maybe have had that experience of either in our own lives or the lives of friends praying for a long time for a particular intention and seemingly not having those prayers answered. I think that could be one of the hardest forms of suffering. Even harder sometimes can be when your prayer seems to be answered and then suddenly your hopes are dashed again. There's a couple I know back home in England who for just many, many years were praying to be able to conceive a child and they eventually did and they just totally miraculous circumstances. I've been praying, not to attribute it all to me, but I had been praying for a year by name for this couple. They suddenly conceived. I remember I was staying in a hotel at the time when I got the news. I just went down to the next room where my parents were staying and just burst into tears. It's just like so overjoyed. And then a few weeks later, they lost the baby. And situations like that, which are so disappointing, so frustrating, so confusing, I think they really do highlight for us these questions about the meaning of hope. What does it mean to be a Christian? What do we say in the face of that? How do we continue to have hope? Sometimes I think in these times of spiritual isolation, certainly for me at least, the experience is that it's not so much that it destroys my faith. My faith remains intact, but often it's my hope that gets shaken. It's my hope that gets shattered. And so we're gonna talk a little bit about that relationship between faith and hope. So I think it's quite interesting, but again, I think it's important for us to realize that there might be people in our lives or maybe we detect this in our own hearts. Or it's like, yeah, I have the faith and that's important. That is the first of the theological virtues. But do I have hope? Or does this loved one have hope? And if not, then how can I cultivate that? Because Jesus doesn't want us to settle for faith. He wants us to have hope and love as well. And he wants us to have a hope that really guides our faith and gives it, I think it's full meaning. Okay, so suffering in our own lives, certainly there's a lot of mess in the world right now. There seems to be a theme among a lot of the workshops hit this weekend. Things are pretty bad. I was in England this summer and things there are even worse. So we had Pride Month in England as my dad likes to call it, Humility Month. And you see the worldliness and you see at the same time our beloved church which often feels like it's just in free fall. And these things can also shake our hope. They can really shake our confidence. They can disturb our peace. And so we want to see how do we overcome that? What do we do about that? And the message of this talk is gonna be that there may be a sense in which we need to prepare ourselves for the reality that things may get worse before they get better. It may be that the worst is yet to come in some proximate sense. But we can say that as Christians and Christians have said that in every age and in every time of hardship and every season of persecution because even if there's gonna be this hardship in the short term, we know that in the long run, there's that final victory that awaits us as sons and daughters of God. So in this talk, I'm going to briefly look at what Christian hope means. I want to try and situate it in light of the cross and I'll explain what I mean by that. And then once I've done that, I'm gonna go and look at three different figures from English Catholicism. So Saint Nicholas Owen, Saint John Henry Newman and then J.R.R. Tolkien who is basically a saint in the eyes of many Catholics. So I'm gonna look at these three guys and just draw some practical lessons from their lives, from their writings and to see what they can teach us about keeping Christian hope amidst everything that's going on. So let's begin with this question of the structure of Christian hope. What is Christian hope exactly? I think beginning of what it is not and I've alluded to this already but hope is not just optimism. In fact, confusing hope with optimism I think can be quite dangerous and it can lead to a kind of false disappointment which we never should have had to start with as Christians. When I was home, I went and visited a family from our parish and the mother of this family is very elderly. She was 99 this summer and I went into the living room to say hi to her and said Irene, how are you? The answer, not good. And she was, you know, she had hay fever and was a bit down about life but it sort of sparked a conversation about British versus American differences and the sort of British pessimism and whereas you guys tend to be very optimistic which I love and there's a sort of, it's rare here that you ask somebody how they're doing and then they tell you straight up, oh, not good. But for my purposes, the point would be that when we're talking about hope, we're talking about something that transcends not just pessimism but also optimism, right? We can't reduce it to either of those things. There's this historian, James Hitchcock who puts it this way. He says, quote, conflating hope with optimism actually denies hope by minimizing the power of evil and insisting that good is triumphing despite all evidence to the contrary, end quote. So there's actually a danger in conflating hope with optimism because then when you suddenly realize things aren't going very well, you get very confused and very disheartened. That being said, as Christians, we obviously believe there is a final optimism, right? That's what the gospel is. That is the good news that Christ brings but that final optimism might be grounded in this kind of proximate understanding that things may get difficult, things may get harder, there may be more suffering in the short term. But understood in light of the gospel, we realize that those difficulties and those hard things, though they're very real, we see them in the light of eternity and we believe that Christ somehow can transform those and make them salvific. So the Catechism in Defining Hope, it says hope is a theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit. And another place, I really love this, it says hope keeps man from discouragement and it sustains him during times of abandonment. So what I take from this is that there's a sense in which hope is very interrelated with the virtue of faith but they're not the same thing. So in the Christian perspective, hope has this very critical role, I think of sustaining faith through one's life. Say, Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian, he talks about how faith draws us to the truth of God whereas hope draws us to the goodness of God. So faith is showing us that God is there, that he's real but hope is more of this sort of mindset shift of recognizing that he is good, that he's the source of my happiness. St. Thomas also talks about how hope operates by allowing us to lean on God. He uses that language of leaning on God and it's actually where we get the word paraclete. Paraclete comes from the Greek as meaning to call alongside. So when we call the Holy Spirit, our paraclete. We call him alongside so that we can lean on him, lean on him in our trials. It seems to me then if we understand hope in all these ways then what hope does is it helps to make sure that our faith doesn't become sterile, doesn't become inanimate, doesn't become lifeless or discouraged. If we don't have hope, if we don't work on hope then I think our faith is really endangered. It's very exposed. And maybe you've met people like this over the years who they started out with faith but because that faith wasn't safeguarded, it wasn't sustained by hope. Over time they lose it. Either they slip into presumption where they decide, oh, I don't need the church anymore. I don't need Mass on Sundays. I don't need the sacraments. I don't need the church's teachings. Or maybe they fall into despair where they think, well, what's the point? You know, maybe they're very faithful. Maybe they still go through the motions, they still go to Mass but they see all the corruption in the church and like, I don't even know what I believe anymore. I don't even know if the Pope's the Pope. You know, these are real dangers I think, especially today. So we need hope to sort of safeguard our faith. St. Thomas reminds us that the object of hope is always a future good that's arduous but possible to obtain. We got to keep those intention. You know, hope is always about something that's difficult. It's arduous. It's not going to be easy. It might be painful, but it is possible. It's possible because of Christ. And if we're willing to work with Him, then He's always going to bring us through whatever that valley is that we're going through. So this brings me to, well, I believe to be a really essential point. And that is that Christian hope finds its source. It finds its inspiration. It finds its interior meaning in the cross of Christ and in the Eucharist. So that sounds like a very nice line and that, you know, this is good for Franciscan workshop talks. This is a nice, you know, buzzwords, the cross, the Eucharist, this is great. What do I mean by that? Like, what's the deeper reality there? Like, is this just platitudes? I don't think it is and here's why. There's a quote I came across recently in the Catechism, which I found very startling. It's Catechism 1336. And it says the first announcement of the Eucharist divided the disciples, just as the announcement of the passions scandalized them. So the Eucharist divided them, the passions scandalized them. This is a hard saying, who can listen to it? And then the Catechism goes on. The Eucharist and the cross are stumbling blocks. It is the same mystery and it never ceases to be an occasion of division. And I actually heard that because my dad was doing Catechism in a year and he was in the kitchen listening to Father Mike and my ears picked up and like, wait, what? Was he talking about the Eucharist, the sacrament of unity? You're calling it always an occasion of division and the same with the cross. So I found that really remarkable. This idea that these are the same mystery, the Eucharist and the cross and they're both stumbling blocks in every age. They both cause scandal. They represent the same challenge. They represent the same sort of struggle which is worth meditating on. So if we were to ask, what do the Eucharist and the cross have in common? Hopefully most of us in this room could give a pretty stock answer that they both participate one and the other, right? The Eucharist is this unbloody representation of Calvary. It's this memorializing of the cross. And so there's this sense in which they're very metaphysically intimately connected. But what I want to suggest for this talk is that they're also connected in another respect. I think there's another connection between the Eucharist and the cross which helps us to understand Christian hope. And that's the, when we think about what the cross represents, you notice it's the central symbol of our faith. It symbolizes almighty, transcendent, all powerful God undergoing this most humiliating, most shameful death imaginable. Dying, God dies, God is defeated. In a real sense, God loses, right? That's what the cross represents. And how about the Eucharist? What does the Eucharist represent? Well, it's almighty transcendent, ever living God being made present under the species of bread, which doesn't even really look like bread, and wine and being brought into the world at the whim of some puny priest who may not even be paying attention to the words he's saying. Okay, great. Christianity has some interesting ideas. So we've got the cross, we've got the Eucharist, and these are bedrocks of our faith. And we believe this. We say it with a straight face. We're willing to die for this. What does that teach us? It seems to me that there has to be, you know, that there's this intimate connection between these two central mysteries because it reveals to us that the God we worship is one who shuns the things of this world. And he's one who always presents a challenge to our human perspective on things. So when we look at the cross, and when we look at the Eucharist, we're forced to ask ourselves, do I really believe on Good Friday that this is gonna bring about the salvation of the world? That this bloody, mangled, seemingly God-forsaken corpse is gonna bring about my salvation? And equally, do I believe that this, you know, perhaps a sort of snotty, bureaucratic priest who I've never particularly liked is holding in his hands the bread of eternal life, which even now is animating and providing oxygen to the church? And then we extend the question. Do I really believe that in the face of unexpected illness, the loss of a loved one, the loss of a child, or infertility, or loneliness, or depression, or suicide, or abuse, financial reversals, missed opportunities, betrayal, like all of these things, do I really believe that they can also be transformed? Do I really believe that God is in control of them the same way he was in control at Calvary, the same way that he can appear under these species of bread and wine? The same way that his majesty, his power, his glory, his plan for our lives can be veiled under these seemingly very bland, very insignificant things. So this is the connection that I'm trying to draw that if Christian hope is gonna be anything, it always has to be two things. It has to be cruciform and it has to be eucharistic. But as we're going through our lives, as we're meditating on our sufferings, as we're struggling and wrestling with them, we have to continually come back and come back and come back to those two things, to the cross and to the Eucharist. They're at the core of our faith and in every age, they represent this kind of rebuke to our worldly aspirations and this challenge to our human senses. It's the same thing with suffering. This is gonna be a brief sidebar that I, this past year in my studies, I did a research project on crucifixion practices in the ancient world. You can see the melancholic coming out again. But I've always been fascinated by, what do we know about crucifixion? What did it look like? How common was it? What's the historical sources? And it was a really eye-opening project for me, learning that when you go to the historical sources and you look at crucifixion in the ancient world, we know that it was practiced routinely by the Romans. We know that there were tens of thousands of people, particularly slaves put to death. And yet we possess almost zero detailed accounts of crucifixion from the ancient world. In fact, so the four gospels are the most detailed accounts we have. So on the one hand, we know from archeological sources and from historical references, it was very common. On the other hand, it's hardly ever mentioned in detail. Why is that? It's because the Romans themselves found this such a horrifying form of torture and execution that you have people like Cicero saying, oh yeah, the word, the cross, that shouldn't even be mentioned in polite society. Among the educated Roman elite, it was very taboo to even talk about this. Maybe it'd be like talking about abortion today. Right, you just, yeah, you know, we allow it, we sanction it, but we're not gonna talk about it. The way that, you know, maybe our elites today treat abortion. You also see, in the artistic expression of the church, for the first 400 years of Christianity, there's virtually not a single crucifix to be found. So all the way from Christ, the first 400 years, the crucifix doesn't even appear in Christian art, which is puzzling, because today, I mean, it's everywhere, it's in our classrooms. You know, it's very visible in public life. And yet, for those early believers, even though they knew their God had died on a cross, they still found it so shocking, so scandalous, so awe-inspiring that he would do that, that they were afraid, maybe even embarrassed, to actually depict it. It makes sense why St. Paul, when he talks about preaching Christ crucified, he describes this as a stumbling block, a scandal on in the Greek. A scandal on to the Jews and folly or morion, right? We get a word from that, to Gentiles. St. Paul realized what we often forget, which is the idea of the God dying on the cross was utterly unprecedented in the ancient world. It was something that the Roman authorities wouldn't even speak of, and it's something that Christians themselves for 400 years didn't even want to depict. When I find that a helpful little reminder for, again, one of those central mysteries of our faith, like that is what our God underwent for us, probably the most awful form of death that a human can undergo. And he took that on. What does that teach us? Well, I think it teaches us that Christianity often begins in disappointment. Fulton Sheen had that line, he says, Christianity began not with sunshine, but with defeat. Christianity begins with defeat. That, I believe, is the context for a Christian hope. I remember talking to a close family member who had suffered a lot for standing up for the church's teaching on marriage. And I was about 15 at the time, and I said very happily to him, it's okay, you're in good company, St. John the Baptist stood up for marriage, St. Thomas More stood up for marriage. And this family member replied, yeah, but they both died. They both lost. But at least my 50-year-old self had the wits to quit back, yeah, but Jesus lost too. And this family member appreciated that. And I think it's a reminder, right? Like Jesus was a loser in the eyes of the world. Most of the saints were losers in the eyes of the world. And so again, there's this aspect of Christianity that is cruciform. It is Eucharistic. There's a veil there. And we have to apply that same perspective to our own suffering, our own trials, that there's a veil here. Things are not always as they appear. There's something deeper going on. And I've really come to believe this, that when we experience suffering, or when somebody comes to you and says, you know, I just don't know if I can believe in the church anymore. Things are so bad, things are so corrupt. There's another scandal that's come out. I think the response to that is that we have to read history. We have to look to the history of the church, which begins with the cross. And then we look through the whole history of the church, through the lives of the saints. And I think they give us this example that there's been corruption in every age. There's been corruption in every century. Things have often been bad, but we continue to hope we keep going. There's a beautiful line in the prologue of John's gospel in John 1.5, that famous line, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. And in the Latin version of the text, that word for overcome is comprehenderant. And it has the dual meaning, it can mean the darkness has not overcome the light, but also means, you know, from the cognate, the darkness cannot comprehend the light. And I find that really beautiful that what we have in our Christian faith is, is not only the assurance that the victory is ours in the end, the victory is Christ in the end, but this understanding that the ways of the gospel, often they won't be defeated, but more than that they can't even be understood by the ways of darkness. And so it's really by viewing our sufferings through the lens of faith, through the lens of hope that we get to comprehend them. Okay, so I mentioned we see Christian hope, we see this cruciform Eucharistic hope in history, and especially in the lives of the saints. And so what I wanna do now in the last 15 minutes or so, is look at these three figures from English Catholicism, Nicholas Owen, John Henry Newman, and Tolkien. So beginning with Nicholas Owen, and I think each of these can offer a kind of practical lesson. I think it's helpful with these talks to kind of come away, not just with some insights, but also a sense of, well, what can I do about it? How can I tweak one little thing? I remember a professor during my time here in Francisco and he would say in his classes that, the purpose of my class is not to change your life. The purpose of my class is, if you think of a really, really long line, several miles long, if I can just tweak you one degree this way, and by the time you get to the end of the line, you're gonna be in a very, very different place. And so often I think with these talks and these workshops, you're gonna forget most of it, or maybe most of it's not very interesting. But if you can just take one little takeaway, then God willing by the end of your life, maybe that will have actually done some good. So Nicholas Owen is our first saint. So he's a English Reformation Saint, or just after the Reformation. He's also my Confirmation Saint. And the lesson I wanna draw from his life is very simple and that's that the church, our beloved church, is still beautiful. And I'll explain what I mean by that. But first, a little bit about Nicholas Owen. He was born in Oxford around the year 1562. So it's during the reign of Elizabeth I. It was a time of very intense persecution. He was a lay Jesuit, so don't hold that against him. And he came from a Catholic family despite being a Jesuit. And he became a carpenter or a joiner. And his job was to build priest holes. So if you go to some of the old Catholic homes in England, especially the North, you can actually go and see some of his handiwork, some of his priest holes that he built. They actually are pretty sure that there's still priest holes out there that we haven't found, which is kind of the sign of a good priest hole. We've never discovered it. But so kind of ingenious was his designs that we're still, every few years, another one will crop up. And this was essential because priests were hunted. It was a treason, treasonous to be a priest. He would be captured and killed. And so he had this very special job of building these priest holes. And when you read some of the writings about him at the time, we know that he would always take Kona Communion on the days that he worked. They say that he would pray continually while he was working. Eventually, aged about 40 years old, he gets caught, taken to the Tower of London, undergoes this excruciating torture and then he's eventually killed. Okay, that's his life in a nutshell. How does he teach us about the beauty of the church? The beauty of the church is something I think is really, really essential to having a Christian hope today. So that's why it's one of these three practical lessons. I think it matters immensely. I mean, I think if we were to do a poll in this room, how many of us have heard recently a homily on how the church is beautiful or a talk at a student conference on how the church is beautiful or have you just had a conversation with a friend how the church is beautiful? And when I say the church, the beauty of the church, I don't mean all the beauty of St. Therese of Asia or the beauty of some Gothic cathedral in Europe or the beauty of Father Mike Schmitz's jawline. Those are all very beautiful. But when I talk about the beauty of the church, I mean the beauty of the church as the church, right? As the mystical body of Christ. Like how often do we talk about that? Scripture talks about it. St. Paul thinks it's important. How often do we talk about it? The biblical reality is what the Song of Songs tells us. The church is like an army, terrible with banners. It's what St. Paul tells us that she is a bride. I don't know about you guys, my Facebook feed right now is there's a lot of people getting married and seeing all these photos of these like really beautiful brides just the other day, it was just struck me preparing for this talk like, wow, like a bride on her wedding day, just that glow, that innocence, that purity, that beauty. And like that's the image St. Paul uses for the church. How does St. Nicholas Owen teach us about this? Well, firstly, Nicholas Owen was very much a broken but grateful member of this church, which he loved so much. So the thing I didn't mention about Nicholas Owen is that by all appearances, he was a very unimpressive looking guy. He was known as little John, that was his nickname. He was around five foot tall. In fact, that impediment meant he couldn't become a priest, which was his lifelong aspiration. And to make matters worse, like several years before his death, he fell off a horse, broke his leg, and they didn't reset it properly. So he, for the rest of his life, he walked with a limp. He also developed a harnier condition, which is part of the gruesome way that he died or spare the details. But he effectively was, you know, clinically speaking, he was a dwarf. He walked around with a limp. He was someone who like to all appearances and it's why I find him so inspiring. It's like, if I saw him, the sad reality is I would not think much of him because of my own false assumptions and my own pride. But to think that this guy who looked like nothing in the eyes of the world, that he saved hundreds of priests through just faithfully working. There's actually a report from the time, a contemporary who says he thinks that no man can be said to have done more good of all those that labored in the English vineyard. It's just amazing that he did this and that even under excruciating torture, he wouldn't reveal the locations of all these hiding places that he built, which could have led to the deaths of dozens of priests. So that's the first thing I think Nikolas Owen teaches about the beauty of the church is he shows us the beauty of being a member of the church that's not about the worldly appearances, but it's about the fidelity in your heart. Secondly, I would say this. Nikolas Owen's life, he knew that the church he was gonna die for was far from perfect. How do we know this? Well, if you look at a saint who died just shortly before him, St. Thomas Moore, a more famous saint. If you look at Thomas Moore's writings, he has the famous word utopia and he's describing this kind of fictional society. And he talks about the religious system on the island of utopia. And how does he describe the priests on that island? He says, the priests of utopia were very holy and therefore very few. And I would bet quite a lot of money that he wasn't just giving a fictional account here. Like his friend Erasmus, he was using satire to make a comment on the church of his day. Thomas Moore knew that the church was far from perfect. I think sometimes we think these saints, oh, they died for some lovely church that was in its heyday really flourishing. Well, maybe not, right? Like all but one of the bishops of England recanted, all except John Fisher. They all went along with King Henry VIII. This was not a healthy church in that sense, right? And it's the same church which Nicholas Owen died for. The fact that he died for this church, even though he knew that it was far from perfect, I think teachers are something about that cruciform and eucharistic hope. That amidst all of the perversion, all of the corruption, the scandals, the apostasy, we need to continue to love Holy Mother Church. We need to see her radiant beauty. We need to see how she is cherished by the divine bridegroom. And I think we need to be proud to be Catholic Christians, proud to be members of this body. And I really think if we could see the beauty of this room right now, I imagine nearly all of us are baptized, nearly all of us are practicing Catholic Christians. I think it would take our breath away just to see how we're all members of this one body in Christ, to see that beauty. And I think that has to give us hope as we go through this fallen world, that when you come to mass, when you're gathered in the body of believers, there's something more going on than, oh, we're all just there, going through the motions, we're all praying, we're all receiving the Eucharist. But in a very real sense, when we come to mass, we're all bringing to the altar our brokenness and our suffering. That if we had some kind of like infrared that could sort of tell the sufferings of the people all around us, I think it'd be a pretty overwhelming sight. You know, so many varied things, so many things that people are going through that we don't know about. Yet we all come to the altar, and what do we do? We turn that suffering into this hymn of praise, that suffering is transformed so that worship becomes the Christian response to suffering. And it's worship that has to take place in and through the body of believers. There's such a beauty there, there's such a power there. I think we need to remember that. I think Nicholas Owen helped to teach us that. Okay, our second saint, John Henry Newman. He lived in the 1800s. His dates are really easy to remember actually, because he was born in 1801. He dies in 1890. And he converts from Anglicanism to Catholicism in 1845. So, born in 1801, converts 1845, dies 1890. I actually overheard a priest say that in Rome, and I sort of stole it from him. But it's a helpful way to remember. Okay, the lesson from John Henry Newman, I'm looking at the clock, I'll speed up a little bit. The lesson I take from John Henry Newman is that the fruits of our labor will appear in due season. I think this is key to keeping Christian hope. The fruits of our labor will appear in due season. So, for those who don't know, John Henry Newman was an intellectual giant. Many people will say that he is perhaps the most important intellect in the church since St. Thomas Aquinas, so in a period of 500 years. There's an Irish poet whose name is escaping me, who was secular. But he said that he thought Newman was the greatest writer of English prose. So, this guy is like an intellectual heavyweight. If you have people in your life who are struggling with the faith from an intellectual standpoint, pray to John Henry Newman for them. But he is also a saint who had his fair share of sufferings. His biographer actually described his life as a history of failures. He's someone who he tried to start a university in Ireland and it got shut down. He got dismissed as a tutor at Oxford. He got a papal rebuke for this pamphlet that he'd written. He was the editor for this magazine, which meant he couldn't get this position at his university. And he's someone in a letter he wrote towards the end of his life. He said, the rule of God's providence is that we should succeed by failure. And several people have even described him as the patron saint of the disappointed. John Henry Newman. And yet, in his writings, I think John Henry Newman offers us so much wisdom about the meaning of Christian hope. And so that theme about our work bearing fruit in due season, it's something that he returns to a lot in his writings. This idea that we may not see the fruits of our labors. We may not. We may work tirelessly and think that everything's ended in disappointment, that things just aren't going anywhere. But the lesson of Newman's life is that we are making the Father proud by our faithfulness and that he will do infinitely more with those efforts than we ever could. Newman says this. And I love this. This was a sermon on the book of Jeremiah and the title is A Lesson for the Disappointed. And it's a great pomele. And he says, do not give up over your attempts to serve God, though you see nothing come of them. Watch and pray and obey your conscience, though you cannot perceive your own progress in holiness. And so Newman, like one thing I really like about him is he's a complete realist. Like in his writings, he again and again acknowledges that things are really bad. So, I don't, maybe we could have a show of hands. Like how many of you have talked to fellow Catholics who have said something along the lines of this is the worst time in church history right now? Okay, so probably at least half. It's always embarrassing as a speaker if you ask a question and nobody raises their hand. Like how many of you brushed your teeth this morning? I'm just kidding. Okay, but it sounds like at least half of this room, right? It's a fairly common trope. You know, this is the worst time in history. It's the worst time to be a Catholic. And I'm not somebody who mocks that or ridicules that. Like I think it could be. I think things are pretty darn bad. I think there's a widespread apostasy in the church. But I think it's also worth remembering that a lot of people have thought that. And every time has its own challenges. And Newman writes about this. He tells us, in truth, the whole course of Christianity from the first, when we come to examine it, is but one series of troubles and disorders. Every century is like every other. And to those who live in it, it seems worse than all times before it. Nonetheless, however bad things are, and they are pretty bad, we continue to work in the vineyard. We continue to sow those seeds and we let God take care of the rest. John Henry Newman again shows us that cruciform Eucharistic hope. This hope that's grounded in the realities of life, the hardships of life, but sees beyond the veil, sees that there's a way to interpret and understand my present sufferings in light of Christ. The same way that I look at the cross and see intense agony and suffering, so unspeakably awful, that the Romans couldn't even write about it, the Christians couldn't even paint about it. And yet I can look beyond that to the empty tomb. And the same thing with the Eucharist. He teaches these things. He teaches us that if we keep working away, our fruit will be born in due season. Okay, finally, J.R.R. Tolkien, who probably doesn't really need an introduction. The lesson I wanna draw from him is a lesson I've heard Father Dave Pavonka, the president of the university, give. And I find it very helpful. And he has this line that our hope cannot be in an outcome. Our hope has to be in a person. Our hope is in a person, not in an outcome. That's the third lesson. You know, Tolkien, I'm actually reading the Fellowship of the Ring at the moment, which is just a delight and it's been quite a while since I read it. I got to go to his grave this summer in Oxford and he is someone who perhaps not, obviously not to the degree of the martyrs, but he is someone who had his fair share of sufferings. He describes at one point in his writings that in the First World War, he lost all but one of his closest friends. So I think there's at least three very close friends of his that died in the trenches. He also wrestled later in life with the kind of demands of fame. So he had his fair share of suffering. What I think we see in his writings in different ways, is again, this understanding of the kind of Christian hope I've been trying to describe. In one of his letters, he says, I am a Christian and indeed a Roman Catholic. And so I do not expect history to be anything but a long defeat, though it contains some samples or glimpses of final victory. Okay, thanks Tolkien. He doesn't expect history to be anything but a long defeat. You know, in the Fellowship of the Ring at the Mirror of Galadriel, what does Galadriel say? It's this like quirky line. She's the wise Elven figure. And she says to the Hobbits, together through the ages of the world, we have fought the long defeat. So he's weaving it even into his fiction. Nonetheless, I think what is implied throughout the Lord of the Rings and it's made explicit in Tolkien's letters is this kind of profound conviction that we can't reduce our hope to trusting in this particular outcome or that particular outcome. So absolutely, don't get me wrong. We have a gospel permission. In fact, we have a gospel mandate to ask for good things from God. Right, when Jesus tells us like who would, you know, what son would ask his father for bread and receive a stone? Like he's reminding us that if we don't do petitionary prayer then we're insulting God by not viewing him as our loving father. Right, so petitionary prayer essential. We have to ask God for good things. That's the only way to have a healthy relationship with him. At the same time, like so much of Christianity there's a tension here. If our hope, if our Christian hope is reducible to resting on the idea that I have to get that job which I'm convinced will be good for my family or I have to receive that healing which I've been praying for the years. You know, I have to, you know, see that situation come about which I've longed for and asked for and pleaded for. If our hope is only based in outcomes. If our hope is simply, you know, I'm hoping for this and it doesn't happen so now my hope is shattered, then we have a problem because there may be things that we pray for and we seemingly don't receive the answer. So we have to resist the temptation to a shallow hope. What we need instead is a hope in a person. So in Tolkien's vision our hope is in the person of Christ. In the mythology of the Lord of the Rings it's the understanding that despite all of the chaos that's going on in his middle earth there is this providential power at work that's organizing all things to the good. And in Tolkien's own life it's the understanding that Jesus is always in control. So as the Bible says, Jesus is the anchor of our hope and he's taking care of us even when we don't receive that healing. He's taking care of us even when the job opportunity falls through. He's taking care of us even when we lose a loved one. So again, we absolutely should ask Jesus for good things. We should do that every day. But if the things that we desire don't come we continue to place our hope in him. We trust that he is that divine physician. He's using this suffering to soften, to cultivate, to mold our hearts to become these greater and greater vessels of his love. That's what Christian hope means. And so I wanna end this with a quote from Tolkien in a letter to his son Michael about the meaning of Christian marriage actually. And this is how he chooses to end his letter. He says, out of the darkness of my life so much frustrated I put before you the one great thing to love on earth, the blessed sacrament. There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity and the true way of all your loves upon earth. And more than that, death by the divine paradox that which ends life and demands the surrender of all and yet by the taste of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships be maintained or take on that complexion of reality which every man's heart desires. And so these three lessons from Nicholas Owen about the beauty of the church, from John Henry Newman about our efforts bearing fruit and juice season and from J.R.R. Tolkien, this idea that our hope has to be in a person that can't be in any particular outcome. I kind of offer these to you and I hope they might be helpful in some small way. Again, recognizing that there may be worse things ahead. The world may get darker yet, the church may get more corrupt yet, you may have more suffering in your personal life yet but none of that compares to the glories that await us as St. Paul says. And when we look to the cross and we look to the Eucharist, we find hope. We realize there's more going on. And I think if we place our hope in the guy who turned Calvary into an empty tomb, who turns bread and wine into his life-giving body and blood, then we have a firm hope indeed. So let's end with prayer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be the word of our tuned Amen. In the name of the Father, and the Son, the Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you all very much for coming.