Like everything in life, hope is both grace and effort, gift and task. When I sit in the silence of prayer pondering on the reason of my hope, it comes to me that to be pilgrims of hope means to set ourselves on a journey that won’t always be easy but for sure will be filled with God’s presence and love.
The lives of the saints of Carmel remind me of one deep truth: All things are passing, God never changes”. Why did it come to my mind while thinking about hope? Maybe because the experience of the Saints assures me that our spiritual life consists simply of encountering the true center within us where our soul remains with God, the unchangeable God, in the middle of changeable world and its events.
Saints, like Therese of Lisieux or blessed Francisco Palau y Quer experienced difficulties, hatred, persecutions, prison, the dark night of faith, but remained hopeful because they had already found that profound center, the anchor of their lives. The certainty of God’s presence and unconditional love gave them courage to do everything they knew God was calling them to do, courage to become whom God was calling them to be. The pilgrimage of hope, in my experience, has to depart from this center that each one of us needs to find and cherish. When our encounter and relationship with God becomes truly the reason for our hope, it is then that we live lives full of meaning and unwavering hope. Moreover, for all the saints of Carmel the door to this center, the door to hope, is the prayer understood as relationship, friendship, love, spiritual marriage.
The same way as we need to be determined in this adventure of relationship with God, we need to be determined to remain hopeful. In my country (Poland) we have large tradition of pilgrimage. Every summer thousands (if not millions) of people travel on their feet through whole country to visit the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Jasna Gora, our national shrine. Hundreds of kilometres done walking in spite of rain, sun, wounded feet, uncomfortable sleeping conditions. But people still keep doing it year by year because they have reason, they have faith, and they have hope that through their effort their prayers for others will be heard, that something good will come out of all this suffering. Journeying is in our blood. Hope is in our DNA. Because we found our center: the love of God. We know that every circumstances of life are not there to stay forever. Everything passes away. Be it joy, be it sadness, it will all end sooner or later. But God remains. This is the testimony of the Saints of Carmel that maintain my own hope alive and my feet still moving forward on this pilgrimage called life.
Aleksandra Nawrocka, cmt
