I’ve seen the effects of such lifelong training in the face of our family member who suffers from Alzheimer’s. As she daily loses ground her soul appears, almost visibly, like a thing with feathers half-perched on her frail, diminutive body. “It will be a wedding,” she said, when we told her she would soon be coming to live near us. Smiling knowingly at our 12-year-old, she told him why he could expect to turn 13 at the end of May: “It’s only because people like you. That’s why good things like this happen.” Odd as these statements are, I’ve never heard a more convincing reason for the hope that lies within: the reason for hope is love. Habitual exercise of a loving disposition has left her with one clear thought to express, and that thought is love.
A wise nun recently told me of a prioress who urged her novices to start practicing in their 20s to be nice old ladies. It’s the only way to be sure of being a nice old lady when the time comes.
Pace Tolkien, Christian hope is not always eucatastrophic. A milder, more quotidian kind of hopefulness is schooled by every small chance we take to find in others and be for others an “other Christ.”