January 26, 2025 Essay: The Risk of Hope
What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? For many of us—including myself more often than I would like to admit—I reach for my phone, squinting through bleary eyes to see what notifications have piled up overnight. (Once, when I was overseas and in a different time zone, I woke up to see more than one hundred missed text messages from family members. Fearful of some medical emergency, I was relieved to realize that I had just slept through a particularly exciting Buffalo Bills game that lit up the family “Bills Mafia” thread.)
But usually, I am not reaching for the phone out of concern that I’ve missed an emergency message. More often, I am just acting out of reflex, looking automatically for the “next thing.”
In “Spes Non Confundit” (“Hope Does Not Disappoint”), the document formally proclaiming the Jubilee Year, Pope Francis reflects on many aspects of hope, including patience. He points out that “in our fast-paced world, we are used to wanting everything now,” and highlights the internet as an example of “space and time yield[ing] to an ever-present ‘now’.”
When I reflexively reach for the phone, either in the morning or during a lull in the day, there is a feeling of a kind of immediacy: I need to know what’s happening right now. In my day-to-day work as editor in chief of America Media, I can feel that pressure from the other side: How fast can we get the story up so that people come to us to figure out what’s going on? Or consider the experience of seeing a breaking news headline and jumping into social media to see what others are saying about it. Yet by definition, since it’s just happened, no one will have anything informed to say about it that quickly.
This kind of immediacy, it turns out, is both illusion and distraction. What is really immediate are the time and space we occupy directly, and yet we often pay more attention to the virtual immediacy afforded us by technology. (Let me offer a caveat here that I do not want to make this into a Luddite screed. There are plenty of kinds of virtual immediacy, such as the ability to see a loved one’s face far away by video call, that deeply enrich our lives.)
Instead, I want to observe that patience, which Pope Francis describes as “both the daughter of hope and at the same time its firm foundation,” is among other things a form of attention.
Patience often involves being bored, and in order to be bored, we first have to not be distracted. It is no accident that prayer also starts with setting aside distractions. When I work with people in spiritual direction, sometimes they think that being bored in prayer means that something has gone wrong, that nothing is “happening.” But often enough, feeling bored can be a sign of beginning to pay attention to what is going on beneath the surface layer of distractions. It is the difference between standing on the subway platform waiting in frustration for the train that should have shown up ten minutes ago and intently watching a bird perched on the tree, waiting for it to take flight.
On Monday, January 27th, I will talk about “The Risk of Hope.” One element of that risk is paying attention: turning our minds and hearts to something outside ourselves and beyond our immediate control, and waiting for what happens next. In this year when we’re called to be pilgrims of hope, let’s set out to meet God on the way and rejoice in what he waits to offer us.
— Fr. Sam Sawyer, S.J., Editor in Chief, America Media