Prayers for Hope

When hope is low, long prayers are hard. These are short enough to say through gritted teeth, and several are the words of people in Scripture who were close to giving up themselves.

Catholics have long learned three short prayers together: the Acts of Faith, Hope and Love. The Act of Hope says exactly what Christians hope for and why:

Hope and strength go together in Scripture because hope is what keeps a tired person walking. Isaiah’s promise is to the ones who wait, not to the ones who feel strong: “those who wait for the LORD will renew their strength. They will mount up with wings like eagles. They will run, and not be weary. They will walk, and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:31).

Illness, grief and a broken heart are where hope is tested most. Christian hope does not promise that every illness will be cured, and it does not ask anyone to pretend. It promises that suffering is not the end of the story, and that God is present in it. St. Paul traces the path: “we also rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope doesn’t disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” (Romans 5:3–5).

Faith believes what God has said; hope trusts that he will do it. St. Paul’s example of both is Abraham, promised a son in old age: “Against hope, Abraham in hope believed” (Romans 4:18). Hoping against hope is not wishful thinking. It is holding on to a promise when every visible sign says it cannot be kept.

One of the oldest ways to pray is to pray Scripture back to God, turning his promises into requests. This prayer is built from the verses Christians have leaned on most when hope ran low.

There is a kind of hopelessness that no prayer on a web page should pretend to fix: the one where you cannot see any reason to go on, or have begun to think others would be better off without you. If that is where you are, the most faithful thing you can do right now is to tell someone. Please reach out:

Sometimes the person without hope is someone you love, and they may not be able to pray for themselves. Praying for them is not a substitute for being with them, and if you are worried they might harm themselves, stay with them and get help. But it is something you can do when there is nothing else you can do.

The Church counts hope as one of the three theological virtues, with faith and love. They are called theological because they come from God and are directed to God. The Catechism defines hope as “the 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” (CCC 1817).

That makes Christian hope different from optimism. Optimism expects things to get better. Hope trusts God whether they do or not, because what it hopes for is God himself. And yet it does not despise ordinary hopes. The Catechism says the virtue of hope “takes up the hopes that inspire men’s activities and purifies them,” and “keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment” (CCC 1818). The Catechism takes up Hebrews 6:19, which calls hope “an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast” (CCC 1820): an anchor holds in the storm; it does not stop it.

Hope has two opposites. Despair stops hoping in God’s mercy (CCC 2091). Presumption hopes without God: either trusting one’s own strength to be saved, or expecting “forgiveness without conversion and glory without merit” (CCC 2092). Real hope sits between them: it expects everything from God, and it gets up and does its part.

Pope Benedict XVI put the difference it makes in one line: “The one who has hope lives differently” (Spe Salvi 2). His example was St. Josephine Bakhita, kidnapped at nine and sold five times as a slave, who came to know God as the master who loved her and said, as he quotes her: “I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good” (Spe Salvi 3).

The Catechism ends its teaching on hope with words of St. Teresa of Ávila that are themselves a prayer: “Hope, O my soul, hope. You know neither the day nor the hour. Watch carefully, for everything passes quickly” (CCC 1821).

Catholics call on Mary as “our life, our sweetness and our hope” in the Hail Holy Queen, a prayer written for people who describe themselves as “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” It is prayed at the end of the Rosary for exactly the moments when hope is thin. And for situations that seem past hoping for, many turn to St. Jude, called the patron of hopeless causes; there is a nine-day St. Jude novena.