Hope

Happy new year!  A new year always brings hope, with new wind in our sails to make changes that allow us to be better versions of ourselves.  Sometimes these resolutions are fleeting and other times more permanent.  Increasing hope in our everyday lives and in our troubled world is something that I believe we should all resolve to do this year.

Hope is what helps get us out of bed in the morning to face the challenges of the day.  Hope helps us bear our sufferings, be they physical, psychological, or spiritual, and push forward.  Hope provides the glimmer of light ahead when all around us seems dark.

It will come as no surprise that the practice of oncology, or really any kind of medicine, relies deeply on hope.  When facing life-threatening, or at least life-disrupting health challenges, hope gives us the ability to make the appointment to meet a new doctor at the cancer center.  To hear about scary biopsy results and ask tough questions.  To schedule that first session of chemotherapy or radiation, not knowing what the future holds.  To get each monitoring scan to see if the cancer is still behaving.  To start over again when it is not.

There is ALWAYS a reason to hope.  Sometimes we have to look harder or dig deeper, but it is there.  Over the next few posts, I’d like talk more about different aspects of hope in our lives and in our health.

I’d like to share a passage from the work of one of my heroes, Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), one of the greatest minds in the past century and perhaps in all of history, who passed away this past week.  He lived a long life of service, perhaps most importantly in teaching the world about many things it needed (and still needs) to hear, including the importance and basis of hope in our world, and also the intimate connection between faith, reason, and science.

In his encyclical letter “Saved in Hope (Spe Salvi),” Pope Benedict XVI wrote: “Day by day, man experiences many greater or lesser hopes, different in kind according to the different periods of his life. Sometimes one of these hopes may appear to be totally satisfying without any need for other hopes. Young people can have the hope of a great and fully satisfying love; the hope of a certain position in their profession, or of some success that will prove decisive for the rest of their lives. When these hopes are fulfilled, however, it becomes clear that they were not, in reality, the whole. It becomes evident that man has need of a hope that goes further. It becomes clear that only something infinite will suffice for him, something that will always be more than he can ever attain. In this regard our contemporary age has developed the hope of creating a perfect world that, thanks to scientific knowledge and to scientifically based politics, seemed to be achievable. Thus Biblical hope in the Kingdom of God has been displaced by hope in the kingdom of man, the hope of a better world which would be the real ‘Kingdom of God.’ This seemed at last to be the great and realistic hope that man needs. It was capable of galvanizing—for a time—all man's energies. The great objective seemed worthy of full commitment. In the course of time, however, it has become clear that this hope is constantly receding…We need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain.”

Though written 15 years ago, these words remain a crucial message that the world needs to hear now more than ever.  Thank God for Pope Benedict and may his soul rest in peace!