Faith That Refuses to Lose Hope
Hope is not denial. It is a deliberate act of faith.
Giving up would have been the easier thing. Aoife Brennan knew that with the clear-eyed honesty of someone who had looked the easier thing directly in the face and understood its appeal completely.
She was forty-seven, a primary school teacher from County Clare on the west coast of Ireland, a woman of considerable warmth and considerable stubbornness in roughly equal measure, who had spent the last six years walking through a situation that had tested every version of herself she had ever known: the capable version, the faithful version, the patient version, and the version that occasionally sat in her car outside the school and cried before composing herself enough to go back inside.
Her son Ciarán was twenty-three and had been struggling with addiction since he was seventeen.
She did not use the word struggling lightly. She had been through the full curriculum of what that word actually contained: the discovery, the denial, the intervention attempts, the two rehabilitation programmes, the relapse after the first and the longer relapse after the second. She had been through the sleepless nights and the desperate phone calls and the particular grief of watching someone you love more than your own life make choices that are destroying them and being unable to stop it.
She had also, because she was Aoife and because she was Irish and because her faith had been forged in a tradition that did not shy away from hard things, kept praying.
Not always eloquently. Not always with the composed, sustained conviction that the word prayer tends to imply. Sometimes it was two words in the dark: please, God. Sometimes it was more confrontational than that, because honesty had always been her first language and she could not see the point of performing a reverence she was not currently feeling.
But she had not stopped. That was the thing. Through six years and two rehabilitations and a relapse that had broken her heart in ways she had not thought her heart still had available to break: she had not stopped praying. She had not stopped hoping. Not because hope was easy or comfortable or automatically renewed each morning, but because she had made a decision, quiet and deliberate and revisited regularly, that hope was the thing she was choosing to carry regardless of what the evidence was currently suggesting.
Her friend and neighbour Brigid, a woman in her sixties who had lived three houses down for twenty years and who had the particular wisdom of someone who had raised five children through five separate sets of difficulties, had said something to Aoife during one of the harder stretches that she had written in her journal and returned to more times than she could count.
"Hope is not the same as optimism," Brigid had said, over tea at Aoife's kitchen table on a grey November afternoon. "Optimism is what you feel when things are going well. Hope is what you choose when they are not. It is not a feeling, Aoife. It is a decision. And you have to make it again every single morning, whether you feel like it or not."
Aoife had written that down and pinned it above the kitchen sink, where she would see it every day while doing the ordinary domestic things that life required regardless of what was happening with Ciarán.
Hope is a decision. She made it every morning. Some mornings she made it through gritted teeth.
She had been in a small prayer group at her parish for four years, six women who met on Wednesday evenings in each other's homes and who had become, over time, the kind of community that carries each other's unbearable things. They knew about Ciarán. They had been praying for him by name for years. There was a particular Wednesday when Aoife had come to the group in the aftermath of a phone call that had left her hollowed out, sat down at Mary Flanagan's kitchen table, and said nothing at all for the first ten minutes. The other five women had simply sat with her, and then prayed with the kind of faith that steps in when the person at the centre of the situation has temporarily run out of their own.
That was community doing what it was designed to do: carrying what one person could not hold alone.
She had a spiritual director, a Franciscan priest named Father Colm, who met with her monthly at the friary in Ennis. Father Colm was in his seventies, weathered and gentle and possessed of the specific quality that long years of contemplative prayer can produce in a person: he was entirely unfrightened by difficulty. He did not minimise it or rush to resolve it or offer it easy comfort. He simply sat in it with you, which was sometimes the most useful thing another human being could do.
He had given her Romans 15:13 in one of their sessions, not as a platitude but as a commission: "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."
She had looked at that verse with the slight suspicion she brought to verses that sounded, in her current circumstances, a little too tidy.
Father Colm had seen her expression and smiled.
"It does not say overflow with certainty," he said. "It says overflow with hope. There is a difference. Certainty requires resolved circumstances. Hope requires something else entirely: the power of the Holy Spirit and the decision to trust. Those two things are available to you right now, today, regardless of what Ciarán is or is not doing."
She sat with that.
The God of hope. She had not thought of God specifically in those terms before. Not the God of answers, or the God of outcomes, or the God of resolved situations. The God of hope. As if hope was His particular domain. His specific territory. The thing He was most intimately associated with in the human experience.
Which meant that choosing hope, in the middle of circumstances that argued against it, was not a naive refusal to acknowledge reality. It was an act of alignment. A decision to stay connected to the source of something that the circumstances themselves could not produce.
Hope, she was understanding, was not generated by the situation. It was received from somewhere else entirely and brought into the situation from outside it.
She had been waiting for the circumstances to give her hope. She needed to bring hope to the circumstances.
That reframing changed something in how she prayed for Ciarán.
She had been praying from a place of fear, primarily. Understandably, given everything. But fear-based prayer, she had noticed, had a particular quality: it circled the problem without ever quite rising above it. It asked God to fix the thing while staying focused almost entirely on the thing. It was honest but it was ground-level.
She started trying to pray from hope instead. Not manufactured, performed hope. Not the pretence of cheerfulness she did not feel. But the deliberate, specific act of speaking what she believed about God's character and His love for Ciarán, regardless of what the current chapter looked like. Telling God that she trusted Him with her son. That she believed Ciarán's story was not finished. That she was choosing, again today, to believe that the same love that had been pursuing her for forty-seven years was also pursuing the twenty-three-year-old boy she had raised and loved and was currently terrified for.
She chose it on the days it felt true. She chose it on the days it felt like pressing a key on a piano that had gone silent and trusting the note was still there even when she could not hear it.
There was a Tuesday in March, the sixth year of the six, when Ciarán called her.
Not in crisis. Not from a number she did not recognise. From his own phone, at a reasonable hour, with a steadiness in his voice she had not heard in a very long time.
He had been sober for eleven weeks. He was living in a supported house in Limerick with five other men in recovery. He had started attending a church there, he said, with some of the awkwardness of a young man reporting something he was not sure how his mother would receive. He had a key worker he trusted. He was attending a TAFE course in construction.
He had called, he said, because he wanted her to know. Because he thought she deserved to know. Because he had been thinking about what she had been carrying for six years on his behalf, and he could not fix the years that had gone the way they had gone, but he could call her on a Tuesday in March and tell her the truth.
Aoife sat down on the kitchen floor for the second time in six years. The first time had been from grief. This time was from something different.
She was not declaring victory. She had been in this journey long enough to know that eleven weeks was real and precious and also required enormous ongoing support and vigilance and that the road ahead was long. She was not a naive woman. She had never been a naive woman.
But eleven weeks was eleven weeks. And the voice of her son, steady and honest and present, was the most beautiful thing she had heard in a very long time.
She thought of Jeremiah 29:11 and the words she had spoken to herself on so many grey mornings: "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."
Plans to give you hope and a future.
Ciarán. Her boy. Who had a future. Who had hope. Who had, on a Tuesday in March, picked up his phone and chosen the harder and better thing.
She told the prayer group that Wednesday. All six of them were there, which was not always the case, and she took it as a small sign that the universe had arranged the attendance properly for the occasion.
She told them about the phone call and the eleven weeks and the church and the construction course. She told them what she had learned about hope, the hard way, the specific and unglamorous way of someone who has carried it not as a feeling but as a daily decision through six years of difficult Tuesdays.
Mary Flanagan, who was not a crier, cried.
Aoife looked around the table at these women who had prayed Ciarán's name so many times they knew it as their own, and she felt something she had been waiting six years to feel without knowing she had been waiting for it: not resolution, not the all-clear, not the happy ending. Just: forward movement. Just: the next right thing happening. Just: God still in it.
That was enough. That was more than enough.
Hope is not the insistence that everything will be easy. It is not the pretence that pain is not real or that the long roads are not long. It is not optimism performing in the face of evidence to the contrary.
It is the daily, sometimes costly, always worthwhile decision to believe that the God who entered human history is still writing. That the chapters that have been hard are not the final ones. That the people we love who are in the dark are not beyond the reach of a love that has never, in any recorded chapter of human experience, run out.
Aoife Brennan had made that decision every morning for six years.
She intended to make it every morning for the rest of her life.
Not because it was easy. Because it was true.
And because the God of hope, faithful and present and stubbornly, tenderly committed to every life He had ever made, was worth trusting with every single day of it.
Especially the hard ones.
Especially those.
"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." Romans 15:13
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