A few years ago, when we were on our parish pilgrimage to France visiting the beautiful village where St. Margaret Mary lived, we met an older nun at the chapel who not only greeted us warmly but couldn’t wait to tell us this joke. A mother held out 2 suckers in her hands, one red and one green, and asked her young daughter to choose one. The child chose the green one and the mother remarked that green was the color of hope. ‘What do you hope for?’, asked the mother to the girl who quickly answered, ‘I hope for the red one, too.’
That question, ‘What do you hope for?’ is actually not a bad question for us to ponder today. Perhaps it’s a hope you have for a family member, or for the suffering community in L.A., or for world peace.
Hope is what our 1st reading in the letter to the Hebrews is all about.
“Hold fast to the hope that lies before us,
This we have as an anchor of the soul.”
Those Hebrews were suffering great persecution and being tempted to abandon Christianity. The constant indignities they suffered as Christians in the 2nd century were taking their toll. The people were discouraged and losing faith. This letter was written to encourage these beleaguered followers to “hold on”, “persevere”, and “hope”, lest they compromise Christ, the only one who is worth such a costly allegiance. To fall away from him should be unthinkable.
And in this 2025 Jubilee Year of our Church, Pope Francis has chosen its theme to be “Pilgrims of Hope,” thus wanting it to be a year of hope for a world suffering the impacts of war, the ongoing effects of the covid pandemic, and the climate crisis. To us pilgrims of hope, he says:
“Let us lift up our hearts to Christ and become singers of hope in a world marked by too much despair. By our actions, our words, the decisions we make each day, our patient efforts to sow seeds of beauty and kindness wherever we find ourselves, we want to sing of hope, so that its melody can touch the heartstrings of humanity and reawaken in every heart the joy and the courage to embrace life to the full.”[1] He particularly encourages us to sing this hope by refusing to turn a blind eye to the tragedy of rampant poverty and work to prevent people who are homeless, hungry, or escaping violence in their country from living in a manner not worthy of our human dignity.
May we be those ‘singers of hope’, a hope that is anchored in Christ, rugged and strong, charitable to those around us, and ultimately focused on eternity. This is ‘what we hope for’, and yes, it can be green and red!
