Hope

The life that grows, not the whole life, is divided into periods of time. But the parts don’t make sense without the whole. The perspective of the future, i.e., hope, therefore necessarily belongs to work, development, and progress. Life, which flows like a river through time, heads toward the next moment, tomorrow, and must reckon with it and expect it. If the sun stopped shining, growth in nature would stop. Hope is the sun of people’s lives. Dante rightly wrote at the gate of hell, eternal death, the inscription: “Leave all hope!” So those who have passed away forever have no hope; customs and happiness no longer await them. In the true sense of the word, however, even those who have already attained eternal bliss do not live in hope. Their hope was fulfilled, and their faith grew in direct vision and experience. The trinity of faith, hope, and love belongs today, too, to time and to our life here on earth. In eternity, only love does not cease (1 Cor 13: 8).
This psychological reasoning will also help us to understand the need for hope in the Christian sense of the word. We know well what an important period in a person’s life is called growing up, sometimes from twelve to fourteen and sometimes to about sixteen. Educators of that age say “hard years,” popularly called “stick years.” It is a time of great change. A new person is being created. For understanding young people in this period, Mendouce’s book, The Youth’s Soul (L’âme de l’adolescent), remains interesting. According to the author, the crisis of youth occurs when children begin to lose the simple security of their actions. Children do not have big problems. Their thinking corresponds to what is in their circle. Even when a healthy boy cries, he does not know the hopelessness and attainability of desire; the future is straightforward, certain. Adolescence, however, starts with dreaming. The mental horizon begins to open to long distances, and profound desires are born. Surprising their incoherence. What we didn’t want to be, in time, we become! The fourteen-year-old boy doesn’t care that he can’t be a violin virtuoso, an aviation officer, a politician, a scientist, a poet, an entrepreneur, a priest… There are many ideals, and they all matter.
In the meantime, however, life remains in its old cramped sidewalks. Parents fail to understand that he is no longer a little boy, and she is no longer the girl they are starting to talk about. Therefore, resistance is born against parents, the desire to flee the house, and the environment that suffocates takeoff. Adolescents therefore experience, as everyone around them thinks, a spontaneous, more serious, eternal contradiction between the ideal and reality. However, it is not possible to live in contradictions. Wanted solution. The character of the future person will be shaped by how you resolve the question posed in your youth. The solutions are always personal and therefore diverse. They could, however, be categorized into approximately four groups. He described the first two types with the subtle satire of Cervantes. The incorrigible idealist is Don Quixote. So he doesn’t have to renounce his ideals; he doesn’t want to see the world as it really is. Fights against windmills; the rural girl he only dimly saw becomes the fairy-tale ideal Dulcinea. On the contrary, the representative of what is now called bourgeois nature is Quixote’s guide, Sancho Panza. He sees reality too well, but that’s why he lost his ideals. We will meet both types in daily life. Most cheerful people accept reality; they recognize that the world is as it is. Their ideals are then good for inspiring ideas and for writing festive speeches on paper, which help drive away the boredom of everyday life. Idealists are particularly adept at “blazing,” as they say. However, they are lost to practical life. However, not all idealists are empty quarrels. Some of them are revolutionaries. They see clearly that the world does not respond to ideals. But why can’t they change this world and its systems, dismantle the old order, and create a new, ideal one? It appears that only a little courage is enough. A revolution can also take place and succeed. Worse, however, is when a newly formed company is compared again with the ideals that led to its creation. Then new discrepancies are identified.
The fourth type has the greatest success in life combat, which we could call an eclectic, a man of choice. He also had many ideals during his adolescence. But you realize that not all of these ideals can be pursued. He picked only one, and for it, as for the pearl from the parable of the gospel (cf. Mt 13:45), he sacrifices everything. He will then become a famous musician, painter, discoverer, I guess, and a saint, or, unfortunately, this often happens. castaway. Whoever bets everything on one card either wins a lot or loses everything. All four types—idealist, burgher, revolutionary, and eclectic—have their weakness. The contradiction between ideals and facts cannot be completely solved. This is also confirmed by historical development and the history of philosophical schools. Plato transferred all ideals to the «world of ideas.» Here on earth, everything beautiful and noble is only a dim shadow. Aristotle also does not believe in the other world of ideas. He must, as he says, acknowledge his limitations and be content with little.