Just before first semester final exams during my senior year in college, a massive earthquake rocked Armenia. Such events are commonplace on our unsettled planet, and therefore often unnoticed. However, this event hit home as I had an Armenian dormmate who—in the days before modern telecommunications—was nearly inconsolable as he waited to hear the fate of his family back home. While they all survived relatively unscathed, their struggles profoundly affected me and my dorm's men. Since then, I’ve always been especially attuned to stories of that 1988 disaster.
So when, about 15 years ago, I came across an account of the horrors that visited an Armenian family during that catastrophe, my attention was piqued.
According to the story, the family’s son was in class the morning of the earthquake. Like most young children, the boy had been apprehensive about leaving the security of his parent’s home to attend school. However, his father worked only a few blocks from the boy’s campus, so he walked the youngster to class each day and assured him that he was only a stone’s throw from the building and that should the boy ever need him, the dad would be there.
Such was what the father reminded his son that December morning.
The earthquake lasted about 20 seconds—more than enough time to bring down the ill-constructed, Soviet-era school building. Seconds after the shaking ended, the father and his co-workers ran from their machine shop to the school and began digging out survivors from the building. Within a few hours, heavy machinery arrived and children—living and dead—were pulled from the rubble. After about 24 hours, as all those being pulled out of the ruins were dead, the volunteers and first responders moved to other areas of the city where the prospects of rescue—and not simply recovery—were better.
But the father remained.
Twenty-four hours became 30, and the father pulled young body after young body out of the pile. The exhausted man’s wife begged him to stop, telling him the effort was in vain and asking him (when he refused to quit) if he was ready to find his son’s crushed, lifeless body.
But the dad went on.
Thirty hours became 31 hours, then 32, then 33. At around the 35-hour mark, the dad lifted a section of debris to find a pocket amid the wreckage. And in that pocket were a group of children—scared and dirty, but very much alive. In the middle of the group stood the man’s son who looked around at his little friends and said
“I told you he would come.”
I’ve shared that story with my sophomores (and their parents) for years. It serves as an illustration of many things: of the meaning of self-sacrifice, of perseverance, and of love. But most of all it is a powerful example of the virtue of hope.
Hope is perhaps the most misunderstood of the virtues. We commonly use the term to mean “wishful thinking,” referring to our desire for a result that is seemingly out of our reach: “I hope I win the lottery,” “I hope there will be peace throughout the world,” “I hope they’ll ban ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ from the airwaves.” In short, we use the word hope in situations where we, ironically, feel hopeless. But that’s to get it wrong. On both the natural and supernatural levels, hope is about having confidence. The theological virtue of hope is the conviction that God keeps His promises: that He has assured us of salvation if we give our lives—and our trust—to Him. According to the Catechism, it is “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). It is, on a supernatural level, the confidence of that little Armenian boy in his father. Like that little boy, the hope we have in our heavenly Father is born of our faith in Him—in the truth of what He has told us—and in our love for Him which is bolstered by the knowledge that He loves us completely in return. Perhaps this is why Jesus tells us that to enter the Kingdom of Heaven we need to “become like little children.” (Mt. 18:3).
This is the first week of Advent—the season of hope. This is the time of year when, looking back over Salvation History, we remember that our hope in the Lord is well-placed; that in the mess that was the spiritual and political world of the ancient Jews, He sent the Messiah He promised. In the Person of the Son, God came looking for His children—and saved them. But it is also the time of year when we cry out “Maranatha,” “Come, Lord!” as we await His return at the end of time. It is a unique tenet of the Christian Faith that religion is not about us looking for God so much as His coming for us. This is the meaning of Christmas.
Advent, we recall, begins the liturgical year. Pope Francis, in his Bull of Indiction, Spes non Confundit (“Hope does not disappoint”), has declared this year 2025 to be a jubilee year (more on this in the coming weeks) where we are called to be “Pilgrims of Hope.” Though we find ourselves in the midst of suffering caused by war, poverty, and climate change, the Holy Father reminds Catholics that
[t]he coming Jubilee will…be a Holy Year marked by the hope that does not fade, our hope in God. May it help us to recover the confident trust that we require, in the Church and in society, in our interpersonal relationships, in international relations, and in our task of promoting the dignity of all persons and respect for God’s gift of creation. May the witness of believers be for our world a leaven of authentic hope… where men and women will dwell in justice and harmony, in joyful expectation of the fulfilment of the Lord’s promises. (Spes non Confundit, #25)
We are not unlike the children in the darkness of the ruins of their school. Like them, some of us are hurting, severely. Many of us have been traumatized in one way or another. All of us face an uncertain future in this life. But like that little boy we are people of hope and know with certainty that even when we are struggling the most we need never be afraid. Because in the varied, superabundant outpourings of His grace and in His Person…
Our Father is coming for us.
A.M.D.G. / B.V.M.H.