If you've spent any time on the water, you probably know that boats don't stay still on their own. Unless your boat is anchored, it will drift here and there with the water's current, sometimes without you even realizing it. Without an anchor, you may soon find yourself a hundred yards or more downstream.

Scripture compares hope to a spiritual anchor: “[H]old fast to the hope that lies before us. This we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and firm, which reaches into the interior behind the veil, where Jesus has entered on our behalf as forerunner...” (Hebrews 6:18-20) Christian hope reaches beyond the veil of eternity to firmly anchor our souls in heaven, where Jesus has prepared a place for his disciples. While our human emotions - our joys, our sorrows, our fears, and our desires - tug our hearts to and fro, hope helps us to set our hearts firmly on the thing that matters most - communion with God in this life and in the next.

In an ordinary human sense, we can “hope” for many different things, like the cure of an illness, relief of financial burden, or the fulfillment of some lifelong dream. When we speak of the theological virtue of hope, however, we are referring specifically to our hope for eternal life with God. Christian hope is not simply optimism about a better tomorrow, but optimism about a better eternity. There is no guarantee for us as Christians that tomorrow will be easier than today, but there is a guarantee that, for those who remain faithful to Christ, all of the sufferings of today and tomorrow “are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us” (Romans 8:18) in eternity. This trust in the promise of God, like the theological virtue of faith, is a gift of God that prepares our hearts for heaven and is necessary for our eternal salvation. The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:

387. What is hope?
Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire and await from God eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit to merit it and to persevere to the end of our earthly life.

Although the popular advice of our age tells us to that we should follow our desires, Christian hope demands that we purify our desires, by setting our hearts firmly on God himself, not on the things of this world. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains beautifully:

1818 The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men's activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity.

Each one of us has an innate, intense desire for happiness, and we spend our whole lives trying to satisfy this desire. Every single one of our decisions, in fact, is made in an effort to find happiness. Faith in Jesus Christ gives us the conviction that God alone can satisfy the desires of our hearts, and hope in Christ begins to direct all of our decisions toward communion with him, now and in eternity. Hope is a confident, expectant longing for the only thing that can give us true peace, meaning, and joy - eternal life with God.

Especially in our secular age, when discussion about heaven is rare, it is difficult to imagine something beyond this earthly life that can completely satisfy us. Pope Benedict XVI, reflecting on this challenge today, offered one of my favorite reflections on eternal life:

To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy. This is how Jesus expresses it in Saint John's Gospel: “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (16:22). We must think along these lines if we want to understand the object of Christian hope, to understand what it is that our faith, our being with Christ, leads us to expect ( Spe Salvi 12).

Only hope for such a beautiful life with God can motivate us to set aside selfish desires and to surrender in wholehearted trust of God, knowing that his love alone can make us happy. Only such a firm, confident desire for eternal life with God can allow us to remain firmly anchored on him even in the midst of the often tempestuous fluctuations of our human emotions in the midst of the storms of life.