The season of Advent is, perhaps above all, a season about hope, as we eagerly await the fulfillment of God’s promises through Jesus Christ. During this season, we remember that Jesus has come among us to give us the hope of eternal life and we wait for him to come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, to bring an end to all injustice, and to usher in the fullness of the kingdom of God.

Every single one of us has a basic human need for hope. We need a reason to wake up each morning and to persevere through the inevitable difficulties of life. We need something to look forward to.

Sometimes, looking forward to little things is enough to keep us going from day to day or week to week. The expectation of an upcoming vacation, an outing with friends, the completion of a project, or another tangible incentive can spur us on to do the hard things that we need to do. These “lesser hopes” aren’t Christian hope in the fullest sense, but they are blessings of God’s creation.

Sometimes, though, the demands of life can seem insurmountable. It can seem as if the challenges of living are much greater than any of its potential rewards.

To give a tragic example, I recently began to see articles online – this story from Catholic News Agency is one – about a disturbing Canadian ad that glorifies euthanasia or, as it’s euphemistically known, “medical assistance in dying” (MAID). The advertisement, which was produced by a fashion company, tells the true story of a young lady named Jennyfer Hatch who had been diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Though she reportedly wanted to live, she was unable to access sufficient medical treatment and then decided to seek MAID. She died on October 23, the day before the ad was released.

The number of medically assisted suicides has increased in Canada each year since its legalization in 2016, reaching over 10,000 last year. My heart goes out to Jennyfer and all who have decided for whatever reason that life is not worth living.

My point in this article isn't so much to focus on euthanasia or suicide (see Catechism of the Catholic Church 2276-2283 for a Catholic perspective on those important topics), but to underscore that we sometimes have an urgent need for greater hope. “Lesser hopes” are not enough when the sufferings of life seem greater than its joys.

Christian hope alone promises something that is always worth fighting for. In its deepest sense, Christian hope is a longing for eternal life with God through Jesus Christ. “Hope 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). Pope Benedict XVI said in his encyclical on Christian hope, Spe Salvi:

[W]e need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain. The fact that it comes to us as a gift is actually part of hope. God is the foundation of hope: not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety. His Kingdom is not an imaginary hereafter, situated in a future that will never arrive; his Kingdom is present wherever he is loved and wherever his love reaches us. His love alone gives us the possibility of soberly persevering day by day, without ceasing to be spurred on by hope, in a world which by its very nature is imperfect. His love is at the same time our guarantee of the existence of what we only vaguely sense and which nevertheless, in our deepest self, we await: a life that is “truly” life (Spe Salvi 31).

The season of Advent challenges us not only to remember the cute story of Jesus’ birth, but to find in Jesus a hope that is hardy enough to keep us going even amid the real, sometimes intense, struggles of human life. None of us knows the details of what awaits us in God’s plan, but in the light of the Gospel we can be certain that “the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us” (Romans 8:18). Through faith, we know that we are called to enter the kingdom of God not by trying to escape the afflictions of life, but by facing them head on, with the help of God’s grace. The season of Advent challenges us to increase our expectant longing for “a life that is ‘truly’ life” – to borrow Pope Benedict XVI’s phrase – until this hope for communion with God is strong enough to overcome our sorrows and fears.

Christian hope, like the season of Advent itself, mysteriously and simultaneously calls our attention to the past, the future, and the present. Hope requires that we remember that God has already shown his faithfulness by coming among us in the person of Jesus Christ. Hope bids us to look forward to the complete fulfillment of God’s promises when Christ will return at some unknown point in the future. Finally, perhaps most profoundly, hope enables us to be confident that Jesus is with us even now amid our sufferings, inviting us to deeper communion with himself and empowering us to press on through all of life’s struggles. With the hope that the Gospel gives, we can be confident that life, even with its many difficulties, is more than worth living.