If you’re a bit of a nerd like me, then you’d know that at the end of the Matrix trilogy, our protagonist fights a losing battle against his enemy, Agent Smith. He keeps getting knocked, beat, and thrown around Matrix-style, but after he is dealt a devastating blow, Smith questions Neo’s resolve to keep fighting. He asks, “Why, Mr Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?” Of course, we’re talking about Keanu Reeves, so one could say that “he is a man of focus, commitment, and sheer fucking will,” but the Matrix trilogy didn’t have the same way with words as the John Wick films. Instead, Neo says, “Because I choose to.” If you’ve seen the film, you’d know that while he loses the battle, he wins the war. One could say, his “power [was] made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9) rather like Christ’s death on the cross. The similarity between Jesus and Neo was pointed out to me many years ago by a pastor I once knew. Neo chose to keep going on even unto death, and so did Christ. I don’t imagine either was particularly overjoyed at the prospect of doing so, but still, simply choosing to do so isn’t a very satisfying reason. What is it that motivates people to carry their cross? Perhaps we could imagine a better answer.

Last week, I wrote about a question put to me by my old spiritual director. She asked, “What was it inside you that compelled you to persist?” and I said I would need to think about it. Having thought about it some more, I take some issue with how the question is worded. When it is uniformly applied to all aspects of my life, as it was then, it works on a poor assumption. Namely, that I have always persisted. Sometimes this would make sense, but there are also many occasions where I should have and didn’t. While I’ve come by this realisation anecdotally, I don’t suppose I would offend anyone if I said that we’ve all made these kinds of mistakes with varying degrees of severity. So, perhaps it is better to ask why it is that I persisted on some occasions and not on others. Perhaps then it would be easy to isolate the independent variable that drives us to persist.

Of course, I’m sure there are many factors that play into it: life circumstances, mental health, or the means of doing so. However, there is a word that comes to mind which might, I think, be far more suitable than any of these other factors. After all, “the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” (John Milton, Paradise Lost). The truth of the matter is that it doesn’t matter all that much whether one can persist in something if they feel unable to do so. The word which springs to mind is “hope”, and you either have it or you don’t.

Have you ever wondered how some people have been able to put up with the worst that life has to offer and still crack on? They’re hopeful, either about this life or the next one. Recently I found myself at a funeral, and one of the things a relative of the deceased said to me was that they were hopeful because this was a man who believed in the resurrection, not to mention that he’d lived a good life. For some reason that thought stuck with me. Even a small ember of hope can get someone through a dreadful time.

Why, then, do so many people feel hopeless? This is a question better attributed to psychology, but I would reckon that the factors I mentioned above—life circumstances, mental illness, etc—have something to do with it. My point was not to downplay the role of these factors, but to suggest that it is the human spirit which has primacy when it comes to persistence. I think, in context of the question that led to this whole essay, that would adequately explain why, in a particularly turbulent time of my life, I both succeeded and failed in many ways because, when the stakes feel so high, sometimes it’s hard to stay hopeful. But if hope is so important, how can one stay hopeful? I mean, you can take your pick honestly. Every self-help guru out there would have a different answer for you, and there is no one-size-fits-all, but if I was flirting with an idea, I would say this:

In Catholic theology, hope is a theological virtue. It’s not something you work out, like a muscle, but is something that comes from God. This makes it tricky when speaking about how to “get” it because it’s not so much “gotten” as it is “given”, and like any gift, you just need to learn how to receive it well. As a kid, you probably hated getting socks for Christmas. (Not in my family, though. We have a long and proud tradition of fun Christmas socks.) Even though they weren’t your favourite gift in the world, you would still say thank you (or at least you should have). So, I guess you just need to try to remain open to receiving that gift. Maybe the socks are comfortable and become your favourite pair. You just can’t anticipate what good things God can throw your way.

In fact, there’s a verse that comes to mind:

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Jeremiah 29:11

In times where I felt hopeless, I’d have done well to take my own advice. Perhaps you can think of one or two occasions where that was the case for yourself. Of course, that may not eliminate your hopelessness, but it might give you reason to at least hope that you’ll hope again. And I hope that you find that courage, my friends.