Faith is the basis of life, and charity is its crown; but hope is its greatest need. Most of the difficulties of life come because man is so prone to lose heart. His distractions in prayer suggest to him that he was not meant for such high acts. His weekly tale of sins at confession seems to imply by its almost identical repetition that it is useless for him to continue his efforts at "a firm purpose of amendment." His faltering attempts at perfection disconcert him from any very persistent or long-continued service. His cold and listless communions take away his feelings of devotion, and lead him to fancy that it were better not to go at all than to go with so little seeming effect. This joylessness in the sacraments does far more harm than that, for it makes him close the very gates through which alone help can come to him. The whole of life tends to depress a man who is at all conscious of his capacities, his responsibilities, and his failures. He is, then, a great sinner? Not at all. He has lost his faith and love? Most certainly not. What, then, is wanting to him? Hope. He has given up hope; he is disheartened; he is too discouraged to go on. He is very human; oh yes, but he is very foolish also: for when hope has gone, all is over. Failure counts for nothing, defeat, disappointment these matter nothing at all, so long as only hope sits patiently, stirring the embers, watching and tending the fire, coaxing the flame, never despairing and never leaving the wind to work its will. That the clouds should come up over the sky, or that darkness should encircle the earth, brings no real terrors, for we are sure that the dawn will come out again and that the sun will break through with its golden glory.
Now hope frankly starts by acknowledging the certainty of trouble. It implies that life is hard, implies indeed that a perfect life (i.e. life without fault) is impossible for man. That is to say, the first thing for me to do is to realize quite simply and quite definitely that I shall never overcome one single fault, at least in the sense that I shall never be able to find myself free from the temptations. I may improve, please God I shall! I may lessen the number of my sins by narrowing the occasions of them. I may so far clear myself that the old fault has ceased even to be repeated; for the goodness of God may achieve all these things. But at any rate I must never expect that this will be done for me so completely as to prevent for ever any struggle in my life. The sins that troubled my boyhood will haunt my steps till my grey hairs. As a child I knew I was naughty and thought that grown-up people did nothing wrong; now that I am grown up I look upon children as the innocent followers of Christ. But now the certainty which I must face is that always I shall be a wrongdoer. I must reconcile myself quite determinedly to this prospect, not buoy myself up with false hopes of a time when I can rest securely upon my oars. Life is always a pull up-stream. The terrible thing is when people expect to find things ultimately easy and discover them to be continuously very hard; the shock is too much for them; they lose heart and can never recover. This, then, is the first point that I have to get into my mind, and it should need little to make it sure. I am a failure from the beginning, and shall be a failure to the end; at the best, says our Master, an "unprofitable servant." I can never be perfect.
The next point, when that first has been fairly faced, is more reassuring. I can never be perfect; nor does God want me to be perfect. He does not expect perfection from me, for the very simple reason that He knows He would not get it. He knows man, for He made man; He knows exactly the limits of his power. Only the Heavenly Father is or can be perfect. It is foolish of me, then, to be discouraged because my prayers are full of distractions, my communions cold, my confessions always the same. God does not ask from me perfection in any of these ways. Rather it should fill me with wonder if for any length of time these things went wholly well. I should at once grow suspicious. God does not ask from me perfect prayers or perfect sacraments. He does not ask me even to overcome my temper or my want of charity or my untruthfulness. He does not ask these things for He knows He could not get them from me. What, then, does He ask? That I should try to over come them: only that and nothing more that I should try day after day, despite failure, repeated and certain, to overcome these obstacles to my union with Him. For goodness consists not in the love of God, but in the attempts to love Him. If, then, I fail, let me not be discouraged, but, realizing my own weakness and confident only in God's strength, let me go on striving my best, for my business in life is really little else than to continue to fail without losing courage or lessening effort. The phrase of Saint Catharine should ring always in my ear: "God doth not ask a perfect work, but infinite desire."
- text taken from Meditations for Layfolk by Father Bede Jarrett, O.P.