However, all our sufferings are transfigured by a ray of light; a light of vivifying solace is spread about everything that would, in itself, legitimately fill us with anguish and sorrow, That light is hope. It is our right, it is our duty to hope: for hope is one of the three theological virtues which are to inform a Christian’s life. Hope, illuminating everything like a shaft of light that pierces through darkness, rectifies and sweetens all sorrow in its innermost core.

So long as we are in statu viae we still live in hope. This means that the eternal morning has not yet dawned: that we have not attained the Goal but are as yet on our pilgrimage. But it means, also, that we already possess hope itself: that, in other words, joy has already virtually conquered all suffering. For we do not hope in the sense of a vague, obscure, halfhearted expectation. Ours is a radiant hope, a firm hope founded on the word of God and the fact of Redemption. And the possession of this Christian hope—a response to the goodness and the revealed truth of God—is in itself an incomparable treasure of happiness.

Therefore, although there is plenty of reason for sorrow, and although our sorrow is not only excused but exalted: “Blessed are they that mourn,” a Christian on his earthly pilgrimage must never live “as though he had no hope.” In the first place, since there is an infinitely greater reason for joy than there is for sorrow, joy must keep its primacy over sorrow. Secondly, the cross of earthly life—all pain and all sorrow, that is—should be illumined and transfigured by hope. “That you be not sorrowful even as others who have no hope,” says St. Paul (1 Thess. 4:13).

We should rejoice even about the natural gifts of God

But neither must the suffering we have to undergo in this valley of tears prevent us from gratefully enjoying the numberless natural gifts of God, particular to us and common to all, with which our lives are blessed. Neither our own suffering nor that of others must be allowed to blind us to the splendor of sunlight, to the beauty of the sky and the stars; to the bliss of loving and being loved; to the greatness of the truths we may penetrate. It would be ungrateful of us, and an unfitting answer to the liberality of the “Father of all lights,” were we to abstain from delighting in all the grandeur and beauty in the world which tells us of God and is destined to elevate us to Him.

Let us admit, though, that God may burden us with a cross—such as the loss of one who is dearest to us—which withers up all joy about creaturely things in our heart, and transforms our life into a pure via crucis. Even then, however, our supernatural joy because of God and because of the glory that awaits us in eternity and is the object of our wistful hope must remain alive in us, and keep its primacy.