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A first essential setting for learning hope is prayer. When no one listens to me anymore, God still listens to me.
When I can no longer talk to anyone or call upon anyone, I can always talk to God. When there is no longer anyone to help me deal with a need or expectation that goes beyond the human capacity for hope, he can help me.
When I have been plunged into complete solitude …; if I pray, I am never totally alone.
The late Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, a prisoner in Communist Vietnam for thirteen years, nine of them spent in solitary confinement, has left us a precious little book, Prayers of Hope.
During thirteen years in prison, in a situation of seemingly utter hopelessness, the fact that he could listen and speak to God became for him an increasing source of hope, which enabled him, after his release, to become for people all over the world a witness to hope—to that great hope which does not wane even in the nights of solitude.
—Excerpted from Spe Salvi, (On Christian Hope), #32, (2007)
