Franciscan University Presents: Grounded in Hope

god calls us to be a people of hope but what does that mean and how in times like these is that even possible today we'll discuss these questions with lisa breneckmeier she's the founder of walking with purpose and the author of the bible study grounded in hope i'm father dave pavanki and i'm the president of franciscan university in steubenville ohio and you're watching franciscan university presents stay with us [Music] [Music] welcome to franciscan university presents i'm your host father dave pavanka and i'm the president of franciscan university in steubenville ohio and today we're talking about becoming grounded in hope i'm joined by our panelist dr martin it's nice to have you and dr scott hahn always a blessing to have this panelist together but we're particularly pleased to welcome our special guest today lisa brennick-meyer lisa is the founder and the chief purpose officer of walking with purpose a catholic women's bible study program and she is also the author of the book this bible study grounded in hope and it's based on the text from hebrews lisa and i have been friends for a number of years now but we don't need to worry about that it's really really great to have you here oh great to be here as well so could you maybe just share a little bit with us about walking with purpose and sure what that is and how that came about sure so walking with purpose is a catholic women's bible study ministry very much focused on leading women deeper into scripture in a way that does that journey from the head to the heart so really helps women to apply what they're learning to day-to-day life and we do that whenever possible in the context of community we think women really need life-giving communities where they can be authentic and come as they are and we want to create a space for women where they can come with their doubts come with their questions this isn't the place where you need to already know where you need to be buttoned up or have a biblical background or even just a strong formation you come as you are we meet you there and we delve into scripture together constantly looking at the ways in which it applies to our lives but certainly keeping it very much grounded in the truths of our faith so the studies have the imprimatur so they check out that's great but we really want to know you know answer that question of so what now how do we live this out in our day-to-day lives so it takes place in parishes but also women do it just in small groups in their homes and as individuals as well is it possible that these women arrive without having been grounded in hope oh yeah that's your job that's right i think that's a big part of it i do really see us in a lot of ways as distillers of hope we're we're carrying christ to them and um he's our hope right and so that's when a lot of the women come in that place of really needing help something they can grasp hold of so what what inspired you other than we're going to assume the holy spirit inspired you to do it but why why now why women why bible studies what was kind of moving in your heart that even brought that about well i'm a convert so i grew up in the evangelical church and so i i was raised on scripture you know memorizing scripture reading it you know voraciously from the time that i was little and it was just always a huge part of my spiritual formation so how i was learning but also how i was connecting to christ and being comforted and strengthened and so i couldn't imagine not having that be a part of my you know my experience within the church and so when i came into the church when i was early married and there were wonderful bible studies out there already in the catholic church that i really really enjoyed but i found that i was having to add to it in a small group setting to take it to that really practical level and also to bring into the discussion the importance of conversion of heart i sometimes felt like we were already assuming that women had made that commitment and and i wanted to start writing material that brought that in continuously and and what really it started though with sitting in mass and seeing women you know crowling their kids and coming in and and being present but i could see a look on their faces as they went where they were just kind of worn out and feeling like well i checked the box hauled the kids here i came but i could see there was something more that they were needing to take it into their day-to-day life and what happened as we came together around scripture everything at mass became so much more meaningful because of course what is the message so loaded with scripture and they came to understand what they were experiencing so much better because of it but it was really motivated out of a desire for that community for myself and but also to see those women really connect with the lord with the living word through scripture in an applicable way you know grounded in hope is relevant for women and men of course but you know they have they haven't lost the hope for heaven but i do think that when women get so busy they have given up their hope for peace today you know and so when they arrive at mass they've corralled the kids and they hope to get through it but the but the sense of peace has often been lost you know and easter the resurrection it opens up the way we now have solid bases for hope but what we really need is a practical basis for the hope on a daily basis and sometimes just from hour to hour and you've tackled a book in the new testament we've talked about this i'm so proud of you because you could have tackled the gospel of john you could have tackled you know a short book like ephesians you tackled a monster of a book but you've done it practically the book of hebrews is my own personal passion and has been for 40 years but to go through this it's like you can you can do this in a way that is practical it's so much about the theology of the old and the new and animal sacrifices but i remember one thing in particular you know that uh the old testament ceremonial laws have given way to the new covenant and the sacraments and all but you just point out that you know the uh the dietary laws jesus shows us in the gospel of mark in the book of hebrews just clarifies it's not what comes into the mouth that defiles you it's what comes out of the heart and what a what a breath of fresh air what a light because it's like lord heal my heart you know it's not going to be primarily the environment or my diet or whatever it's going to be whether you live in my heart or not because if you do it doesn't matter you know what really strikes me about both of you is that you're so passionate about a single letter from the scriptures i came of age at a time when there were two sorts of people regarding scripture either those who never read it and they were catholics or those who had very little reverence for what they read and they were scripture scholars here is scott i would sometimes think that you know if i didn't know the bible had predated his birth i might have suspected scott wrote it because you know it from the inside out i wish that were true well it is true yeah and apparently you know almost as much yeah i know from the heart level yeah like you can i mean i could never keep up up here but on the heart level and i think that's what you do so beautifully in this is is make that connection um from taking words on a page that that ought to be alive and can come alive and then making it practical and concrete but with all that was in there why why hope why was focus of the hope what you focus on good question i think what really struck me is that um and this isn't just women but my focus very much is women we're living um in a postmodern culture and we're breathing it in like carbon monoxide we don't we don't even realize the way in which it's affecting us it's certainly affecting our belief systems but it's very much causing us to lose hope and when you think about postmodernism and you know what it is there's no absolute truth right and god he or she you know whichever if he or she exists doesn't have anything really to do with me personally but i think maybe the biggest problem i'm in post-modernism as far as hope goes is it says there's no grand narrative like it's all just it's all just chance right and at the end it's all meaningless and so you go through life and you encounter suffering which is of course what the people who the book of hebrews was written to were experiencing tremendous suffering and you hit it and if there is no overarching narrative if there isn't a god that cares about the details of your life who is actually making sense of things and bringing meaning even into the hardest things well then where is our hope going to be our hope will have to be rooted in perfect circumstances right right which should be natural rarely happens yeah right you know the great lutheran theologian robert jensen wrote an article how the world lost its story and it wasn't just like where are my keys you know for the last 50 years there has been a strategic effort at so many levels in so many university departments to dismantle to explode the grand narrative or what they call the meta-narrative so that there is no script that binds you other than whatever script you script for yourself you know and and as a result you can't answer the most basic questions who am i why am i here what is my purpose you know i'm walking but not with purpose and so to rediscover the fact that there is a grand narrative it's more than a story it's salvation history and it didn't end with the resurrection it's going in now right now because of the resurrection and my life doesn't just find a little bit of meaning suddenly i'm a character in a script that involves a drama greater than anything hollywood could ever produce or even think of and i mean it's not just hebrews you do bible studies in the shorter ones too but it always has that journey from the head to the heart you know scripture scholars often just stop at the head and then just dissect the scriptures you know and i i had a colleague in another institution years ago who's he was a priest and a biblical scholar and he wanted to show that the bible can be dissected so that you can show as professor stanley fish as the great postmodernist that it is a self-consuming artifact that as an interpreter you can sovereignly dismantle this according to whatever you wish and it's like all right then this is what we're living for you know and you know the seminarians who i spoke to were just like disheartened and i'm like well what about the parishioners you'll preach to when i was uh in rome i had a course and it was absolutely the worst course i ever had uh i will tell no names god knows who he is and will dispatch him in due course and i think maybe he already has but it was on the letters of saint paul and it was so bone crushingly boring and it lasted a whole semester but what he did was murder to dissect as the poet wordsworth warns us against he reduced this dazzling overwhelming mystery of god's love for the world to a whole series of lifeless pieces of dead information that maybe you could pluck out of an encyclopedia it was it was deadening it was stultifying and paul is the central figure in the new testament teaching on grace right they deconstruct your reach and that's just how do you do that how do you do that lisa how do you take this these ideas from the head to the heart what's that process well that's a fun question um well first of all i have to interact with the scripture passages just on my own devotionally and so i do do a tremendous amount well i i think it's a tremendous amount as a mother of seven but of studying just what does this mean in the literal sense and you know really delving into all of that um but then i come at it when i've gotten to the background understanding i understand where it's coming from culturally and you know what it means in that sense and i basically say what does this mean to me personally you know jesus says you speak to me through your word what does this have to do with day-to-day life and and as i'm writing the study i am giving the needed background so people can place this in context right because you can take anything in scripture and make it mean all sorts of things and of course that's historically been done we have to be very careful of that but when i find that these scripture passages have been run through my life you know the lord has has used them to not just teach me and comfort me and reveal something new about himself to me but has strengthened me and has changed me has changed me so why do we do this like do we do this just to come together as women in good community that's to be honest a byproduct we do this because we want to be transformed we want to encounter jesus personally and we want him to change us through his words so when he does that with me personally very often i have just been studying whatever book it is myself for probably about a year and then i start to say okay and this is how it worked out in my life so i never write something i haven't experienced well i mean this is sort of like lectio divina i mean you read the text and then you meditate on what you've read what does it mean you try and tease out some application to your life and the fruit is that book you know it's like lectio and yet i can tell that you've done more than lexio and you just indicated how and why because you've got to you know critical scholarship is useful hypercritical scholarship is dedicated you've got to get into the historical and the cultural background you've got to look at the literary context study the whole canada see how the old and the new relate especially if you're tackling hebrews but if you stop in the head it'll just dry up you take it to the heart you take it to prayer and then suddenly it starts to bear fruit not only in your prayer where the lordship of christ is showing you the areas of life where he wants you to let him in but then all of a sudden the floodgates open so that women can come and you're talking not dozens of parishes you're talking what hundreds hundreds hundreds of parishes where women are finding not only hope to get through the day or hope to get to heaven but hope to figure out how can i get more of the bread of life how can i get more of scripture because it does answer the questions it it eradicates the doubts as well but at the same time it opens up this sense like i'm a cradle catholic but this is our book right you know it is our book it's not playing an away game you know it's playing a home game yeah and that's beautiful i don't want to open up a shower to rain on your parade but i do have one practical question sure maybe in order to ground these women and hope it might be helpful to find a babysitter for these kids so that they can park them somewhere sequester them safely so that they can then plunge into the scriptures do you make provision for that love that question we do it's actually one of the most important things of the program so when we talk to coordinators about bringing this to their parish one of the first things we say is you've got to find a woman who's willing to oversee child care she's we call her the child care coordinator because women need to know their kids are safe and they're being well taken care of and we're following all the guidelines but then you can come and anytime a parish isn't willing to do that with children i find that really concerning because who are we going to lose we're going to lose the young moms why do we need the young moms because their kids are still sponges they're still willing to hear it from mom and say okay well this is this is truth and if you wait till the kids are in school to start delving into your spiritual life you have the heartbreak of coming to know christ wanting to tell your kids and you lost that window amen and to that end we will come back in just a moment or two to be able to continue our conversation on hope [Music] our prayer life certainly relates to our hope in god in the first letter to the thessalonians paul speaks about putting on the breastplate of faith and charity and the helmet of the hope of salvation and i think of that scripture from saint paul because prayer is really putting on the mind of christ it's putting on the helmet the protection from all the voices of the world it's centering ourself in the hope of salvation looking beyond this world and that's what our prayer leads us to it takes us to the lord who is our hope itself there is a place where education begins and faith and reason connect franciscan university of steubenville's online programs will advance your career through an e-learning experience that's both academically excellent and passionately catholic with online degrees taught by full-time professors in theology catechetics business education and other disciplines you can earn your master's degree online without changing your lifestyle find out more today at franciscan.edu where your faith and career can connect online welcome back to franciscan university presents and we are talking about being grounded in hope uh a virtue which i love how about just a little bit more you at the previous section you were talking about the natural virtue of hope so maybe just about what is hope from a theological perspective however you want all right well you've got natural hope right and so i see that in my eight-year-old daughters so charlotte will like sit for the afternoon and color pictures and have a stack like this high and i'm like what are you doing charlotte you know you're sending these to the grandparents and she'll say no i'm going to sell them in the neighborhood and i'm going to make loads of money and i look at her i'm like you are so certain that you're literally going to sell that whole stack and make loads of money and that is hope that is beautiful that is optimistic it's not really likely to happen and sometimes our hope is that we're just hoping for the best well that's not theological hope right and it's not rooted in our circumstances at all it's actually rooted in the trustworthiness of god because it's something that is infused to us it's given us as a gift rather than something we conjure up from within can i give you an illustration of natural hope a new yorker cartoon some years ago showed two guys in a prison cell the walls are about eight feet thick and they run a hundred feet high there's no window there's no door and the guy turns to his pal and says okay fred here's my plan that's all natural hope yeah you know but supernatural hope is what we're really talking about that is the theological virtue that is supernaturally infused you know so you have the courage core from the heart to face moral difficulties to attain nothing less than heaven but not only at the end of life to attain heaven now by opening up the heart to christ you know it's a quote from hebrews 6 19 as you know to seize the hope and when you back up to the beginning of hebrews 6 it's a subtle distinction but it's important because the word of promise that god gave to abraham is the object of his faith and it gives him the certitude of faith but at the same time he's got challenges and so he asked for something more and so god adds the oath in genesis 22 verses 16 to 18 so that through two unchangeable things in which it's impossible for god to prove false the word of promise the certainty of faith the oath of assurance which is the assurance of hope so you know i have absolute certainty of everything that god has said is true but because god has never said in scripture or tradition scott hahn is numbered among the elect that is not the object of faith that is the object of hope the certainty of faith is the word the assurance of hope is the oath and the latin word for oath as i discover when i wish for the protestant is sacramentum so to go to worship word and sacrament gives us the promise the object of certainty our faith but then to ground it personally practically today in the sacrament which is god's swearing i will help you i will see you through all of the difficulties i'll not only get you home to heaven at the end i'll get into your heart and you point out that the anchor of hope is in the holy of holies what does that imply that our heart is the holy of holies that's where christ wants to meet me daily not just once a year like it was you know when the high priest went into the holy of holies deep stuff lisa that you were you're looking at the culture and seeing the need for hope right now so how do you speak to that and how do you speak to the women and in allowing them to find hope in circumstances which are really difficult on so many levels right now what was that or how do you bring them to that place i think their stories are really really important and back to what you were saying you know we one of the beautiful things about hebrews is you're in the new testament so you have the new covenant and all that that brings to us but you've got all these flashbacks to the old where you're getting to see the faithfulness of god the story of salvation throughout it so that's one of the things i love about the book and and we need that we need to see that historically god has always shown up and seen people through because you come to a woman in her own story and it feels like it's the exception to the rule right it feels like but is he going to show up for me and so it's a matter of meeting a woman where she is at this level not up here and and finding out what is her story you know where is that place where the trustworthiness of god came into question for you where is that place of hurt or their place of fear or that place of woundedness whatever it might be you meet her there you hear her story and you remind her that all these promises of god that are yes in christ are yes for her but we can't hold him to a promise that he never made right so that's why we go to scripture to say well what has he promised and how do we find out whether or not he's trustworthy well let's look and let's look at his track record and how has he been for people in that regard and so um i feel like scripture really um is really helpful just in getting that macro view of the overarching narrative that he has shown up always he will continue to today but then i want to bring it personally and to the life of a woman and she needs a tool something that helps her day-to-day to grab hold of hope because you can have hope in the morning and have lost it by five you know and so one of the things that i love about the way our studies are structured is each week's lesson is broken down into days so it's training you start your morning with your head in scripture and it'll renew your mind and bring you hope but something that i've started incorporating into the bible studies i've written more recently and whenever i speak is something called the i declares and to me it takes the truths that you know we're talking about in scripture and brings them into the day-to-day day-to-day where we say what are the promises of god that we can hold him to in scripture where we pray his word back to him and we declare those truths until hope comes back into our hearts and chases out the despair so i might say you know i'm just feeling like i'm suffering and i'm swimming and i'm going to go under and i'm lacking right and i might say i declare that no temptation has seized me except what is common to man and god is going to be faithful and provide a way out so i can stand up under it first corinthians 10 13. i declare that when i am weak god is strong within me i declare that there is nothing that i face that he cannot get me through and you start to quote these bible verses and and their references and realizing this is true for me today and we challenge women pray these things out loud because the enemy hears right and so often what do we say we we spew out the litany of all the things that we're discouraged about he hears all that too and whispers it back but if we speak out hope in these promises that's a weapon right i i know that women have a special skill set but do they also have a set of discouragements uh that that are peculiar to their predicament i mean if you say jesus is the answer to the question that's my life do women have a different question that they put to christ than say men i mean is their situation special i mean would that book work for men it does work for men i've actually heard that quite a bit um i think you have to overlook the pinkness of the cover that's tough i know but like rip the cover off and and you're good to go and i do know many men use it i do think there are unique questions in the heart of a woman and i think that a woman longs to be seen longs to be known longs to be considered beautiful longs to be valued in that way i think that's something specific to women and i think men i've at least been told want to know that i've got what it takes you know and so i think there are different things that you know when the lord speaks into those those needs um it meets our hearts in special ways but your question about um not just what is the question but what is maybe the ache of a woman what i see over and over again is the ache of losing this next generation you know of of the fact that they have wanted more than anything to pass their faith to the next generation and they haven't known how to do it and very often haven't had tools to do that and they're watching their children walk away from the church and i think that is the heartache that i hear the most you know pope pius xi back in 1930 spoke of how men you know are more familiar with the order of authority and that's why headship applies to them not exclusively but in a preeminent way whereas women have primacy in the order of love he says and so they're the heart of the home and you think about the blessed virgin you know she didn't just bear the word made flesh she bore the future generation you know and women bear not jesus in their own wombs physically but i do think that they have within the womb which is below the heart and the head but it really is the embodiment of hope and i i have said this for years especially because i've got two family members who really suffer from the need for hope and the loss of hope that hope is the cinderella of the three virtues we always talk about the faith and you know sharing it defending it and love love love but hope is i think the neglected virtue it's also the difficult one and so to have women find hope isn't just you know something convenient it's something necessary and essential if god's children are going to be born through these women of hope these women of god there's a passage in charles peggy who is the great poet of hope and he pictures her as a little girl who was born just a couple of minutes after christmas morning and we watch her going down the street with faith and charity on either side and from a distance it appears as if they're carrying hope but in fact on closer inspection they are held by sustained by hope this little girl without hope faith and charity would be would be old women they wither and they would wither and die and fall into a ditch hope is the really primordial virtue chesterton calls it the religion of tomorrow morning things are going to be better and christ guaranteed that and and why do you think it's so difficult why is hope so difficult to grasp why is it that i mean that's a beautiful image but we find so many people disappointed and we hear in romans that hope doesn't disappoint so how is it or what's the misconception that the individual has of hope i think we we think hope is somehow connected to our circumstances so it is going to get better tomorrow morning as in i really do need to see this turn pretty dang fast and we want our prayers answered on our timetable and we don't have an eternal perspective at all you know and so we we want it all here we gauge how good it is based on right now and so as a result our sufferings don't really have meaning because we haven't fixed our eyes on heaven so i think that robs us you know of a tremendous amount of hope we we don't look far enough out and you know we we think it's going to happen somehow here on earth we we pin our hopes on a on a utopia here right which will never be satisfied politicians and their promises there we go and then we're disillusioned right and then despair creeps in and then what we start to feel i think especially if we don't really have a strong formation to fall back on of what did god actually promise is it's like you know i think that this christianity thing was a bit of a bait and switch like this isn't delivering on what i thought it would give and it's because we're wanting something today that god has promised as a reward in eternity and and and tomorrow morning too but sometimes when you're going through good friday you have to wait through holy saturday for easter sunday and the resurrection gives us hope i i we have a mutual friend matt mar who sings christ is risen from the dead but he never just sings the song he talks about the death that we have experienced more recently and how this hope isn't just one day out of the year it's something that has to be sustaining us and that imagery too i really believe it's easy to fall out of love when you fall out of hope when you've lost hope right you know you can give up on the faith because what good is it but you know love is just too hard without hope you know a joseph ratzinger in a series of meditations way back in the late 60s spoke of the long holy saturday of this present moment that we're enshrouded in a kind of darkness and it is symbolized by the absence of the eucharist on holy saturday those tabernacles have been emptied god is dead and we're going through that that period of the absence of god being god forsaken and that's the death of hope and we can't see far enough to know that from friday to sunday there has to be this pause that's part of the music the dark tones the chords we have to hear but at the end of that there's easter sunday you know this resurrection he climbs out of the grave he's so intensely alive as balthazar puts it that he can he can survive even death death can't keep him dead but what's going on on holy saturday i think is so important that we not lose sight of because if you tell a person just grate your teeth and get through it right that can be a long wait and that's pretty miserable if you can say this is where the maturing is happening this is where you're becoming like christ you know it's not in the you know rainbows and sunshine moments and don't we want to become like him don't we want to be mature followers of christ not superficial ones and it's all happening on holy saturday it's not you're not just treading water it's not for nothing it's actually where the spirit is doing his deepest work that he hasn't left you and we do want to become a church christians and we'll talk about that next so stay with us uh and francisco university presents [Music] a great example of having the theological virtue of hope while at the same time feeling the feeling emotional feeling of despair is jesus on the cross who when he saw that he was going to die there was no way out express that despair my god my god why have you abandoned me but that despair is not the sin of despair it's not a choice to refuse the hope the help of god it was the feeling that follows the understanding that there's no way out but he had theological hope that in three days as he knew he was going to rise from the dead by the power of god and he himself the son of god and so look at psalm 28 verse 8 the lord is the strength of his people he is the saving refuge of his anointed what if you discovered a university with unmatched science faculty and programs a place where you didn't have to choose science over faith at franciscan university of steubenville you'll find faith-inspired student-focused research-driven programs leading to satisfying careers in medicine scientific research engineering computer science and many more science and health fields at franciscan university of steubenville education is more than just a word it's a discovery welcome back and thanks so much for joining us you're watching franciscan university presents and we record this program in the com arts studio here at franciscan university of steubenville our students are operating the cameras in the equipment they always do a great job and members of our theology faculty dr martin and dr han who also always do a great job and i are discussing ways to become grounded in hope with our guest lisa elisa you close at the end of talking about this this process of maturing in hope and maturing in our faith it's interesting so hope isn't just something we get we got it we can actually grow in it it can develop what is that how does that happen well i think it grows in us as we grow in our deep belief at the heart level of the trustworthiness of god that's really where it's rooted why do you think it's probably that's one of the things i probably hear most as a priest is an inability to trust god yeah god is a god who is so faithful who always keeps his promises and it's just fundamental to who he is why is it that we have a hard time trusting how about that for a big question that's a big question figure this out for us and we can move on here's here's what i think i think that um the battle's in the head but this is where it originates so something happens to us that has been you know deeply hurtful deeply you know wounding we're you know we're in this moment and our first thought is i never ever want to feel like this again you know it can be any sort of circumstance and in that moment that we start to say okay what am i going to have to do so that i never feel like this again the temptation to only rely on ourselves and just kind of pull in gets really really strong and in that moment when we are down for the count at our lowest at our most hurt that's when the enemy leans in and starts to whisper lies and they're lies that are very much connected to our identity as children of god he brings that into question and he brings into question the goodness of god so he starts to say things like you're all alone you're powerless nobody sees nobody sees you you know and if you ever speak of this you know it will be the end of the world he speaks these lies the problem is that in that moment because we are at our lowest they make sense because it's what we're feeling and instead of our at that moment battling back with the truths that we know about god whether it be from our own experience or what we know of scripture we start to that does make sense i am all alone what do i have to do so that i never feel like this again i'm not going to rely on anyone right i'm not going to let anyone in i'm not i'm not going to let anyone trust and we build this barrier around our heart and what we're trying desperately to do is to remain safe to remain in control and we don't even realize that we've bought into a lie about the trustworthiness of god about his goodness as our father you know isn't isn't it also the case that people are unable to turn trustingly to god because so often they have been betrayed by his image the image of god their their husband their father their friends whom can i trust they have no experience of trust yeah you know i think this is the key because you mentioned life experience personal experience and scripture very few people have life experience that is sufficient to fall back on you know i think most people look at their life experience at least most catholics and they're looking at like mostly a blank page with some doodling you know like yeah okay when i was 14 and other points too you know we were talking last night at dinner with jim caviezel kind of a unique experience and when he played jesus christ and he was on the cross struck by lightning you know he was given hope you know very few people have experiences like playing jesus christ and the passion of the crowd or being struck by the lord strike by lightning and he had other experiences to relate over the course of a year you know and i'm just thinking most of us are bereft of any of that but this is where scripture comes in because if you know the story you can find your place in it but if you're reading the new testament apart from the old i can't help but say that the new testament is almost unintelligible apart from the fulfillment of these promises and so what do you do well you just can't overcome biblical illiteracy in a day so what you do you know in various points sam sam wise gamji and and frodo are carrying the ring of power up mount doom you know and so you're plugging them into the stories that you know not only rekindle hope but also show hopeless situations and you know you're looking at you know why would gandalf give that ring to that little hobbit and expect him why would god give me these personal problems and expect me to get through today and you know you have to fill in the gaps you just can't say well study the old testament then you'll discover a father who's keeping all of those promises but you're right i mean i do think that the breakdown of trust is the single greatest wound in the hearts of women and but also men because they don't have fathers they can trust and so it's like you know you've got to come to jesus in order to really find the way to the father and to that and that's important part of that is that ability to come to jesus so you speak about the relationship between prayer and hope the relationship between the sacraments and hope so maybe speak about how how we can be drawn into a deeper hope by relationship with just how do you pray and how do you go to mass and how do you celebrate this sure well you know i think one of my favorite illustrations about prayer is going through your life thinking you're going to live the victorious christian life without prayer is like saying i'm going to clean my house and vacuum but you haven't actually plugged the vacuum cleaner in and you're just doing this all the time why is it not getting better why is it not getting cleaner so we've got a plug-in we've got to plug in through prayer we've got to plug in through the sacraments that's we're going to where we're going to receive the power and the means by which we can live you know live out the christian life as to you know how i pray i do think i have kind of a unique way of of praying for myself and of interceding for others and so um obviously i want to protect hope in my own life and and develop and cultivate that virtue but i want to see it in the lives of there's always someone on my heart i find each year that's especially heavy on my heart who i know is struggling with despair okay and who i know is really lacking hope and i had one moment in my life where that was so acute where my concern for that loved one was almost debilitating because the despair was so deep and in the darkness was was so acute and i found the only thing that helped me was interceding for this person in a very particular way and what i did um is i took a bible which i hadn't yet read and i downloaded a guide to reading through the bible in a year and i decided i was going to claim every word of scripture over the life of my loved one over my child and i was going to underline every promise to claim every example to follow every example not to follow and i was going to hold god to his word and say you have promised this and so in the margins of the bible i wrote those prayers and so i prayed that over a year over that child's life and i tell you i saw the tide turn and two things were happening at the same time i was saying to god this is who you who you are and i'm just you know calling to mind your goodness and your faithfulness and your promises i saw his hand move miraculously and the life of my loved one but it did something in my heart because if you remember i began by saying i was the one who was also in a state because i was so worried but reading that much scripture on a daily basis really was the only thing that settled my heart and gave me hope to know he is so above this like his the grand narrative is so beyond us you know it said that god too is a hoper he hopes that we'll turn to him and beseech him because he wants to help but he wants to be asked that's an amazing story that is really quite thrilling you know claim the promises is what we always heard as evangelicals but of course that's not something catholics can do you know i mean it is something that we have to do we have to do yeah you know the poet uh emily dickinson speaks of hope as the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all it springs eternal it's sort of native to the human heart this desire this longing that things will be better somebody said that the reason bananas are curved uh this is really amusing the reason they're curved is because they were originally straight when they fell from when they dropped from the tree but because they want to get back to the sun they curve upward because that's the whole thrust of their being i mean that's tropism everything longs for the light theotropism is when the creature longs for the sun the helios the true light and that's hope this movement in a direction we can't quite chart but we sense we instinctively know the outcome is a good one god is not going to cheat us he's not setting us up for some supreme setback my experience shows me that when you meet an individual who has hope that there's something contagious about that that and maybe speak to that your experience is how you have been i'm sure model of hope for other people but how does that how does that work in your heart when you meet somebody that's filled with hope and and how can we be that for one another i think you meet someone and um i don't know maybe this is just me and my weirdness but i really like to meet a person at that point of pain like i don't have a lot of time for small talk and i want to go there and say you know where is that pain point in your life and speak to that and i find more often than not that you know there can be some kind of a connection there because so often our difficult experiences are common right to man and so you you give that time right you you see the person where they are and you acknowledge that that's a part of reality and then you build the hope from there you don't just start with the you know the solution or the hope or everything's going to be great it's all going to be good because it causes a person to feel unseen you're doing something right right but when you meet in that place where you're like oh no i i can relate to that kind of suffering you know i'm not in the annoying me too yeah i know my story is better mine's the topper but just that connection seeing them and then going from there to talk about but god is still going to show up in this god is faithful in this this is not the exception to the rule i find that moment bringing the hope in at that point can be quite contagious and it's one of the things when we um train leaders to lead walking with purpose it's really important to us that the materials be solid and applicable but the leadership be of a certain type we talk about the importance of an outpouring of love for women and another of our values is fearless positivity that women are we are attracted to that we need to know that there is hope and there is goodness and it's not all going to hell in a handbasket right you know you know somebody said don't talk about christ unless somebody is asking you but live your life in such a way that they want to ask you about christ what makes you so different why do you have this this spring in your step yeah you know i think a lot of people confuse hope with optimism because they don't distinguish the the natural hope that people have because they're optimists and the supernatural hope that all of us are supposed to have because christ is risen you know so i do think that it's helpful for people like me who are not optimists but who have hope but need more to hang around people like kimberly my bride because she is an optimist an eternal optimist and since grace builds on nature the more optimistic natural hope there is the more that can be supernaturalized and so to be around her is to be around someone who's radiating hope and you know we've gone through dark times and and she has difficulty understanding the depression that goes through my family line she can enter into it but not like i can with my kids at the same time she's gone through enough suffering to know that the lord is faithful he'll not only see us through it he's going to bring a better body out of the tomb than what was buried you know and it's like yeah that's what i need to seize that's the kind of hope that goes beyond optimism you know that goes beyond a presidential election or national championship you know this is what unites us as family but not just the hans but all of god's sons and daughters this father has shown us in his son my goodness easter just rewrites the script of human history in terms of hope and lisa i think that's what you've done with gathering the women together is that it provides them an opportunity to share that story where where one woman may be experiencing a difficulty that day the other woman might be able to encourage them so that gathering together is key for your ministry is it not absolutely and i think we want women when they come to know you matter you your story your particular struggles your particular hopes and dreams you matter we want them to know truth matters that's why you know we're rooting ourselves in scripture and in the teachings of the church and the catechism and then we also want to say in relationships matter right we weren't meant to live in isolation we can't live the christian life well in isolation and so then we facilitate these communities where women taste all three at the same time and it really does become a lifeline i hear that over and over again i literally hear women say it has saved their life and because we need all three of those things you know child care by the way is one thing that i wanted to mention again because kimberly had a bible study with child care and the women related later this was life training this is real life right here exactly and up next our panel and our guest will share our final thoughts on how to become grounded in hope please stay with us [Music] the emotions of hope and the contrary despair are emotions you feel in your body in your endocrine system when you perceive some evil that's overcoming you and you can't get away from it the emotion is despair when you see some evil you think you can overcome it it's difficult you might have the emotion of hope this is different than the theologically infused virtue of hope from the holy spirit you don't feel this you might feel the effects of it but you might not the theological and the infused virtue of hope is the power that god gives you to trust in him and his promises that he will save you that he has the ability to do so and that he loves you and wants to do so [Music] welcome back to franciscan university presents we've come to our final segment so regis if you could start us yeah i'm uh i'm really full of admiration for what you've done but i'm also marveling at all three of you i mean father dave you always inspire me i'm sure but but this particular session i mean here's scott with this throwaway line that he had dinner with jim caviezel i mean as if this happens all the time you know i have dinner maybe with a couple of cats and my wife and then you i i suspect that if you sit down to have a cup of tea with a friend you cut right to the chase you don't talk about the weather or the length of her hemline none of that matters you want to get them straight on the paul line express uh let me end with with this it seems to me that in approaching faith there are two contrasting attitudes that people take some people view faith as this ideal it's out there it's distant it's almost unattainable but maybe at the 11th hour god will swing a special deal and sweep me into the kingdom but until then i'm in the grip of a kind of despairing moralism i struggle i stumble i fall i just make a complete wreck of my life because christianity is this ideal that's almost unattainable but the other attitude which i think is more catholic is to view christianity as the center of the cosmos and i'm living out of that center so it's not an ideal towards which i have to move but it's a center from which i radiate out to the very ends of the universe and that gives me hope that gives me the bounce it gives me a sense that you know things are going to be pretty good because the outcome has already been uh guaranteed by this dead god who conquered the grave amen scott okay i want to just summarize a few practical takeaways for those women especially who are watching because catholic women's bible study has to become a better growth industry than it is yeah second walking with purpose we're not just talking about one bible study on hebrews grounded in hope we're talking about walking with purpose we're talking about not just thousands of women but over 400 parishes and i believe that this is a work of god and even though it's reaching thousands i think it needs to reach millions and uh in the evangelical world especially wherever you see growth explosive deep spiritual growth invariably the women are involved small groups especially and the the word of god sacred scripture and you know even if they're outsiders or beginners with questions or people who've been catholics all their lives but still have doubts you know this kind of stuff is the food for the soul you can't satisfy your hunger by watching the food channel you know you've got to actually partake of the bread of life and uh you come away like the cappadocians would say with a sober inebriation from the wine of god's word it's bread it's wine you know it's the other side of what we celebrate in the eucharist and so the last takeaway is thank you and may your tribe increase thank you thanks lisa thank you so much for being with us my joy um you know i think the key question we all need to wrestle with is why why should we trust jesus to be the source of our hope why should we put all our eggs in that basket and as i think about it and i think about the book of hebrews i think well we could say because he's superior because he's all-powerful because of his glory but when i think about the why why he's deserving of all of it of our placing our trust in him it's his sheer goodness and his pure love for us and i think about um what it takes for a person to open up their heart and trust in god and place their hope in christ and we could come with you know the most incredible scientific arguments for the existence of god we could show hundreds of prophecies in the old testament that were fulfilled in christ that would just blow your mind and you think oh this is amazing we could present the christian worldview and say clearly this is the superior one but none of that moves the heart if the heart does not trust okay so the heart needs to know it's safe with god yeah so god knew that and he knew that we weren't going to be won over by arguments a perfectly crafted debate he knew we were going to be won over by love and so he looked at us and he said so what's the core problem here the core problem is this gap between you and me and it's been created by sin and i can't bridge that gap by saying sin doesn't matter you can't bridge that gap by making your way over to me with your good works and always being better and better there's always going to be something that falls short and so what he did is he said i'm going to not only bridge that gap but in doing so i'm going to do it through love and i'm going to answer the question for now and for always of just how trustworthy i am and so yes thinking back to the passion of the christ and the way that we are able to understand yes my heart is actually safe with god in all of its most vulnerable and tender places those places where i'm afraid to hope is by focusing on the cross and if that seems sterile and just kind of like just like a creed that you're reciting and isn't coming from here i challenge you to watch the passion again because that suffering is what jesus was doing to win our salvation and bridge that gap but also to say i am trustworthy this is how far i'm willing to go for you for you and that's the ability and the grace to be able to celebrate that particularly during easter and that it's not the end of the story obviously that's the end it's it leads us to the end so that's wonderful so if you'd like to learn more about today's topic we have an article that was written by lisa it's free it's taken from grounded in hope the bible study and it would be yours if you simply go online to faithandreason.com or call the number that you're going to see at the bottom of the screen in just a moment uh hope is one of my favorite themes in in being able to pray and reflect uh it's been said that i we can live without food for something like 40 days 40 days and then water with something eight days oxygen three minutes uh we can't live for a moment without hope hope is ultimately what what sustains us and what keeps us going and it's interesting i was praying one time and and i would never have thought the word because in the scripture was a really important word and yet i was praying through romans 5 and i got stuck on the word because text says hope does not disappoint and for so many people that i've experienced that i've met they're disappointed which raises the question what is it that we put our hope in hope is not wanting good things hope isn't desire hope isn't even prayer hope is something different than that and and i've shared many times that my mom's got multiple sclerosis and has had ms since i was five years old and i've prayed thousands and thousands if my hope is in god healing her i'm going to be frustrated i'm going to be angry i'm going to question whether or not god is trustworthy and all of those things so i think one of the dangers is that we place our hope in places that it is never supposed to be so paul says hope does not disappoint because and everybody should lean in right because lean in all right because the love of god has been poured forth into our hearts by the power of the holy spirit and that's that's why we can hope we can hope because no matter what's going on no matter who the president is no matter what the circumstances are no matter what's going on in our family and all of those difficulties are true in what in in part of our story but we don't get lost in that because the love of god has been poured forth into our heart by the power of the holy spirit and to the degree that that's been our experience that this isn't just a story or it's not just something that was written but that each one of us has experienced that love of god that has literally been poured into our heart and i love the word scripture says that it is not rationed right it just continues to pour if that becomes our experience if that becomes our reality if that becomes the starting place for us then we can say hope does not disappoint so thank you so much for reminding us amen so let's pray heavenly father we thank you for your word and we thank you for placing your word on lisa's heart and her sharing that with us we pray that you would continue to shower us with your holy spirit that we would live in your hope and that your hope would remind us of your promises and that you are a god who was always faithful was always true was always loving may almighty god pour his blessings on you the father the son and the holy spirit amen download a free handout on today's topic at faithandreason.com where you can also watch past episodes of franciscan university presents or request the handout by emailing us at presents franciscan.edu or reach us by phone for today's handout by calling [Music] six four 800-783-6444 seven that's eight hundred seven eight three six four four seven [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Franciscan University of Steubenville

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Keywords: Franciscan University, Steubenville, Ohio, Catholic, college, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Franciscan University of Steubenville (College / University), Franciscan University Presents, Presents, EWTN, Fr. Dave Pivonka TOR, Dr. Regis Martin, Dr. Scott Hahn, Lisa Brenninkmeyer, Walking With Purpose, Grounded in Hope, hope, bible study

Id: Gh2Dgope-to

Length: 58min 30sec (3510 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021