When people leave an interaction with us, are they more hopeful than they were before? In our second reading, St. Peter tells us, “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope.” When there is a situation that seems hopeless to others, we disciples are supposed to be people of hope.
If faith is trusting in the present, hope is extending that trust into the future, having something to look forward to. Hope is the confidence that I will possess something I do not yet have.
To see what it looks like to be a person of hope, come back in time with me to October 1960 when Maria Teresa and Ruggero got married. The great prayer they had for their marriage was to be able to have a child. A few years came and went, and they had no children. After five years of praying and trying, they still were without a child. After 10 years of praying, they continued to be without a child. Now, for most married couples wanting a child, this would seem like a hopeless situation, but Maria Teresa and Ruggero held onto their hope. They prayed on because they had a hope that their deep desire for the love they had for God and one another would overflow to have new life come from their marriage.
They considered their prayers answered when Teresa gave birth to their baby girl on October 29, 1971. She grew to become a typical teenager who listened to pop music, hung out with friends, played on the school tennis team, and she even got in trouble sometimes. On one day, she went into her neighbor’s yard and took an apple from the neighbor’s tree. When her parents found out about this, they made her go and apologize to the neighbor. After she went to the neighbor’s house and apologized, to show how bountiful God’s mercy can be, the neighbor brought an entire bushel of apples over to her.
When she was 16 years old, she was at a retreat and had a powerful spiritual experience that strengthened her faith and left her feeling empowered. For her, it was one of those profound spiritual encounters that could only be explained to others by saying she knew she wasn’t the same way she was before and that’s all the proof she needed to place her hope in Jesus. She knew who she was before, she knew she encountered Jesus, and she knew she was changed forever because of that encounter.
Later that same year, while she was playing tennis, she got this intense pain in her shoulder. She was rushed to the hospital, and they started running tests on her. She received a diagnosis that most would describe as devastating. She was diagnosed with bone cancer. Instead of becoming angry with God, cursing at God, and going down the “why me?” path of self-pity, her reply to the diagnosis was this: “If it is what you want Jesus, it is what I want too.” In the hospital, the pain was intense, but she refused to take morphine because she said it would reduce her lucidity and she said she wanted to participate as much as possible in the sufferings of the cross so she could offer her sufferings up to God.
Instead of sitting in this suffering in solitude, she would often get up out of her hospital bed even though doing so caused her great pain. When she got out of her bed, she would go to visit other patients in the hospital to bring light to them in their darkness. She knew that for every minute we fall into the sin of despair, we lose 60 seconds of hope. Her friends from school would come to the hospital to cheer her up, but when they walked out of the hospital, they realized that they were the ones who had been uplifted and encouraged by her; that they were more hopeful when they left their interaction with her than they were before. Her chemotherapy treatment began and as locks of her hair would fall to the ground, she would pick the locks of hair off the ground and hold them up to heaven saying, “for you Jesus.”
When the Archbishop came to visit her in the hospital, he said to her, “The light in your eyes is so splendid. Where does it come from?” She said, “I just try to love Jesus as best I can.” The doctors in the hospital had no way of explaining how she could be experiencing such pain and yet exude such joy. They couldn’t help but see the light of Jesus through her life. As she became weaker and weaker and the pain grew more and more intense, her parents encouraged her to rest. She responded by telling them, “I will be able to sleep later on.”
As she came close to the end of her life, she told her family not to be sad. She said she wanted singing and dancing at her funeral because she was going to be with Jesus. She asked to be buried in a wedding gown so she would be a bride ready to receive her groom at the end of her life here on earth.
After receiving the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick and the Eucharist, on October 7, 1990, she then spoke her final words to her mother saying, “Be happy, because I am.” Chiara said these words to her mother because she knew that a mother is only as happy as her unhappiest child. Our own mother Mary is the same way because she wants all of us children to experience the joy and the hope her son provides.
After Chiara passed away in 1990 at the age of 18, she continued to share the gift of life she received from her mother with others. Chiara’s intercession was sought for an Italian boy with meningitis whose organs were shutting down and doctors said would die within two days. After the boy’s parents prayed to God through the intercession of Chiara, he was fully healed. The doctors could not explain the boy’s sudden and completed healing and it was deemed a miracle. The doctors of Chiara and the doctors of this boy had no hope for these two patients. From their medical perspective, their cases were hopeless, they had nothing to look forward to. Yet, both Chiara and this boy had hope. They both had something to look forward to … life. This life is something we experience a just a taste of here on earth and we are meant to experience fully when we pass into eternity. To be more precise, they both had someone to look forward to. If the doctors were to ask these two whose situations seemed hopeless the reason for their hope, their response would be short and sweet: Jesus, who is the hope of humanity.
Chiara was a high school teenager who showed us we can find joy and hope in the midst of the suffering of this world. Instead of falling into the temptation of letting our circumstances dictate our joy and our hope, Chiara Badano reminds us that our joy and our hope don’t depend on our circumstances. Our joy and our hope come from Jesus who is with us through it all. St. Peter says to always be ready to give an explanation for your hope, not sometimes, not just when we are experiencing smooth circumstances and things are going our way, St. Peter says to always be ready to give an explanation for your hope.
In a world that is desperately longing for hope, when we leave here today with Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist inside us, we have within us a hope that can only come from Jesus. We should not worry about an unknown future when we have within us a known God. Jesus can take the lady who cannot have a child and make her a mother. Jesus can take a dying girl and make her have the glow of a bride about ready to meet her groom. Jesus can take a boy’s two-day death sentence and make a miraculous healing happen that no doctor can explain.
No matter how hopeless the situation may seem, Jesus gives us the hope of someone to look forward to. When it comes to the explanation for our hope, St. Peter says to always be ready to give a reason for your hope. This is because the only Gospel a person may ever read is the Gospel of the way you live your life. So, let the next chapter of this Gospel, which we are to write today, provide the good news of Jesus’ hope to all those we encounter. When we are asked for the reason for our hope and we need to be reminded of the reason for our hope, Blessed Chiara Badano, pray for us.