Hope Leads the Way
by John Huynh | August 14, 2025
I’ve often found it interesting how love and memory are intertwined. The more we love someone, the more we remember them: intentionally, frequently, and longingly. Perhaps this is why “forget me not” is printed on greeting cards and carved into memorials. Remembering is how we hold someone close, especially when the person is absent.
This is also why forgetfulness, theologically speaking, is so dangerous to the life of faith. Forgetfulness is a habit of the quiet kind. It grows from fatigue and distraction and ultimately leads to indifference. We become indifferent to those who suffer because we’ve forgotten they are our brothers and sisters in Christ, and that love for them demands we act.
Jesus tells his disciples, “Do this in remembrance of me.” He wants them to remember what he has done and what he will do through their sharing of him. Scripture is full of this same call: to remember who God is, what he has done, and who we are because of him. When we forget, we lose our way. We lose sight of the people around us. We become indifferent.
In my recent conversation with Bo Bonner on Iowa Catholic Radio, we discussed Pope Leo XIV’s homily for the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It reminded me how easily indifference takes root. The parable is one we know well, yet it never ceases to be a powerful force for reflection. A man is left for dead. The priest and the Levite see him, but they move on. They don’t hate him; they just have things to do. The one who stops is the outsider, the one who refuses to ignore suffering.
It’s obvious that the failure in the parable isn’t rooted in malice. It’s rooted in forgetting: forgetting God’s commandment to love one’s neighbor, forgetting that mercy is often inconvenient, and forgetting that love almost always costs something.
The good Samaritan, by contrast, remembers. He recalls what love of neighbor requires, and in doing so, shows how memory gives rise to hope, and hope gives way to charity.
In The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, the French poet Charles Péguy imagines three sisters—Faith, Charity, and Hope—walking together toward the Kingdom of God. Faith and Charity are the older and stronger sisters. But it is the youngest, Hope, who walks in the middle, holding their hands and quietly leading the way.
Péguy describes Hope as a small child, almost unnoticed. She skips between her older sisters, carefree and trusting. She carries no weight, sleeps peacefully, and rises each morning with quiet resolve. It is this innocent persistence that surprises even God.
The antidote to forgetfulness and indifference is hope. Hope remembers what has been promised. And because it remembers, it helps us see again what we are tempted to forget: that God will fulfill what he has promised even when all signs seem to contradict it. Hope is what allows us, even in the most difficult times, to believe that good is still possible.
As pilgrims of hope, we are challenged to allow hope to lead charity and faith into action, however that might look in each of our lives. For some, it may mean volunteering at shelters, advocating for just policies, supporting migrants and immigrants seeking stability and belonging, or making space in our parishes and homes for those on the margins. For others, it may begin more quietly—with prayer, awareness, or small steps of accompaniment. Wherever we are, hope prompts us not just to simply feel but to move.
Where might hope be drawing your faith and love to act?