Dear God,
Today feels like pizza day in the canned-green-peas-smelling cafeteria of my soul. Because I get to read the Beatitudes! Hands down, my favorite passage in your book (the Bible).
For this at-times pessimistic, skeptical person, your eight promises give me a better shot (than had I spent the fifteen minutes reading the DaVinci Code) at peace and serenity. I repeat them and absorb them for the same reason that a homeless person spends all his money on a lottery ticket: they lead me to hope, a much-needed ingredient to my recovery.
The Beatitudes begin the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew (5:3-12) and go like this:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the lad.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.

These words consoled me as a child because I was, more than a few times, ridiculed in your name. As a child afflicted with OCD, so often my acts of piety—praying rosaries, attending daily Mass, reciting lengthy prayers—blended in with symptoms of my illness. But I didn’t know the difference, nor did the adults in my life. I just knew that I was weird, and that other people thought so, too, and didn’t hesitate to tell me.

Remember? I’d belt out the lyrics to “Be Not Afraid” (which include lines from the Beatitudes) in the shower, reminding you to follow through on those eight promises. Weighed down by fear and anxiety even back then, I rejoiced in your pledge to deliver me to freedom and sanity: it was okay to be laughed at during recess because you were on my side. Our world is temporary. Your grace is eternal.
I didn’t attach the word “hope” to your Beatitudes when I was grooving to them in the shower. But that’s what Matthew’s fifth chapter, is all about.
But I have a question regarding hope, God. Because so many times it conflicts with critical thinking and reasoning, two important skills you learn in a liberal-arts education, and especially in law school and in the seminary. Like in the example of the homeless man who spends his only dollar on a lottery ticket, hope doesn’t always make sense.
At least your kind of hope.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, the late Swiss Catholic theologian, distinguished Christian hope from human hope. He wrote:

The Christian is entrusted with something valuable: Christian hope. This hope is to be clearly distinguished from purely human hope, since it cannot be described in terms of uncertainty or calculations of probability, but like faith participates in the unconditionality and the universality of love (“love believes all things and hopes all things” [1 Cor 13:7]) and thereby leaps over its own shadow (“hoping against all hope” [Rom 4:18]).

Perhaps what von Balthasar calls “Christian hope” is simply knowing that everything of this world eventually dies, that new rules get made up, and that those rules tend to favor depressives and others who have lived some or all of this life in pain.
Perhaps when a person starts to consider the possibility of eternity, the ingredient of redemption that says we will live forever with you–sans depressive symptoms– that we begin to feel less weighed down by our negative thoughts, dry mouth, fatigue, and resentment at others for not being more compassionate.
Perhaps when we begin to depend on you with every small decision in our day—paying little attention to the rules of the game down here, which work about as well as those rules you’re supposed to follow to get a man (“passing gas on the first date” is not included, and Eric still married me)—we experience “hope” in the fullness of that word.
The Medieval pope, Saint Gregory the Great, wrote:

Everything we labor for in this present world scarcely lasts until death. Death intervenes and cuts off the fruit of our labor. But what we do for eternal life remains even after death; it begins to appear only when the fruits of our physical labors cease to be visible. The recompense of the one begins when the other is ended. Let one who recognizes that he now bears eternal fruit within his soul think little of the temporal fruits of his labors. Let us work for the fruit that endures.

I don’t know why, exactly, God that repeating your eight promises makes me feel better—able to clear my head enough to write and my heart enough to love. But they do, God. They are extremely comforting, and for that I thank you.