Hope

Hope is not a desire for anything. It is not day-dreaming about anything. It is the reverse mode of fantasy. Hope is a fundamental attitude or direction of consciousness. It is an outward turning. To be hopeful is to make the discovery that we are integral parts of something greater than ourselves, and that we are living with the energy of that complete reality. Hope is the outward turning of the self, whatever the difficulty of remaining outward-turning. Despair is the surrender of consciousness to the force of introversion. . . Hope is an absolute, constant and unconditioned virtue. You cannot be hopeful only when things are going well. You need to be hopeful and, in a sense, to choose to be hopeful, however things go, whatever the inclination to sink back into self-consciousness, into the safe enclosure of the ego.

Hope is one of the virtues resulting from deep prayer. It is in deep prayer that we turn from self to God, the God who is "other" than ourselves but to whom we bear a likeness more striking than to our family or any human being. Hope is the aspiration to be totally at home. It is the strongest aspiration of our being. 

From Laurence Freeman OSB, "Hope," THE SELFLESS SELF (New York: Continuum, 2000), pp. 151-154.