Cold weather is here to stay this winter. Cold brings hardship for many, high heating bills, children sleeping on cold hard floors, car and transportation difficulties, more work to obtain food, warm weather jobs disappearing, children are confined inside more times and the list goes on. Most of us will not experience any of this difficulties but the growing number of people in poverty do. Our response is to give money to charities for food and toys for people in need. Charities compete to collect money and food while poor families increasingly have no stoves and refrigerators to store and cook the food and children with new toys still sleep on the floor.

In Catholic social teaching the main mission of government is to serve the ‘common good’ and the mission of the church is to bring to what we do the “evangelical and preferential option” of Jesus to the poor and marginalized.

By these standards our government and Catholic Churches are failing. Our government seems more worried about ‘tax breaks’ for rich, more money for the military, killing enemies, imprisoning poor and minorities, protecting our borders and deporting people and cutting service for low income than for the ‘common good’. Our church, at least locally, seems more concern about spending money to prevent victims of sexual abuse from getting compensation, hiding money in endowments for ‘future church’, closing churches in poor and segregated neighbors, talking about the dignity of human life but looking the other way when we teach and practice killing without conscience.

What do we do? A friend mildly accused me of giving up hope by not working for ‘results’ or ‘outcomes’. I do want a government concerned about the ‘common good’ more than allowing health care to be a profitable business for the few. I do want a Catholic Church using its money for those in need rather than giving it to bankers for storage. I do want to see our Catholic University stop teaching killing. However, if I only look for results I would have despaired and lost hope by now. It is like struggling against the cold of winter only to find more cold and more winter. Hope means believing that spring will come or, for us, that someday governments will be for the ‘common good’ and the Church will given preferences to serving the poor and marginalized.

Facing the death of winter or the rejection of efforts justice and peace is not the time to look for ‘results’ or ‘outcomes’. We just live through the winter making the most of our conditions and believe that spring will come. We just resist violence and injustice and believe that goodness will overcome evil. If it happens or does not happen we can keep our hope alive by listening to our hearts and the silence within us. Keeping Hope alive, especially in the cold of winter is hard, but it is all we can do, as we try to bring the new life of spring to our planet

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