24/12/2025
Rorate Masses: Day 9 of 9
Lesson 9: Mary as the Star of Hope - The Light after a Long Night
In Mary, the Church learns that hope is not a denial of darkness. The quiet certainty that Godโs light will rise after the longest night - that is hope. Advent has walked us patiently through exhaustion, fear, silence, poverty, waiting, suffering, and endurance.
Many people today are not struggling with outright unbelief. They are simply weary from the feeling that life goes on, from the feeling that nothing really improves.
Hope is really difficult. It is not the same as positive thinking. Positive thinking assumes that things will get better on their own. Christian hope holds on to God even when circumstances remain hard and difficult and unclear and unsurmountable.
In a world marked and even shaped by broken systems, repeated disappointments, and personal losses, such hope can easily be mistaken as foolishness. The world condemns that sense of hope in the spirit of faith as foolishness.
At the edge between darkness and light, the Church turns to Mary as the Star of Hope. Long before Easter morning, Mary already lives the kind of faith that keeps going even without clear answers. She carries Godโs promise quietly long before anyone else understands what is happening. She knows confusion and loss before any joy is explained or justified. She remains faithful at the cross even when hope seems to have failed. Her faith is not short-lived enthusiasm; it endures through the longest and darkest stretch of the night.
Sometimes, our faith is based on what we feel. There are times when our spiritual life becomes dry; we donโt have the same enthusiasm for Mass, for praying the Rosary. God allows the dryness in our spirituality so we could know how to endure in hope. It is precisely in these moments that God teaches us to hope when things become dry, when the night is darkest. That is how St. John of the Cross learned the dark night of the soul. The purpose of it is so the soul becomes schooled in hope, so that the soul endures through the longest and the darkest stretch of the night, hoping against hope, learning to adhere to Christ only and nothing else. It is in that moment of dryness, the moment that questions surface, that it is precisely when God is teaching us how to endure in hope. It is not easy. We have to endure it.
The image of Mary as ๐๐ญ๐๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ ๐๐๐ซ๐ข๐ฌ - ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐๐ต๐ข๐ณ ๐ฐ๐ง ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐๐ฆ๐ข - comes from the Ancient Church. Sailors do not look at the stars to escape the sea but to navigate through it. That is why the Blessed Mother is given that ancient title. There is a theological reason for calling her so. In the same way, Mary does not take us out of our lifeโs struggles. God does not take us out of our struggles. Mary helps us to keep our direction when everything feels confusing and uncertain. She helps us navigate through the stormy sea, stormy waters, stormy life.
Today, many people are trapped in cycles: political cycles, economic cycles, etc. These cycles keep our families precarious. There are also personal cycles of grief and disappointment. Hope weakens when time feels circular rather than purposeful. Christian hope, however, is not circular. It is ๐๐ฌ๐๐ก๐๐ญ๐จ๐ฅ๐จ๐ ๐ข๐๐๐ฅ. History is moving somewhere. It is not moving in circles. Even when progress seems slow and uneven, Godโs promises are not canceled by delay. History is moving somewhere toward the climax we call, in theology, ๐๐ฌ๐๐ก๐๐ญ๐จ๐ฅ๐จ๐ ๐ฒ.
Mary lives this kind of hope in a very real way. She keeps trusting God even when nothing around her seems to support that trust. In the Magnificat, she speaks of a future shaped by God, a world where the poor are raised and the hungry are cared for, even though at the moment her daily reality still looks the same. Yet she has that undefeated hope, that unbroken spirit, to proclaim: โYes, there is hope. I trust in God that in due course He will reverse everything, and He will fix everything even though the signs in the present could not yet be seen.โ Really radical, this song of the Blessed Mother. It is truly a song of hope.
Philosophically, hope is a virtue that resists both despair and illusion. Despair says that nothing will change. Illusion, on the other hand, pretends that everything is fine, which is worse. Hope stands between them. Virtus stat in medio. Virtue lies in the middle. That is why it is difficult to hope, because it is a tension between despair and illusion. That is why hope requires patience and courage. It demands memory: remembering what God has done, what God has already done.
When we are at the point of despair, how do we hope? Two things: ๐๐๐ฆ๐จ๐ซ๐ฒ and ๐๐ฆ๐๐ ๐ข๐ง๐๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง.
๐๐๐ฆ๐จ๐ซ๐ฒ: Remembering what God has done and continues to do in your life.
๐๐ฆ๐๐ ๐ข๐ง๐๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง: Trusting that what God has begun in the past, He will complete and make perfect in the future.
In the stories of the Resurrection, Mary is not always mentioned by name. But her faith has already prepared her for what is to come. The woman who learned to trust God quietly and patiently is able to receive joy without trying to control it or cling to it. The Resurrection does not pretend that the wounds never happened. It simply gives the wounds a new meaning. That is the grace of the Resurrection. That is the gift that Mary received. She suffered through it with Christ. That is why we say she is Co-Redemptrix, because she cooperated with the work of redemption. The Blessed Motherโs heart was pierced. The Resurrection did not remove the wound, did not change the past, but changed history. It simply gave new meaning to the wounds. Such is the struggle of the Blessed Mother. That is why she is the Mother of Hope, the Star of Hope, the Light of Hope, because she bears that new meaning in her life as a gift from the Risen Lord, from her Risen Son.
The Eucharist sustains this hope. Each Mass proclaims Christโs death until He comes again. We live between fulfillment and expectation until He comes again. Like Mary, we hold onto joy and waiting. That is why we are constantly in a perpetual state of Advent. It is not just a cycle of four weeks for us; it lasts as long as we live, because we wait until He comes again. The prayer of the Ancient Church captures this: ๐๐๐ซ๐๐ง๐๐ญ๐ก๐, meaning โ๐๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ฆ, ๐๐ฐ๐ณ๐ฅ ๐๐ฆ๐ด๐ถ๐ด.โ
To be Christian today is not to deny darkness but to refuse to surrender to it. Hope is not loud, but it is persistent. It is the courage to live as if Godโs promises are truer than the darkness of the night. May our Mother, Star of Hope, lift our eyes to the mystery of Christmas, where God chose to be born among us in quiet and among the lowly. May Mary, as the Star of Hope, steady our steps as we walk through the long nights of life, carrying that same humility and love that she had. May she shape us into a people who live in the life of the Christ Child, confident that His light will triumph over all the darkness.
