Locus and Momentum

Newsletter for April 4, 2025

In my readings this week, I came across two related phrases that have stayed with me: one by a Jesuit psychologist who wrote of the “momentum of hope,” and another that spoke of a poet as having a “locus of hope” for a better world in his love for a particular region.

I like the way these two words, momentum and locus, play against each other in the description of hope. Momentum implies that “straining forward to what lies ahead” that we encounter in this Sunday’s Letter to the Philippians (3:13). A locus, in contrast, is a site, a center, a stillness, the place where multiple forces coincide to realize a particular action.

Hope requires both stillness and motion. The moment we discover its locus within ourselves, it immediately wants to move outward, to join that discovery to the collective momentum of others. Says Gabriel Marcel: “In the first place hope is only possible on the level of us, or we might say of the agape, and that it does not exist on the level of the solitary ego, self-hypnotized and concentrating exclusively on individual aims.”

In this world-historical moment of disruption and transition, hope can be seen as a kind of spiritual luxury, something unearned in the face of so much suffering. But it is not a luxury; it is the opening to which we must return again and again to conceive of a new possibility. I think of peering into the “Aventine Keyhole” last October in Rome, where a tiny view through a nondescript green door widened to include the dome of Saint Peter’s.

Marcel also says that “hope means first accepting the trial as an integral part of the self, but while so doing it considers it as destined to be absorbed and transmuted by the inner workings of a certain creative process.” Trials are what open us to hope, and Marcel’s “creative process” means asking what we are learning from them and being pliant enough to let them transform us. The verb “absorbed” has Christological overtones for me: Jesus as a sponge of the world’s evil, taking it upon himself, “transmuting” it so that he himself becomes the very object of our hope. It conjures the image of the wine-soaked sponge lifted from the foot of the cross—the bitterness of our own trials, our own “absorptions,” offered as a share in his suffering.

Exchanging thoughts on hope this week, a friend pointed out how Martin Luther King Jr. was close to hopelessness when he wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” And yet it was this very trial that caused a cataract of prophecy to burst forth, a surge of the “momentum of hope” that radiated outward:

I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth-century prophets left their little villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Finding the locus and momentum of his hope, Dr. King was able to speak with surety of a new horizon that becomes our prayer today:

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. . . . We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.

Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic