What does it really mean to be a pilgrim of hope? We all know what hope is, more or less. The Gospels call Christians to hope countless times, and Pope Francis, planning ahead, invited Catholics to “gain new strength and certainty” by becoming pilgrims of hope in the Jubilee Year of 2025, which concludes on Jan. 6, 2026. Some of my Catholic friends made a pilgrimage to Rome, and some took advantage of the chance to visit pilgrimage sites here in the United States.
But some of them made an involuntary pilgrimage, walking not through Holy Doors but through terrible trials of grief and loss—and in the process, they gained a more profound understanding of the theological virtue of hope. It is, they learned, more than optimism, more than desire, and more, even, than a belief that everything will work out someday in heaven. Hope is a force that orders their lives on earth as they walk toward heaven.
Pope Leo recently said, “We know that, even in the darkness of trial, God’s love sustains us and ripens the fruit of eternal life in us.” Here are three stories of Catholics who did find sustenance from God in times that felt hopeless.
Danielle McLellan-Bujnak knows about that darkness. She saw her home, her cozy neighborhood and her entire town vaporized in the Palisades fire at the beginning of this year. It burned at 2,000 degrees for 20 hours. The soil was poisoned, and the ocean went black.
“The whole town is gone. The goneness of it is mind-blowing. I still can’t wrap my head around it, how thoroughly gone everything is. Fire is very final,” she said.
Since January, she has lived in seven different temporary homes, and her life has changed forever. The fire wasn’t her first major trauma, though.
“I had a very uprooted family life. There was so much brokenness in my family,” Ms. McLellan-Bujnak said.
After several moves, she finally settled in as an adult with her father and sister in Ojai, Calif., thinking she had found some peace at last. Then her father died suddenly, and because his legal affairs were not in order, she found herself pushed out of their shared home and left without anything. She eventually moved to Pacific Palisades, and spent the next 10 years trying to heal and sort out rare happy memories from a complex history of trauma and loss.
“Finding ways to connect to the loving parts of those broken stories, trying to salvage the loving memories from a broken childhood, is really hard and really important,” she said.
So when she returned again and again to sift through the ashes of the Palisades, she was looking for more than mementos. She was looking for physical signs of spiritual truths: evidence of love.
“I needed to see something the fire could not take,” she said.
Five months after the inferno, she found it. Under a layer of ash, between blackened chimneys and puddles of glass, she uncovered a poignant sign of hope in the form of a little figure of Jesus himself. It was a charred bit of a statue from Europe, with the arm of his mother still attached.
“It was such a solace to find that in the ashes. It was almost like a reminder my spiritual life still exists,” she said.
Courtesy of Danielle McLellan-Bujnak.
Then she shifted a fragment of stucco and exposed another treasure: her family jewelry, singed but unmistakable. She believes St. Anthony set these things aside for her, knowing how deeply she longed for them.
A lifelong Catholic, Ms. McLellan-Bujnak believes this entire world is transient—that all of us are pilgrims passing through a fleeting life, and the material things we acquire will not last. She knows that anything necessary for our happiness will be restored to us in heaven, she said.
But she is not in heaven now. She is in the world where God placed her, and she believes profoundly in the value of tangible connections.
“We’re accustomed to having these physical connections with our loved ones. I don’t think that’s wrong. That’s why we have the Eucharist. God comes in a physical form because that’s what we need, to connect with love,” she said. So she received these small, material signs of hope with profound gratitude.
Ms. McLellan-Bujnak is the author of two books (one under a pen name) and teaches early childhood education to community college and dual-enrolled high school students. Her work reflects a lifelong fascination with how the lived reality of the body connects us to the undeniable truth of God’s love.
In the first cataclysmic week after the fire, she threw herself into preserving those connections. Ms. McLellan-Bujnak is also an overnight newborn nanny and postpartum doula, and after the fire, she maxed out her schedule, glad for the exhaustion that helped her sleep and grateful for the grounding work of welcoming new life in a time of profound destabilization. Even as her own life had been reduced to ash, she found strength in shepherding others through their most vulnerable times.
“Babies reach a very hard part of my heart and soul,” she said. “It goes deeper than any fire or any loss.”
The work of being a fire survivor—collecting documents, recalling and reporting every purchase, waiting on hold for hours—was a full-time job in itself, but she soon began to realize she had yet another job before her: advocacy in the face of injustice.
As devastating as the fire was, even worse was feeling betrayed by systems she thought would protect her. She and other survivors believe the complete destruction of their town could have been avoided, and they’re fighting hard for accountability and reform. Ms. McLellan-Bujnak fends off bitterness by channeling her righteous anger into action.
“I channel it toward advocacy for myself, for others in my community and for others in future communities that could ever be influenced,” she said.
Those survivors are not just banding together for legal purposes. They support each other emotionally, encouraging and commiserating in a way that only other fire survivors can. Ms. McLellan-Bujnak said her adopted parish, St. Monica, also offered powerful healing by welcoming survivors specifically and repeatedly, and by disbursing $1.5 million from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
“They said they would help us, and they did,” Ms. McLellan-Bujnak said. “They really live the love of God.”
Like the jewelry she recovered from the ash, these relationships, old and new, are not just a sentimental comfort for Ms. McLellan-Bujnak. They express something fundamental about how she understands existence.
She teaches her students that there is never just a baby; there’s a baby and someone. We are made to live in relationship, and it is in serving and nourishing relationships that we find meaning and hope. Now, as she throws herself into nurturing relationships with her fellow survivors, with her students, with clients and with her own past, she is living out the still deeper relationship she has with Jesus, which she knows is unshakeable.
“That is a really important part of my hope: truly believing that, no matter what happens with me, or what I choose or don’t choose, there is a love that never will change or go away, and will always be there with open arms for me. That is a core component of my existence,” she said. It will “survive the fire” even when nothing else does.
Healing is a long road. She still weeps when she speaks of what she lost, and she still trembles when too many firetrucks pass by. But she has already achieved the goal of remaining steadfastly in relationship, with others and with God. This is her mission, and through it she remains rooted in hope.
The Hallmark of Hope
Leticia Adams thought she understood hope nine years ago. Her family lived in what was billed as “the safest suburb in America.” After decades of struggle with generational abuse, poverty and addiction, she had turned her life around, joined the Catholic Church and was living her dream with her family, her two dogs, a steady job and faith in the Lord.
Then her son hanged himself in her garage. That day was Leticia Adams’s first lesson in true hope.
“Where it really began with me was 30 minutes after finding Anthony. His body was still in the garage and the ambulance was just getting there, and our priest was right behind them,” she said.
It was the worst day of her life. It was also the day she felt God’s presence, profoundly and unmistakably.
“It wasn’t just the people around me. It was God. It was the person standing beside you, not saying floofy sh-t, not telling you everything happens for a reason. But just a strong presence,” she said.
In that presence, Ms. Adams made the deliberate choice to live.
“It was a move I had to make in order to take care of [Anthony’s] children. It was a move I had to make so as not to jump into his grave. It was either hope or follow in his footsteps. There was no other option,” she said.
She turned, deliberately, because the only alternative was death.
This turn is what Pope Francis identifies as the hallmark of hope. In a Jubilee catechesis, he said:
In tears, Mary looks first inside the tomb, then she turns around: the Risen one is not on the side of death, but on the side of life.… Then, when she hears her name spoken, the Gospel says that again Mary turns around.… She can dry her tears, because she has heard her own name: only the Master pronounces it in this way.
Ms. Adams identifies strongly with Mary Magdalene, whom she calls “a hot freaking mess” of a saint, and she loves how Anne Catherine Emmerich described a vision of Mary Magdalene wailing and throwing stones at the soldier who arrested Jesus, while the Blessed Mother steps in to calm her down. That’s the kind of energy Ms. Adams can relate to.
She does recognize the Master’s voice in small things that speak promises of something larger. She feels strongly that God wants to be known and knows her, and that he sends her signs. This has always been true, but first she had to disentangle it from something akin to the prosperity gospel, she said.
If you had asked her as a new convert to Catholicism how she knows God loves her, she would have pointed to money—not a fortune, but enough to feed her kids or get to the doctor without scrounging. When she first gained financial stability right around the time of her conversion, it felt like evidence she had earned God’s approval.
“When you’re a convert, you’re just so freaking happy and excited, and it’s like a puzzle that all fits,” she said. It can become easy to think that if you pray enough rosaries and say enough novenas, good things will happen to you. Ms. Adams got her house, her family, her bougie little pergola with string lights in the backyard.
But when her son died, it all turned to ash. She had to start from scratch.
She understood, suddenly and acutely, that we cannot earn God’s love. What, then, was she supposed to do with her life?
“I honestly started walking toward Anthony,” she said.
She said that she wasn’t entirely sure God was real, but she knew the only way she would ever see her son again was if he was in God’s hands. The hope of seeing Anthony again made her walk forward, one step at a time.
“Then, slowly but surely, I came into this place of seeing those little things God was doing for me,” she said. Not favors she had earned, but hints, signs of something more to come.
She thinks of her mustang, Blue, one of the many animals she keeps on the property she and her husband bought after they sold their dream house and moved to rural Texas.
“My dumb ass who knows nothing about horses bought one off the internet. When he got here, he looked like a mule, he was so raggedy. People thought I was an idiot for buying him,” she said. But against all odds, he blossomed into something huge and majestic.
Anthony’s first car was a blue Mustang, and this horse was born on Anthony’s birthday.
“I’m holding onto tangible things to know the more unseen, unknown things,” she said.
She believes it is a small sign from God that he wants to be in her life.
“Sometimes these moments kind of go away. It fizzles out, and you’re like, ‘Yeah, sure. Your kid’s still dead,’” she said.
In those moments, she’s left holding onto the people she loves, drawing strength from their own faith in God. She knows it is God who keeps her alive, moment to moment, even when she doesn’t feel his presence.
She also thinks of how God could have miraculously intervened to keep her son alive.
“But that’s one of those things that has to work out the way it works out. I made my choices, Anthony made his choices. [God] wants his children to live, but he gives us our choices,” she said.
She does not pretend to understand God’s hidden will.
“The only way it ends besides in despair and grief is to put it in God’s hands,” she said.
That realization has been a relief. She has given up “trying to orchestrate all these holy things” in her life, and this has freed her in unexpected ways. Before she surrendered to God, she was the worst version of herself, she said, condemning people based on throwaway Facebook comments or a Trump lawn sign.
Now, even when she disagrees with someone vehemently, she sees that God’s in conversation with them. He wants everyone to live.
Ms. Adams just lives her life, getting up at dawn to do her chores and commute to her job helping uninsured people get access to H.I.V. medication. She feeds her goats, cleans her house, writes her essays and waits for the Lord to fulfill his promises. She does not know how it will come about, but she is leaving that up to him.
The Freedom of Surrender
Father Sean Smith also knows about the lessons of death, and about the freedom of surrendering to God.
Father Smith is the pastor of four parishes in rural eastern Iowa. He is also a widower and a bereaved father. While he does not recommend death as a teaching method, he cannot deny what his grief has done for him, and for his relationship with God.
“Death is pretty clarifying,” he said.
Father Smith believes God used loss to help him order life. And in recognizing how weak he really was, and how strong God really is, Father Smith came to a more profound understanding of hope.
When he was young, Father Smith knew very little of his faith. He feels the catechesis of his youth was vague and sentimental, and he craved more, but it was not until he attended a Defending the Faith Conference at the Franciscan University of Steubenville that he heard clearly how substantial the faith is—and how sacrificial is the love that Jesus offers.
“[The faith] asked something of me,” he said. “That’s one of the things that actually attracts people. Our faith asks something of us.”
He was newly married to his wife, Sara, establishing his career as a software engineer and starting a family, and life was busy and full. So when the family attended a charismatic conference and the bishop made a kind of altar call for vocations, they were dumbfounded to see Sean get up out of his seat and make his way to the front. What is a deacon? He wasn’t even sure, but he felt a pressing urge to find out.
He found out that, at 27, he was too young. So he bided his time. He acquired a house, a motorcycle, hobbies and a full set of responsibilities as husband and father, and when he reached the required age of 35, he applied to the diaconate.
Again, they turned him down. He just had too much else on his plate, they said. He was crushed, because the call felt so strong.
Then, 18 months later, someone at the diocese had a change of heart, and they asked him to apply. He and Sara had been talking and praying about it for five years. But they now had three little kids, two with special needs, and they were 1,000 miles away from family. Deacon’s wives have massive obligations. Sara, sensibly, said, “No.”
Sean is a large, bluff, blunt man, and Sara fully expected him to respond with anger and arguments. Instead, he paused, breathed and gently said he didn’t know how it would work. But God was simply asking them to take the next step. If it was what God wanted, it would work. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t.
She began to cry. Sean didn’t sound like Sean to her; he sounded like God. So she said yes.
It did work out. He was ordained a deacon in 2003—and rather than the stern and theologically heavy treatises he expected to deliver, he found himself preaching sermons that were substantial but heartfelt. He did not want to just transmit information; he wanted God’s words to penetrate the heart. One thing he preaches over and over again: The right order of things is God, then others, then ourselves. He preached it, and he had to learn it.
Sean and Sara were married for 27 years, and then she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Sean says the last six months of her life were the best part of their marriage.
“It was intimate in the best sense of the word. We didn’t hide things from each other,” he said. He was there when she took off her bandages and saw her fresh mastectomy wounds for the first time. He kept her clean; he packed her wounds. They talked to each other openly, holding back nothing.
“I don’t know that I ever loved her more,” he said.
At the very end, she was in her hospice bed, crying. She said to her husband, “What if Jesus doesn’t want me?”
He asked her if she wanted Jesus. She said she did. He told her, “Then, sister, you’re there.”
If you want Jesus, then you will have Jesus: He gave her this hope as a comforting husband, and also as a deacon secure in his theology.
“That’s the foundation of my life. If I can’t say that, I can’t say anything,” he said.
Hope, he now believes, comes in recognizing that God is God, and in recognizing our own utter lack of power.
“It’s very freeing,” he said.
Even theologically correct arguments can give us the illusion we’re in control and must be set aside. At some point, you have to imitate Job and place your own hand over your mouth.
“Hope is a great stripping away,” he said. “What I hope for is to see the face of God, and whatever else I thought I needed, I don’t really need.”
He preached at Sara’s funeral and then took stock of his life. At age 51, his house was paid off, his career was lucrative, his children were grown, and he could do whatever he wanted. But the one thing he wanted, he couldn’t have.
He missed Sara desperately, and he also missed the vocation of being her husband. He started to push to become a priest. He was forced to take it more slowly than he wanted (and he admits that he was after instant healing and distraction from his empty home). But in 2020, in a cathedral emptied by Covid, he was ordained a priest.
Nine months later, his son, who had poorly controlled diabetes, died. Then his mother nearly died, and now she is in hospice. But God asked more of him, more stripping away.
Last year, in the fourth year of his priesthood, he went on a silent retreat. The spiritual director, a 75-year-old consecrated widow, said to him: “You need to love Jesus as much as you love Sara.”
The shaft went deep. But he knew she was right.
He went home and folded up the quilt on his bed. It had been pieced together from Sara’s old shirts, and he had slept under it every single night of his priesthood. Now he put it away, because it was time to belong to God first.
He still prays for Sara every day, but he doesn’t talk to her constantly anymore.
“I’m still just as much crazy about her, but I’m not crazy over her,” he said.
Today, as a priest, he still preaches, ministers, comforts his flock—and also laughs, cusses and rides his motorcycle when he can. But what he hopes for most of all is to become the kind of person who can just rest in Jesus. He knows a man who goes to adoration for hours every week, just being silent before the Lord, and he is a little envious.
“I wish I had that depth to be able to just rest in God that way. I’m looking forward to that. I’m looking forward to resting in God,” he said.
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