“The world will stop having value when we lose hope and nostalgia,” says Cardinal

The Archbishop of Santiago and Primado de Chile, Cardinal Fernando Chomali, reflected on nostalgia and hope, defining the first as “a certain absence that mobilizes us”, and the second as “the search for what saturates and is perceived as possible.”

In that context, he considered that “the world will cease to have value when we lose hope and nostalgia, which are the ones that mobilize and give strength to move forward every day, to get up even when everything seems difficult.”

He did it within the framework of a column entitled Nostalgiaprepared exclusively for ACI Press, which we transcribe below.

Nostalgia

By Cardinal Fernando Chomali

I am pleasantly attracted every morning to hundreds of men and women who get up very early in the morning to work, as well as hundreds of young people who do it to go to study. Many prepare with great sacrifice to access a more prosperous future. Despite the difficulties of life, people mobilize, work, study, marry, why? Reason is probably that at the bottom of each being – and I include myself – we feel nostalgia. A lot of nostalgia. The Spanish Language Dictionary defines it as “a penalty of being absent from the homeland or relatives or friends.” He also exposes it as “melancholic sadness originated by the memory of a loss,” longing. I would define it as the presence – in the most intimate of our being – of a certain absence that mobilizes us. It appears every day as a need, as a desire, as something we want to achieve.

It is typical of the human being to look further, aspire to be more, and to grow towards what we intuit: a fully realized and fully lived humanity. There are two reasons that drive us to it: the first, is that a part of us is understood that is, to be carried out; And the second, because we intuit that something better will come, whether through personal, community or part of God effort.

The human being is built daily. It is a natural search engine. The matter is to know what to look for and where to do it, because in the space of experimentation we can get or spoil. I have even known people who, acting in a reprobable way, did not to harm, but because deep down they were looking for a good.

That reality, far from impoverishing our life, is presented as a possibility of something. The search for what satiates and is perceived as possible is what I call hope. In other words, life is presented as a wait.

Hope mobilizes the world and without it life would not make sense. Saint Thomas postulates that the object of hope is an infinite good, that is, eternal happiness. It also says that without knowing what it consists of, we conceive it as a perfect good. In fact, who marries it with the hope that he will be happy; The same happens with whom a religious life project begins.

The background conclusion is a reason for joy and optimism: who believes that the world makes no sense or no chance of improving is wrong. As long as there is a person who mobilizes in search of that more or someone, it means that something good can happen. And I dare to say: it happens. The world will cease to have value when we lose hope and nostalgia, which are the ones that mobilize and give strength to move forward every day, to get up even when everything seems difficult.

Some years ago I visited an old woman who suffered from terminal cancer. When greeting her, she please asked me to close the window, because you could cold. What a wonder! I thought. Knowing that he was going to die, his concern to close the window to not cold – apparently irrational, given his terminal diagnosis – reveals the hope that manifests itself in his instinct of self -care and in his persistence of valuing every day. He has not resigned from life: he continues to find reasons to continue raising day by day. It is the ability to find meaning and value even in the most adverse circumstances. This fact has been one of the most notable episodes that I have lived and that continues to teach me. Similar situation I lived when in the Hospital of the Santiago prison I asked the inmates as they were, one, taking their gaze from the television where the news were not encouraging, looks at me and tells me “for God the thing is bad outside.”

One of the beauties of the Christian faith is that our hope has been fully filled. The most interesting thing is to recognize that this fullness did not come as an idea or as a human project, but with God himself. If every search for the finite is nothing other than an infinite search, so also, God’s irruption in history – by means of Jesus Christ – is nothing other than his response to that deep desire for something else who lives in us, to the desire for eternity.

As St. Augustine said: “Our heart is restless, until you rest in God.” Santa Teresa de Ávila pointed out something similar when I expressed: “I live without living in me, and so high life I hope, that I die because I do not die”, because only in God will find the fullness that only can intuit and ask on earth.

Faith in Jesus Christ acquires a sense of maximum relevance for our lives by reminding us that God is in the midst of us as fullness and hope of a better life, and that He has not abandoned us. Thus, our daily life, along with all the efforts that move us daily, are not in vain, but are full of meaning.

He shares his life with us becoming a man and living as such. That is the greatness of this mystery. God abages, becomes small, houses within a simple woman, in a humble place. It is born poor in a manger, so that our humility and destitution be filled by himself, fullness of being, as well as truth, path and life. Believing is then a new possibility of recovering lost hope and recognizing that in it fatalism, pessimism and unease have no place. God is with us and nothing and no one can separate us from his love.

The work of the Church finds here its full meaning and realization in the midst of history and the vicissitudes of life, focusing its work on remembering that God loves us and does not abandon us, guiding us along the path of love and peace. For those who believe in the promise offered by God, life is presented as a possibility of witnessing his love and testifying to Him. Neither faith nor the believing option are presented as a mere moral or as a set of commandments that must be fulfilled, but as the possibility of living in fullness, as the one who has found the answer to the questions that nest in the deepest correct.

In that context, it is understood how a well -lived life in Christ has the spiritual dimension and the social dimension indissolubly united. The Christian full of God’s love is called to live it by serving others.

August 10, 2025.