Pope Benedict in paragraph 31 of his Encyclical Spe Salvi said:

“Let us say once again: we need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain. The fact that it comes to us as a gift is actually part of hope. God is the foundation of hope: not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety.”

I found this paragraph very helpful because in it he talks about our lesser and greater hopes which are the ordinary hopes of life; like “I hope I’m liked” or “I hope things work out”, and how these really depend upon the greatest hope of all, the truly great hope, which is the hope that comes from knowing that there is God and knowing that God loves us and that the world is in His hands.

So I think there are different kinds of hope, but the one that really matters is the one that comes from faith in God. That is the hope we are talking about, Christian hope, hope in God.

Bishop Michael Putney