When the Times News recently solicited opinions from local clergy, this author spoke of the source of hope as Christ’s Resurrection, which declares God’s definitive victory over sin, suffering and death.

Justly you could ask, “Where is this ‘definitive victory’ of which you speak, when we continue to sin, suffer and die — and others around us do so as well?”

Faith upholds that victory as objective fact: That is, with an Amen (Hebrew, “it is so”) we declare it in the face of mishaps, sins, trials and tragedies. A “new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1) exists on a level inaccessible to the senses. “The Kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21), Jesus said, but St. Luke’s “among” also could mean “within” or “inside.”

Like the souls of living creatures, the Kingdom doesn’t show up on MRI or telescope. But that makes it no less real.

Faith upholds that Resurrection victory as subjective summons: It is a task to be realized in each “you” where the Kingdom of God can be found. This victory comes in glimpses. We swim in the ocean of change, sometimes unwelcome and unseemly. Of this change we can be agents as well as patients, doers and done-to-ers. And who can fathom the effects of one change upon another across the world and down the ages?

My message for the media last week spoke to “national tragedies or personal trials,” the riptides in our ocean.

Any number or sort of tragedy might come to mind for the reader. The Times News asked our take on whether “more people seem to gravitate to church during dark times.” Wistfully I replied that such times “may nudge people to church, but when the sting of them wears off, attendance wanes one soul at a time.”

It prompts the question of whether or why one should “go to church” at all. Life presents a panoply of options for one’s “disposable outcome.” Let the weekend warriors and the weekend worriers live as they please! But if church were just a “Get Out of Hell Free Card,” in the face of the hellishness on all sides, besides being rather ineffective, it would be rather silly.

In addition to hosting his iconic television show, Fred Rogers was a Presbyterian minister. One could say that his show was liturgical in nature, from the “hymns” to the “fixed” features to the variations whose appearance indicated special meaning.

Rogers famously said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ ”

Except for a paywall I would not surmount, I read the claim that Rogers’ maxim was “bad for adults.” Why might that be so? In the first place, his first audience, in general and in this aphorism, was children. But today’s adults are yesterday’s children, now imbued with a greater appreciation for Rogers’ project, which by my lights was a humanization of the Gospel, and not a completely secular one.

Adults are expected to be “the helpers” for children in traumatic circumstances; one indicator of maturity is the willingness to help, to think and act outside oneself. In this publication I said that the hope of Easter “blossoms in the communal and personal prayer, the just and merciful living that (the risen Christ) daily inspires in us.”

These are the modalities of helping, the only ones believers know. They keep us together in every sense.