The silence as broken at last by the bell signifying the end of morning activity. Turning to the old woman, I asked, "What are you looking at?" I immediately flushed. Prying into the lives of the residents was strictly forbidden. Perhaps she had not heard. But she had. S1ow1y she turned toward me, and I could see her face for the first time. It was radiant. In a voice filled with joy she said, "Why, child, I am looking at the Light."
Our human compassion binds us the one to the other
– not in pity or
patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common
suffering into hope for the future.
~ Nelson Mandela in a Message at Healing & Reconciliation Service, December, 2000
In the practice of conscious love you begin to
discover...a hope that is related not to outcome
but to a wellspring... a source of strength that
wells up from deep within you independent of all
outcomes... It is a hope that can never be taken
away from you because it is love itself working in
you, conferring the strength to stay present...
~ Cynthia Bourgeault, in LOVE IS STRONGER THAN DEATH
So in the end I am left only with hope.
I hope the nights are transformative.
I hope every dawn brings deeper love,
for each of us individually and for
the world as a whole. I hope that
John of the Cross was right when
he said the intellect is transformed
into faith, and the will into love
and the memory into – hope.
It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision...This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, know that they hold future promise...We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities...We are prophets of a future not our own.
~ John Cardinal Dearden, homily written by Fr. Ken Untener
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act...Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable.
...If we can stay in touch with ourselves, if
we can find the connection to our deeper
selves, we can find this deeper level of
hope that truly should be called
imagination...in the depths of each person
there is a greater self and a core
imagination that is truly the source of
one's life.
~ Michael Meade in LIVING MYTH podcast, Episode 167, "The Second Level of Hope"
Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and
desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?...if you don't feel despair, in
times like these, you are not fully alive. But there has to be something beyond despair,
too; or rather, something that accompanies it, like a companion on the road....I am
going to pick up [my scythe] and go and find some grass to mow. I am going to cut
great swaths of it...I am going to walk ahead, following the ground... I am going to
breathe the still-clean air and listen to the still-singing birds and reflect on the fact that
the earth is older and harder than the machine that is eating it—that it is indeed more
resilient than fragile—and that change comes quickly when it comes, and that
knowledge is not the same as wisdom.
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope within or we don't; it is a
dimension of the soul not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the
world or estimate of the situation. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the
heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored
somewhere beyond its horizons.
