Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb.
~ from A Tree Full of Angels, Macrina Wiederkehr, O.S.B
Beneath yet another blanket of gently falling snow, I find myself pondering the warming glow of hope. Endless gray days, dying yearling deer, and seemingly lifeless forest encroach upon my heart. I know that spring will come, with its joyful melodies and vibrant hues and teeming life. Likewise that winter holds its own still beauty, paring down the landscape so we can see its silhouettes more clearly. Yet at times our world seems too far cast in winter's thrall to be able to remember and envision its renewal. How does one hold on to hope amid the chill of our inhumanities and senseless overpowering of the earth? From whence does hope come? How can we cradle our hands around it to protect it from the snuffing winds and cynical voices? To choose hope is to tap into the memory of faithfulness and to wait with gratitude for seeds of possibility hidden beneath the snow.
Hope is the foundation or beginning step of faith and an essential expression of love. It provides the formless general aspiration for that which is higher and better, and then faith fills out the picture with the specific shape that a better self or a better world would take. As the expression of love, it sends that image out to the loved one and to the universe. By hoping you are taking an active part in the process by which the present creates the future.
Hope is a human act of commitment to and investment in the future. Hope is an act of human courage that refuses to cherish the present too much or be reduced to despair by present circumstance. Hope is the capacity to relinquish the present for the sake of what is imagined to be a reachable future...
Sureness about God's large resolve...is a summons...Now is the time for yielding justice, for foolish forgiveness, for outrageous generosity, for elaborate hospitality. None of these acts can come from fear, anxiety, or despair. But they are all acts that evoke new futures that the fearful think are impossible. Hope in the end is a contradiction of the dominant version of reality...it is at the root of human well-being, for ourselves as for all our would-be neighbors.
~ Walter Brueggemann in Sojourners Magazine, Dec 2013
I see in [these] folks the human capacity for change, for redemption, for forgiveness. I believe that every one of us, made in God's image as we are, has that capacity. Our challenge is to learn to call it forth in each person. Our hope is that we will succeed.
~ Shelley Douglass in Sojourners Magazine, Dec 2013
How shall the mighty river
reach the tiny seed?
See it rise silently
to the sun's yearning,
sail from a winter's cloud
flake after silent flake
piling up layer upon layer
until the thaw of spring
to meet the seedling's need.
Make tender, Lord, my heart:
release through gentleness
Thine own tremendous power
hid in the snowflake's art.
