What has always struck me about the way in which the desert dwellers receive friends is their ability to put all activity to one side. You, the guest, become the focal point, and they range themselves round you in a circle. If the owner of the tent has planned to go on a journey, he puts it off: now he must concern himself with you. If the wife was thinking of doing the laundry, she piles it all up on one side: now she must see about serving you. The guest is sacred: everything else is less important.
For the time being you are the one who matters: time is less important. And if the friend, who has left one corner of the world in order to search you out and spend a bit of time with you, has these rights, surely God has the same right, the one who came from heaven itself to find you; who took flesh in order to become visible for you; who became the Eucharist in order to gain entrance to your tent and stay there as long as possible.
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
