Lying on my back under the starlit sky, I gave myself up completely to the lovely sounds of Irish music. It was a magical sound, I said, beating with my fingers happily and humming the tunes. The music stopped for a few minutes while the musicians rested. As I lay motionless in the silence of the night, I listened to the quiet voice of my heart. "Music is free," it said. "Music belongs to everyone. You only have to listen." Some knowledge is full of bliss.
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
