Without hope, our faith gives us only an acquaintance with God. Without love and hope, faith only knows Him as a stranger. For hope casts us into the arms of His mercy and of His providence. If we hope in Him, we will not only come to know that He is merciful but we will experience His mercy in our own lives.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, Sentences on Hope
Faith without hope
is a dry throat
swallowing hard
to push down the panic
“What if I am wrong?”
Unless it is
seething hatred
at a world
that has no good news.
Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, Sentences on Hope
What is this hope that dashes all hopes,
yet is the only sure remedy for hopelessness?
An anchor that holds us, drowns us,
baptizes us clean, clean,
cleaner than we ever wanted to be
(but always wanted to be)
in water that is life itself
if we will only drown ourselves in it,
suck it in knowing it is the death of us,
us as beings with the right to choose,
for our own selves,
what we hope for,
even if what we hope for
would be the death of us.
We are…God knows, a people who walk in darkness. There seems little need to explain.
If darkness is meant to suggest a world where nobody can see very well — either themselves, or each other, or where they are heading, or even where they are standing at the moment; if darkness is meant to convey a sense of uncertainty, of being lost, of being afraid; if darkness suggests conflict, conflict between races, between nations, between individuals all pretty much out for themselves when you come right down to it; then we live in a world that knows much about darkness.
Darkness is what our newspapers are about. Darkness is what most of our best contemporary literature is about.
Darkness fills the skies over our own cities no less than over the cities of our enemies.
And in our single lives, we know much about darkness too. If we are people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths.
Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, “Come and See”
I
This description of darkness sounds all too familiar to me.
I have an impulse to turn away from it, to not dwell on it lest it engulf me (as it has so many times).
I have a reluctance to admit how easily it can engulf me and for how long.
To be honest, I fear the depression it can bring on and how helpless I can feel in the throes of it.
I don’t want to risk feeling that dark, that hopeless, again.
II
God is Light.
Light doesn’t turn away from darkness.
It pierces it and exposes everything in it.
It looks into every corner to find what might be lost, to nourish what might be starving, to bring order where there is disorder, to give sight where there is blindness.
The darkness does not taint it, does not overcome it.
Light feels anguish at what it finds in the dark; anguish that breaks the heart and sweats blood.
Anguish is Love encountering the beloved in darkness; Light suffers anguish because the beloved is worth it.
Light, because of its anguish, brings warmth and hope and joy to the one engulfed in darkness.
III
God in me, with me, is that Light.
God in us, with us – Immanuel! – is that Light, doing even greater things through us, the many, who are following Him, the One.
The land once covered in darkness has seen a great light.
The land now covered in darkness can see a great light – if I, if we, follow the One in not turning away from it.
Supernatural hope is the virtue that strips us of all things in order to give us possession of all things.
— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, Sentences on Hope
We’ve had a theme of sorts running for a good bit of this year on Thomas Merton’s reflections on what love is and isn’t. We’ll be switching now to the topic of hope. As we’ll see, hope may not be anything like we’d expect it to be, today’s quote being a jarring example. Merton will push us to examine our hearts in ways that maybe we haven’t before:
What do we hope for?
What do we hope in?
What does this mean for our soul?
What does hope that is good for us look like, feel like?
What does it accomplish in us and in God’s kingdom?
Do we have reason to hope for this kind of hope?
I sincerely hope this series is something you can connect with, something that speaks to you where you are and challenges you and gives you maybe a hope that’s been missing for awhile or maybe that you can’t remember ever having before.
Grace and peace…and hope…to you…
dw
p.s. Here’s a page that lists all posts on the topic of Hope: Pages on hope
p.p.s. Here’s a listing of some past posts on the topic of Love:
becoming flame 