“At first we hope too much; later on, not enough.” Joseph Roux
It occurs to me that what intervenes in between the “too much” and “not enough” is that I start to believe that I was wholly responsible for what brought me to where I am. That is, the hope gets squelched by the self-adulation.
Contemplating Valentine’s Day, and I ran across this:
“For one human being to love another human being; that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is mere preparation.” Rainer Maria Wilks.
I like that thought, that love is “the work for which all other work is mere preparation.” That the actualization of that thought has its difficulties does not make it any less true. Which of course takes me back to yesterday’s thought in 1 Cor. 13:13: “And now these three things remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest is love.” Maybe Paul was correct after all.
“And now these three things remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest is love.”
1 Cor. 13:13
In Paul’s book, at least here, hope is second best, and perhaps third. There is, however, an argument to be made that hope is shortchanged here. I offer these three bits of evidence in support of that proposition:
From Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man:
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest.
The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
From Lisel Mueller, the poem Hope:
“It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.”
And from my favorite movie character, Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption:
“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies”
One can never discount love’s power (see 1 Cor 13:1-8), and faith is pretty good, but here’s to hope, because sometimes (apologies to Paul) it feels like the only one of the “three things” that is present.
Photo taken in Portland some years back. Text from Stanley Kunitz, The Layers.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54897/the-layers
“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.” Leo Tolstoy”
I am, at times, the “slow-witted man,” at times the guy who “knows already.” Most often, I suspect, I am the guy who is somewhere in between – the guy reluctant to take in new things because, well, they are new and challenge the stability of this carefully constructed “house of thoughts” I have struggled to construct and keep together. And while I don’t know this is exactly the point Paul was trying to make, what comes to mind here is this: “Do not conform any longer to the patterns of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Romans 12:2
It is, after all, quite difficult to renew a closed mind.
This beautiful excerpt/thought that I’d like to calmly recite to each (and I mean each) of our Senators and Representatives while shaking each soundly comes from the poem, Blackbirds by Julie Caldwallader Staub:
“but instead we live and move and have our being
here, in this curving and soaring world
that is not our own
so when mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives
and when, even more rarely, we unite and move together
toward a common good,
we can think to ourselves:
ah, yes, that’s how it’s meant to.”
From time to time I need to and in fact do find something that allows me to call out that cynical, skeptical pessimist that seems to live in my mirror for the scoundrel that he is. Here’s today’s sweet medicine.
Sometimes – Sheenagh Pugh
Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost, green thrives, the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.
This photo taken a few years back near Austin resurfaced recently, as did the Barbara Brown Taylor quote from An Altar In the World.
“Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.” Luke 17:25
For all the efforts to hunt it down all the travels, the books read, the services gone to, the acts done and foregone, “the kingdom of God is within you.” Who woulda thought! In this I am reminded, yet again, of this from Barbara Brown Taylor:
“No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it. The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be who we are.”
One more time, for the slow learner in me – “The treasure [I] seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All [I] lack is the willingness to imagine that [I] already have everything [I] need. The only thing missing is [my consent to be who [I am]” because “the kingdom of God is within [me]”
In more modern day terms, Jesus is shaking his head as he points out that the cell phone I am looking for is in my hand. Duh!
As many times as it occurs, logic would dictate that I wouldn’t, on reading some collection of words strung on a page, on hearing something said or sung, feel as if the world stopped spinning, if only for an instant, while I took those words in and pondered them – or maybe it is in that instant that they take ME in and ponder me, search me? Regardless, those words today are from Lawrence Raab’s poem, My Life Before I Knew it:
“One day, one of those strangers would introduce herself to me, and then the life I’d never been able to foresee would begin, and everything before I became myself would appear necessary to the rest of the story.”
It occurs to me... 