Easter Hope

 Dear Neighbors:

I stumbled across this poem a while ago and it so beautifully captures a sentiment that I expressed in my Eastertide Memories post; that Easter is a time when we should remember the brave women and men through history who gave their all to defend their beliefs, their convictions, and their loved ones. It is they who, with courage and hope their hearts, dared to stand against those who tried to silence them. It is because of them that the world, broken though it is, is a better place. Their staunch hope for the future can serve as an inspiration for us today as we try to navigate a world that is challenging and even frightening at times. 

   One this Easter Sunday, dear friends, I wish you hope.

What is Hope?
by Rubem Alves 

What is hope?
It is a presentiment that imagination is more real
and reality less real than it looks.
It is a hunch
that the overwhelming brutality of facts
that oppress and repress is not the last word.
It is a suspicion
that reality is more complex
than realism wants us to believe
and that the frontiers of the possible
are not determined by the limits of the actual
and that in a miraculous and unexpected way
life is preparing the creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection....
The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.
Suffering without hope
produces resentment and despair,
hope without suffering
creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness....
Let us plant dates
even though those who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
This is the secret discipline.
It is a refusal to let the creative act
be dissolved in immediate sense experience
and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined love
is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints
the courage to die for the future they envisaged.
They make their own bodies
the seed of their highest hope.