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PDF versionBegin the new year with new dose of hope
Jan. 05, 2010
Physicians tell us that the human body can survive four to six weeks without food, up to three days without water and for about 10 minutes without oxygen.
How long can a human being survive without hope? Our own experience suggests that without hope the human spirit begins to die almost immediately. Even our bodies show signs of sagging when our horizons show no future or purpose.
Hope is about defining loss or resistance as challenge, not defeat. Hope says that if we aren’t getting what we prayed for it is because we are being directed to something better. A hopeful person keeps going forward despite resistance or setbacks, believing in St. Paul’s words that even suffering can serve to enlarge us, because “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5).
This kind of hope, of course, is more than just optimism. Ultimate hope is grounded in God’s promise that, at the end of day, truth and love will triumph over every obstacle, even death. Hope is among the theological virtues because, like faith and love, it holds us in relationship with God, the source and guarantor of our deep innate trust in the goodness of human life, cast into mystery yet toward a destiny beyond itself.
Hope is not a feel-good emotion and does not depend on evidence. In fact, it thrives best in adversity, like the light that is most visible in our darkest hour. It does require endurance and a commitment to the long haul, a capacity to interpret the silence. Hope is more than waiting out bad times. It is an active virtue that inspires us to be the future we want, to choose and work toward the changes we envision. Hope prompts us to live as though our prayers were already being answered.
Who needs hope on this threshold of a new year and new decade? We all do, but especially all those who fear that the larger dream of a more open, shared church promised by the spirit of the Second Vatican Council is being deferred to protect official privilege.
Women need hope that, just as birth cannot be postponed, the Holy Spirit will complete the promised renewal in amazing ways, bringing new life to our faith communities.
Peacemakers need hope that despite a world set on edge toward endless violence, new ideas and strategies will rise out of the exhaustion and failure of the politics and economics of war.
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Young people need hope that the world being handed on to them will not have been wasted by the selfishness and indecision of their parents and elders.
The world’s have-nots need hope that, if not out of love then because of enlightened self-interest, governments and societies will make room at the table for everyone and foster development as the only path to stability and security for all.
We leave behind the old year wondering if it is safe to exhale. Let us begin the new with a deep, fresh breath of hope.
During a low period in my
During a low period in my life I came upon a bible verse that renewed my hope in believing in a God of hope. Romans 15:13 said it all for me.It did give me the joy and peace that I needed. May you find that same peace.
The evolution of religious
The evolution of religious consciousness: If the source of hope is identifiable, it might be expected to originate in religious consciousness. But where is religious consciousness? In light of cultural history we shouldn’t be surprised that religions fight evolution. Why? because there is no profit in evolution except for universal uplift, enlightenment and wellbeing. Religion from-the-ground-up valuates moral sense that treasures all life in the holistic ecology of nature. Evolution embraces universal kinship and eschews dominion theology’s arrogation of kingship. Divinely ordained codependency in the Sacrament of Natural Order (Naturalis Sacramentum Ordinis) is the hierarchy of evolution.
Dominion theology and patriarchal culture weave a fabric of distrust and overreach for purposes of advantage and control, not the symbiotic way of nature open to evolution and growth of wisdom, age and grace. In these times of cultural unsettling, rooted in the misdirection of fideistic, cultic religion, humankind searches for a new compass, hope’s attraction that turns universal consciousness in true North direction. Too much capital, spiritual and ecological, is wasted on for-profit schemes and self-interest ideologies.
Authentic understanding (religious/ secular) is enriched and enlightened in the “theology of evolution”—the “analysis” (word) and “synthesis” (work) called for by Vatican II [Const. IV, Gaudium et spes, Intro, #5] Theology is about understanding God, the place of God in the evolution of life, in the evolution of the cosmos. Divine Presence operates in the continuity of kinship, in all relationships of energy/ matter, of spirituality/ secularity.
It’s time to reset the conscious compass to the magnetism of divine attraction and word, the universal language of common wellbeing—belonging not just to academic elitists and church institutions but to everyman, every woman and child, everywhere, every age, every walk of life. Such a compass must be universally intelligible and accessible in a language all understand, based on universal experience. By natural selection, the energy of symbiosis works for conscious uplift to ever new levels of insight in purposeful objectives of Intentional Eucharist, as taught and lived by Jesus, the Cosmic Christ.
Where is God? Before us, beside us, in us—we live in face-to-face contact with God in the Naturalis Sacramentum Ordinis. Theology is about discerning Divine Presence in natural word/ work. Every one of us is caught up uniquely and essentially in the task of speaking God’s Word, doing God’s Work.
Universal access to theology’s natural short-course is owned by all in the here-and-now. The laity, churches, need to accommodate each other in God’s universal word/ work. All own equally the theology of evolution. Authentic religion is about pursuit of God’s Truth. All religions contain strands of natural/ divine truth, and evolution weaves these strands into a universal crazy quilt colorful enough to cover everyone. All spirituality is earth-connected from-the-bottom-up. Vertical uplift and horizontal sense converge at the intersection of vertical consciousness and horizontal sensibility. All life is primed for growth in spiritual ascendancy and communal wellbeing.
A self-study short-course on the “Theology of Evolution” is accessible at no cost, at no risk, except that it may open your consciousness to "liberation theology", an enriched, holistic sense of Natural Sacrament, communal necessity and global openness. www.secondenlightenment.org, and www.evolution101.org
Interesting. This is
Interesting. This is something that I can modify to use during our brainstorming sessions for story development.
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