[Faith] sees the raising of the tortured and crucified Son of Man as God’s great protest against death…
Jurgen Moltmann
[Faith] sees the raising of the tortured and crucified Son of Man as God’s great protest against death and against everyone who plays into death’s hands and threatens life…. Resistance is the protest of those who hope and hope is the festival of those who resist.
Jurgen Moltmann
Christian hope is resurrection hope, based on “God’s self-disclosure in history”.
Henri Nouwen
It is “an attitude in which we dare to connect ourselves to that which is radically beyond all human control”.
Karl Rahner
What do you hope for?
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What are the sources or reasons for your hope?
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Rahner suggests that hope is a way of life more than a belief system, a way of self-surrender, exchanging a living death (full of fear and anxiety) with a dying life (of learning to let go, “costing not less than everything”).
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The poet Edward Thomas writes of “the patterns which all things living are forever weaving”. This weaving of memory and imagination, intuition and choice, dreaming and action – just like our constantly changing bodies is a “pattern” that remains “us”.
It seems to me to be an intelligible and coherent hope that God will remember the pattern that is us and recreate it in a new environment of his choosing, by his great act of resurrection.
John Polkinghorne
What’s it like to reflect on a God who re-members you, who is constantly re-creating you?
We are called to a sustaining and imaginative vision,
which questions our conventional understanding of reality,
enlarges and shapes our horizons and helps us live out of Julian’s transforming and radical insight,
All shall be well.
Moltmann speaks of the “spark of certainty in the uncertainty of the struggle”. This “resurrection hope” – this way of reading reality is not easy or obvious. But the hope that is grounded in Jesus’ protest, and promise, is not serene or placid – it makes us restless and impatient. We can “no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it.”
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When are you tempted to despair?
What in our world at present seems “hopeless”?
What “next step” are you being called to take?
Gurrumul Yunupingu – Gathu Mawalu
Now don’t you go forgettin’ O the land that you were born
you got some place to go you got some place to belong
and when you’re feeling lonely put your feet down in the earth
reconnect with your soul, reconnect with the world
see the the roots of the tree are your family
and if they be the roots then the fruit is me
see the love that they give is the love that’s free
so I know that it can’t be wrong, I feel when we’re apart
my path in my present even though I’m away,
I come back again
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation click on the link below.
