What is hope?
It is the pre-sentiment that imagination is more real and reality is less real than it looks.
It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress us is not the last word.
It is the suspicion that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe.
That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of actual; and in a miraculous and unexplained way life is opening up creative events which will open the way to freedom and resurrection- but the two- suffering and hope.
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair.
But, hope without suffering creates illusions, naïveté, and drunkenness.
So let us plant dates even though we who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we see.
That is the secret discipline.
It is the refusal to let our creative act be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience and a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined hope is what has given prophets, revolutionaries, and saints, the courage to die for the future they envisage.
They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hopes.
--Rubin Alves
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