Dominican Preaching through Word and Image
Today’s Easter poem from Education for Justice is by the Brazilian Theologian Rubem Alves.
What Is Hope?
What is hope?It is a presentiment that imagination is more realand reality less real than it looks.It is a hunchthat the overwhelming brutality of factsthat oppress and repress is not the last word.It is a suspicionthat reality is more complexthan realism wants us to believeand that the frontiers of the possibleare not determined by the limits of the actualand that in a miraculous and unexpected waylife is preparing the creative eventswhich will open the way to freedom and resurrection….The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.Suffering without hopeproduces resentment and despair,hope without sufferingcreates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness….Let us plant dateseven 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 actbe dissolved in immediate sense experienceand a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren.Such disciplined loveis what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saintsthe courage to die for the future they envisaged.They make their own bodies
the seed of their highest hope.
Source:Hijos de Maoana (Tomorrow’s Children), Rubem Alves,
Salamanca, Spain: Ediciones Sigueme, 1976.
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