Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Sunday Phamily, Refugees, Fascinating People, Dawn Patrol, Early Birds, Beautiful Bigots, Triggeratti, Conversants and Lurkers!

While Sundays are days to contemplate faith as I prepare for worship, one cannot do that without also pondering love and hope. We hear about love all the time in our culture, even if we may have different understandings of its meaning and impact. Many believers talk about faith, but it always seems as if hope gets the short end of the stick in discussions and thoughts about faith, hope and love. A few quotes for a hopeful Sunday, some babble and musings to follow I am sure. ☕🌞

Of all delusions perhaps none is so great as the thought that our past has ruined our present, that the evils we have done, the mistakes we have committed, have made all further Hope impossible. - Alban Goodier The School of Love and Other Essays

The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for. - George Washington Burnap The Sphere and Duties of Woman

At first we hope too much, later on, not enough. - Joseph Roux
Meditations of a Parish Priest

Hope - even if animals can't be said to hope in the future, many have some concept of future things and perhaps that expectations of future things is something like hope for them. Some of you may know the experiment on swimming rats, the wild ones lasted only a few minutes before drowning, but the domesticated rats that were used to human handling could last up to 60 hours. Terrible experiment - but it prompts one to ponder the meaning of hope or at least hopeful expectations. If rats can figure it out, you would think that more people would as well.

Sadly rats don't think about their past, don't feel trapped by terrible experiences or terrible choices they made, but people do. That feeling of being trapped can be so burdensome that many are tempted to think that death is a better than another day of living. I suspect most of us know someone who lost hope, perspective or meaning in life so that death was a better choice. I pray for all the dead, it is a Catholic thing, but I pray for those that ended their life most of all. I hope they find the Healer of Souls on the other side. The Healer's work is not just limited to the other side of the divide, there is healing to be found here, but sometimes the Disciples get in the way and often communities can forget the mission. No claims for perfection can be made, only a desire to strive for the Healer's mind and heart.

If there is no Healer, than one of the best things we can do is help each other find hope, meaning and perspective in life. If this life is it, and afterward just the big NOTHING, helping one another find hope today is a tremendous gift to give to another. I am not talking about sugar-coated turds of hope that ignore the evils of life and the ugliness of humanity, but actual hope that provides much need perspective in the great adventure of living. Hope that can provide healing of past wounds and a belief that tomorrow can be better. Good friends cannot erase the wounds of the past, sometimes they can barely understand them, but good friends can help one bear the burden, end the loneliness, shatter the prison cell. I hope you have a friend or friends like that, and that you might have the desire to be that for someone else. A little hope can inspire a rat to swim for days, how much more can it do for a person?

Well my friends, I am off to prepare to celebrate HOPE in all its wonder with some of the most flawed people that I love. No barn photos today but one of my favorite stories from the first Chicken Soup for the Soul. The first book was so good, and sadly like many things, subsequent books were less commendable.