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.
Today marks the three hundred and thirtieth birthday of the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (1694-1778).
Born into a bourgeois family during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” (r. 1643-1715), Voltaire suffered tragedy at a young age when his mother died. Never close with his father or brother, Voltaire exhibited a rebellious attitude toward authority from his youth. His brilliant mind was fostered in the care of the Society of Jesus, who introduced him to the joys of literature and theater. Despite his later criticisms against the Church, Voltaire, throughout his life, fondly recalled his dedicated Jesuit teachers.
Although he spent time as a civil servant in the French embassy to the Hague, Voltaire’s main love was writing—an endeavor where he excelled in various genres, including poetry, which led to his appointment as the royal court poet for King Louis XV. Widely recognized as one of the greatest French writers, and even hyperbolically referred to by ...
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XIII
The Proud Minister
One day there came into the Garden a man in torn clothes badly bruised and cut, who said to the Lover, “In the name of the Beloved I demand your help.”
So the Lover and the Disciple let him in and dressed his wounds and prepared the best of the vegetables from the Garden for him to eat. When his wounds had been dressed and he had eaten and rested the Lover asked him how he had fallen into this plight, to which the man replied, “I was Minister of the Beloved in a city near this place, where I preached His gospel and expounded His doctrine to the people. I pointed out to them how their sins had made them wholly hateful to the Beloved and how therefore they were utterly beyond the range of His love and He would condemn them to eternal torments, whereon some fell into despair and wept bitterly but many were angry. One day the magistrates called me before them and begged me to leave the city and preach elsewhere for they said I had made many people so angry and desperate that they feared there might be a riot and they might not be able to protect me but that I might suffer some injury. I, however, very zealous for the Beloved and believing that the magistrates only feared that their own sins might be proclaimed, preached the more vehemently, denounced the magistrates and made it abundantly clear that the whole wicked city was foredoomed to eternal punishment by the just provision of the Beloved. Whereon a mob, stirred up no doubt by the corrupt and venal magistrates, fell upon me with sticks and stones, nearly killing me and driving me out of the city in the state in which I came to you.”
“My friend,” said the Lover, “this was not a good deed of yours, for besides denying the unfathomable compassion of the Beloved, you have by your obstinacy caused these people to commit a grievous sin, and this cannot be pleasing to the Beloved, that through you who profess to be His minister the people should become worse. Surely you remember that He Himself said, ‘If they persecute you in one city flee to another.’”
Therefore the man was very angry, and cursing the Lover, said, “I see that I have had a very false report of you and I do not believe that you are a servant of the Beloved at all. When I came to you so injured for the Beloved’s sake you set before me only herbs and fruits although the garden is full of birds which you could have killed to make me a worthy meal. I shall proclaim everywhere that you are no true servant of the Beloved but a mere falterer who dares not suffer in the cause of the Beloved. Be sure that you are foreordained to eternal torments who suffer nothing here.”
For the man was so blinded by his own pride that he could not perceive the scars on the hands and feet and the brows of the Lover nor how the cloth beneath the armpits of his tunic was dyed with a red dye. So he went out of the Garden cursing and shouting.
But the Lover looked sad and said, “A man like this does much harm to the cause of the Beloved, for by thus speaking falsely about the Beloved he may bring men to fear Him but none to love Him, and by love alone can any man approach the Beloved.”
