Hope on the Advent Way

May this poem from the Brazilian theologian and educator Rubem Alves accompany you on the Advent Way:

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 the 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

must live from each other.

Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair.

But, hope without suffering creates illusions, naivete

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 will never 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 it 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.