When Smooth Words Fail Us. (Hope part 2)

"It requires moral courage to grieve, it requires religious courage to rejoice."

- Soren Kierkegaard

"There may be Herostratoi who set fire to temples in which their image is worshipped."

- Friedrich Nietzsche


On my previous post I talked about the elusiveness problem of trying to find hope. I suppose I am more concerned with the other odd quality of hope, its toughness.

One can feel the ground-swell of anger in this country. There are so many problems that they seem to overcome us. We get so angry at the caucophony that we scream just to know we have a voice. Then we know the horrible truth, we are just adding to the noise.

So often we want to fight the system in the face of the lies that swirl around us. We think to ourselves that we must fight evil with evil or else with our self-righteousness. Yet, both have in the past proven to be poor replacements. Hope will always be tied up in our faith. Faith is something that calls to us from the eternal now.

We have memories of how life should've been and dreams of how life will be, but in the chaos of current life, we cannot seem to see outside the box. It is no use making up stories about what lies outside the box, but it doesn't change the fact that we know there is something outside. If we didn't have faith that their was, our hope would scream to us that there was.

And yet this fighting is not to be one of sorrow. The truly sad are only those who are disappointed when life doesn't turn out the way they want. The hopeful are constantly in awe of the eternal now. There is a wonder in hope. We do not know the future, and there is no respectable belief system that says we should. However, we believe in beauties of the present. We make our peace not with the world, but with truth.

So, when the smooth words are over, and the false illusions of the human progress peddlers have drown into the background; we can be sure of that hope in the deeper meaning of life, the thought behind the words. It is the refuge that gives us the joy to face the uncertainties inside as well as outside our boxes.