Signs of the Times • 8.19.16 • No. 84
Special issue
Hope quotes
Introduction
I wrote only one poem from my work as a stonemason, after several days of cutting capstone with hammer and chisel to adorn pillared porch columns. That experience remains a vivid image for what it means to live in hope.
“The implausible has been promised. But not apart / from covenant terms of disciplined patience, / of sweaty, achy perseverance in pounding / away—strike after metered strike, with pauses to / relieve parched and breathless throat—at / apparently-impenetrable prospects.” (“Blistering Hope”)
“Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love,” wrote Thomas Merton. (I would have preferred it if he had used “self-obsession”—which I’m pretty sure is what he meant—instead of "self-love.") Numerous others, including the editors of The Midland [Texas] Daily News, have written about despair as a form of luxury:
“For people in need of clean drinking water, arable land to till, or homes free of bombs and bullets, every day presents unsurmountable challenges. For these, despair is a luxury they cannot afford, because every waking moment must be spent surviving and caring for loved ones.”
This special issue of “Signs of the Times” is devoted to the virtue of persevering hope (which has nothing to do with optimism) at the heart of the liturgical season of Ordinary Time.
It seems especially timely, given the butt-kicking news from every direction, near and far.
There’s nothing ordinary about it, of course. To be reared in hope requires practice, the discipline of habits, and sustenance around a Eucharistic, joy-divining table within a community of conviction—all of which runs against the grain of a culture committed to solitaire and market share.
Hope floats, but you have to trust the water's buoyancy.
§ § §
§ “Faith, hope, and love abide, wrote the Apostle, adding that ‘the greatest of these is love’ (1 Corinthians 13:13). Maybe so. But hope is the hardest.” —Nancy Hastings Sehested
§ “Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope; today I declare that I will restore to you double.” —Zechariah 9:12
§ “Hope is the radical refusal to calculate the limits of the possible.” —William Sloan Coffin
§ “Repentance is the response to grace that overcomes the past and opens onto a new future. Repentance distinguishes Christian life as one of struggle and conversion and pervades it, not with remorse, but with hope. The message of Jesus is not ‘Repent’ but ‘Repent for the Kingdom of God is near.’” —John Shea
§ At the center of our pain, we glimpse a fairer world and hear a call. When we are able to keep company with our own fears and sorrows, we are shown the way to go, our parched lives are watered, and the earth becomes a greener place. Hope begins to grow, and we are summoned to the work that will give us a feeling of wellness and make possible that which we envision. —Elizabeth O’Connor
§ “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” —Jeremiah 29:11
§ “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope.” —Reinhold Niebuhr
§ “For the needy shall not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the poor perish forever. —Psalms 9:18
§ “The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” —Vaclav Havel
§ “The beginning of hope is to be conscious of despair in the very air we breathe, and to look around for something better.” —Walker Percy
§ “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” —Romans 15:13
§ “Risk in faith, decide in hope, and suffer the consequences in love.” —attributed to an unnamed participant in the 
1965 Selma to Montgomery march
§ “Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man (or woman), the look on his (or her) face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought it or even needed it for yourself. For that look on his (or her) face, for your hands meeting his (or hers) across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.” —Daniel Berrigan
§ “So we can say with confidence, 'The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?'” —Hebrews 13:6
§ “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places shall be made straight and the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” —Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream”
§ “The best definition of the Gospel message I ever heard is that the Gospel is the permission and command to enter difficulty with hope.” —Donna Schaper
§ “The war horse is a vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save.” —Psalms 33:17
§ “I am open and I am willing / To be hopeless would seem so strange / It dishonors those who go before us / So lift me up to the light of change.” —Holly Near, lyrics in “I Am Willing”
§ “There is no true theology of hope which is not first of all a theology of the cross.” —Jurgen Moltmann
§ “A vision without a task is but a dream, a task without a vision is drudgery, a vision with a task is the hope of the world.” —Church inscription, Sussex, England (1730)
§ “Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, / Sing a song full of the hope that the present has 
brought us.” —James Weldon Johnson, lyrics in “Lift Every Voice and Sing”
§ “Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness. . . .” —2 Corinthians 3:12
§ “Faith becomes the one wholly inflexible ground for resistance to violence, precisely because it teaches us how to face death—not in excited expectation of reward, but in the sober letting-go of our fantasies in the sure hope that a faithful God holds us firmly in life and death alike.” —Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams
§ “Occasionally, weep deep over the life you hoped would be. Grieve the losses. Then wash your face. Trust God. And embrace the life you have.” —John Piper
§ “When wounds heal on the world’s face / and in the pits dug by shellfire we have planted trees / and in hearts scorched by conflagration hope sprouts its first buds / and the dead can turn over on their side and sleep without complaining / knowing their blood was not spilled in vain, / this is peace.” —Yannis Ritsos, “Peace”
§ “Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.” —1 Peter 3:15
§ “Hope is the ordinary things you stubbornly do every day!” —Mitri Raheb
§ “Hope fills us with the strength to stay present, to abide in the flow of the Mercy no matter what outer storms 
assail us.” —Cynthia Bourgeault
§ “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage: anger at the way things are and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.” —Augustine
Left: Art by by Jennifer Hewitson
§ “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” —Hebrews 11:1
§ “Let us plant dates even 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. Such disciplined love is what has given prophets, revolutionaries, and saints the courage to die for the future they envisaged. They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.” —Rubem Alves
§ “No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.” —Dorothy Day
§ “Only the hopeless are silent / in the face of calamity— / silenced because they no / longer aspire even to be heard, / much less heeded. The labor / of lament, on the other hand, / is premised on the expectation / that grief’s rule will be bound / by the Advent of Another. / The liturgy of grief transforms / the pain of lament into passion / for an / 
outcome forged in justice / and tempered in mercy. —Ken Sehested, “The labor of lament”
§ "We live by hope, but a reed never becomes an Iroke tree by dreaming." —Nigerian proverb
§ “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. . . . Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” —Romans 8:18-28
§ “Who dares nothing, need hope nothing.” —Friedrich Schiller
§ “The Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stay but a little, and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while the Company is true.” —Galadriel, Lady of Lorien, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings
§ “Our ultimate hopes are expressed by whom and what and how we now love.” —Paul S. Minear
§ “The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.” —Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
§ “For people in need of clean drinking water, arable land to till, or homes free of bombs and bullets, every day presents unsurmountable challenges. For these people, despair is a luxury they cannot afford, because every waking moment must be spent surviving and caring for loved ones.” —“Truth and Meaning: The Luxury of Despair,” editorial in The Midland Daily News, 26 December 2015
§ "Hope is a tease designed to keep us from accepting reality.” —Countess Violet Crawly (played by Maggie Smith) on PBS’ “Downton Abbey” series
§ “Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is to dance to it.” —Rubem A. Alves
§ “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.” —Barbara Kingsolver
§ “The life of the living is a suffering with the world, yet not as a passive victim but suffering in resistance and in love, experiencing the darkness of crucifixion without surrendering the hope and strength and revolution of resurrection. —Albert Camus
§ “As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream.” —Rebecca Solnit
§ "To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.” —Howard Zinn
§ “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise 
the Lord, my help and my God.” —Psalms 42:11
§ “Hope, as an anchor so steadfast, / Rends the dark veil for the soul, / Whither the Master has entered, / Robbing the grave of its goal.” —Septimus Winner, lyrics in “Whispering Hope”
§ “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.” —Anne Lamott
§ “You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us. And the world will live as one.” ―John Lennon, lyrics in "Imagine"
§ “You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” ―William Faulkner
§ “When our moral lives are shaped by fear, and safety is worshiped as the highest good, we are tempted to make health and security the primary justification for right action. We thus lead timid lives, fearing the risks of bold gestures. Instead of being courageous, we are content to be safe. Instead of being hopeful, we make virtues of cynicism and irony which in turn keep us a safe distance from risky commitments.” —Scott Bader-Saye
§ “They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.” ―Tom Bodett
§ “Hope is the dream of a soul awake.” —French proverb
§ “We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope 
does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” —Romans 5:2
§ “History says, Don't hope / On this side of the grave. / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme.” —Seamus Heaney
§ “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change.” —Jim Wallis
§ “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. . . . [T]o live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” —Howard Zinn
§ “For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease.” —Job 14:7
§ “To hope is a duty, not a luxury. To hope is not a dream, but to turn dream into reality. Happy are those who dream dreams, and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.” —Cardinal Leo Suenens
§ “It’s not the despair I mind, it’s the hope I can’t stand.” —actor John Cleese in the movie “Clockwise”
§ “And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance.” —Lee Ann Womack, lyrics in “I Hope You Dance”
§ “Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
Left: “Hope for the Future,” eddiecalz
§ “What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” —Romans 8:31, 35-36
§ To have hope “doesn’t mean closing one’s eyes to the horrors of the world—quite the contrary, in fact: only those who have not lost faith and hope can see the horrors of the world with genuine clarity.” —Vaclav Havel
§ “Faith becomes the one wholly inflexible ground for resistance to violence, precisely because it teaches us how to face death—not in excited expectation of reward, but in the sober letting-go of our fantasies in the sure hope that a faithful God holds us firmly in life and death alike. This is the hope that allows us to recognise power for what it is and isn’t: As what is given us for the setting-free of each other, not as the satisfying of our passion for control.” —Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams
§ “Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails and the 
fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will exult in the God of my salvation. “ —Habakkuk 3:17-18
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