Best wishes to you all for 2012. May grace, peace, joy, love, hope, healing and happy surprises be yours in the year ahead.<\/p>\n
And jobs all around for those who need them.<\/p>\n
I should probably say first that the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don\u2019t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it\u2019s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. I don\u2019t think you can explain it as a mere derivative of something here, of some movement, or of some favorable signs in the world. \u2026<\/p>\n
Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. \u2026 It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.<\/p>\n
\u2014 Vaclav Havel, 1986<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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Best wishes to you all for 2012. May grace, peace, joy, love, hope, healing and happy surprises be yours in the year ahead. And jobs all around for those who need them. I should probably say first that the kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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