*No Man Is an Island* Hope

"Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" according to Hebrews 11, right? Well, let me ask first, what do you hope for? Or rather, what IS hope?

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Protestant Christians cannot be Christians without hope, right? It is the resurrection that binds us together with a hope for something more... with the hope that death will not have the last word... with the hope that "Thy Kingdom will come"... So again, I ask, what is hope?

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"By hope we possess God without feeling God's presence" and "without hope, our faith gives us only an acquaintance with God" (15). So we need hope to really KNOW God... which seems paradoxical considering how much we will ever know about God... but we also "hope in God knowing that God loves us" completely and entirely. We are always loved by God even though we don't recognize it sometimes, which means then, that this hope Merton is talking about, brings us closer to feeling loved by God. Merton also says that "all sin is rooted in the failure of love" which makes sense because if we participate in an act of sin, we are surely denying how much we love God. If we love God so purely, we would not sin against God because we would be dedicated through love to God. An absence of hope, therefore, leads to sin and death.

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The most prophetic thing Merton says in this chapter is as follows: "The supreme expression of God's justice is to forgive those whom no one else would ever have forgiven. That is why God is, above all, the God of those who can hope when there is no hope" (21). Words escape me to follow this, so I will leave it there.

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What is your hope rooted in?

Why do you hope?

What about being a Christian leads you to hope?

For what do you hope?