Hopeful.

van Gogh, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gaugin (detail), 1888

Our life is a pilgrim's progress. I once saw a very beautiful picture, it was a landscape at evening. In the distance on the right hand side a row of hills appearing blue in the evening mist. Above those hills the splendour of the sunset, the grey clouds with their linings of silver and gold and purple. The landscape is a plain or heath covered with grass and heather, here and there the white stem of a birch tree and its yellow leaves, for it was in Autumn. Through the landscape a road leads to a high mountain far far away, on the top of that mountain a city whereon the setting sun casts a glory. On the road walks a pilgrim, staff in hand. He has been walking for a good long while already and he is very tired. And now he meets a woman, a figure in black that makes one think of St Paul's word, "As being sorrowful yet always rejoicing."  That Angel of God has been placed there to encourage the pilgrims and to answer their questions:

And the pilgrim asks her:    Does the road go uphill then all the way?

and the answer is              “Yes to the very end”─

and he asks again:     And will the journey take all day long?

and the answer is:             “From morn till night my friend”.

And the pilgrim goes on sorrowful yet always rejoicing – sorrowful because it is so far off and the road so long. Hopeful as he looks up to the eternal city far away, resplendent in the evening glow.

Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to his brother, Theo, Friday, 3 November 1876

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

Viktor E. Frankl, from Man's Search for Meaning

Think.

Mercy.

But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God's love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God.

Thomas Merton

Happy birthday, Bonhoeffer.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on this day in 1906.

In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Hope.

I use the language of decline, decay, and despair rather than doom, gloom, and no possibility because I think any talk about despair is not where you end but where you start and then the courage and the sacrifice come in, but at the level of hope not optimism. Optimism and hope are different. Optimism tends to be based on the notion that there is enough evidence out there that allows us to think that things are going to be better, much more rational, deeply secular. Whereas hope looks at the evidence and says “it doesn’t look good at all,” says “it doesn’t look good at all.” Says, “We gonna make a leap of faith … go beyond the evidence in the attempt to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow us to engage in heroic actions always against the odds no guarantee whatsoever.” That’s hope. That’s hope.

Dr. Cornel West

Ever-fixed.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 

William Shakespeare

Believe.

... if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here.

Paulo Coelho