Issue 25: “What is Hope?”

"Poetry is a nightingale that sits in the darkness and sings"
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our mission at the Matthew 25 Initiative is to equip and sustain Anglicans serving alongside the vulnerable. The work of justice and mercy is often wondrous and also difficult. Holding beauty, naming pain, and contending for hope is what M25i does well. Walter Brueggeman writes, "A poem utters the unutterable and thinks the unthinkable." In places of brokenness, where much feels unutterable and unimaginable, we encounter Jesus. Continue with us in reflection and prayer through this series, "For the Soul," as poetry might offer us Spirit-soaked imaginations.

REFLECTION

We are in Eastertide. How easy is it to lean into the fasting of Lent but to shy away from the joy of Easter? Yet, Easter is our reality. Hold on to hope that our day-to-day reality is "less real than it looks." These hours and days are but shadows of the life that is coming.

In the poem below, Rubem Alves declares that suffering and hope "live from each other." Consider what he means by this. Matthew 25 Initiative work is the work of holding hope with suffering. It is what Alves calls the "disciplined love" that gives "prophets, revolutionaries and saints the courage to die for the future they envisaged."

Read the poem slowly and, if possible, out loud. Listen for the Spirit to speak through these words, whispering of a creation restored by love.

What is Hope?
By Rubem Alves

What is hope?
It is a presentiment that imagination is more real
and reality less real than it looks.
It is a hunch
that the overwhelming brutality of facts
that oppress and repress is not the last word.

It is a suspicion
that reality is more complex
than realism wants us to believe
and that the frontiers of the possible
are not determined by the limits of the actual
and that in a miraculous and unexpected way
life is preparing the creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection...

The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.
Suffering without hope
produces resentment and despair,
hope without suffering
creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness...

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.
It is a refusal to let the creative act
be dissolved in immediate sense experience
and a stubborn commitment to the future of our  grandchildren.

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.

LIVING ISA58 COURSE

Parish leaders, are you looking for a resource for small groups or Sunday formation class? Use this course for rich, robust, elegant, and interactive learning and growth in your communities.

This resource is completely free and includes the digital materials, facilitation guides, exercises, slide decks, and even email templates to ease communication for church groups.

At M25i we hope to shape an ACNA that is known for its vision of those who are most vulnerable in our society.

We help parishes and dioceses strategize, launch new works of justice and mercy, revamp works that have gotten stuck, and offer resources to their churches that can mature what it means to be Anglicans who love Christ in the poor, the imprisoned, the stranger, and the hungry.