As an earthly person, I oscillate between hope, wishing, expectation, frustration, and despair. Looking back on my career, I ask myself: how have you overcome life’s challenges and crises so that your life could metamorphose from one state to another and you could grow? The answer: through hope. I didn’t hope for something, I hoped. If I had hoped “for something,” the word “hope” could be replaced by “wish” or “expectation” and it would lose its meaning. Hope has no content—it is still full of substance. I immerse myself in this inner act of “hoping” and can find nothing in it, but I am warmed and attracted by something ahead. Where does this warmth and this attraction come from?
Inside me, the image of a small child learning to walk arises. In their first attempts to stand up, they fall down countless times, get up again and again, and try again. What happens between a fall and a new attempt? The child has no certainty that their next attempt will be successful. Why do they keep getting up? Because they feel attracted to something in the future that warms and encourages them. Hope and attraction are like two sides of a coin: one viewed from the active and present, the other from the passive and future. We have all learned to stand up and experienced the rhythm of falling and rising. This learning has taken place unconsciously and is filled with an instinctive will to live. Is there a spiritual “standing up?” The animal moves horizontally and cannot allow itself to stand upright—it has no “ego organization” and is not guided by the heavens into an upright stance. A human being has to acquire a physical ego over a few months, but a spiritual ego? A whole lifetime may not be enough for this. What can faithfully accompany us in this learning process and give us fresh strength so that we keep trying to stand up straight, make mistakes, and break through or expand our spiritual boundaries? Hope.
In early Christian times and in the Middle Ages, hope was linked to faith and love. Now, in the age of the conscious soul, it is more closely associated with knowledge permeated with love. Every human being feels the urge inwardly to stand up and develop toward the ideal, but the development process is occasionally interrupted or blocked. This urge knocks on every heart, tirelessly. Unfortunately, we are often no longer able to hear it due to background noise. But hope requires being able to listen to the future. Hope and knowledge promote and enrich each other. Hope brings a longing and a sheath to knowledge, namely a mood of prayer and grace, while knowledge gives hope a deep insight into the here and now and the future. Hopeful knowledge and knowledgeable hope should be born as twins.
Hope is a magic power that enables us to harness resistance as a crucible for forging the will and to transform the shadow of life into precious nourishment for experience. Hope leads me with warmth into the afterlife of earthly life in the evening and lets me wake up in the morning with fresh strength. Hope is the glow of dawn and dusk.
Translation Laura Liska
Illustration Gilda Bartel
