The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves.
Interpretation
Hope involves being content and happy without needing all the answers in life.
This quote by Richard Rohr emphasizes the importance of hope as a theological virtue that allows individuals to endure life's uncertainties without requiring immediate closure or resolution. It suggests that true satisfaction comes from a deeper source that transcends personal struggles, enabling one to live in patience and trust, even amidst unanswered questions.
In practice
In a motivational speech about dealing with uncertainty and challenges.
My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.
The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.
Much of the Christian religion has largely become “holding on” instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else).
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world.
Clumsiness attempts to fix simplicity straight in the eye. It is not a mark of incompetence but of reticence.
One area of law more than any other besmirches the constitutional vision of human dignity. . . . The barbaric death penalty violates our Constitution. Even the most vile murderer does not release the state from its obligation to respect dignity, for the state does not honor the victim by< emulating his murderer. Capital punishment's fatal flaw is that it treats people as objects to be toyed with and discarded. . . . One day the Court will outlaw the death penalty. Permanently.
Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.
If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.
In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.
The whole problem is to establish communication with ones self.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.