Spring’s hope is not the denial of winter but its recovery. The arbitrariness of life is neither cruel nor kind. It is impervious to our moods, desires or beliefs.
Reliable hope, it seems, has little to do with relief of pain or the denial of death. That hard truth is the root of our capacity for compassion. You and I, whatever our shared or disparate states, abide within the same reality as the seasons.
Our capacity for that sharing is the foundation of reliable hope.
That capacity between us is called faith.
Faith, in contrast to belief, is an intuitive emotional conviction; a deep personal trust in possibilities for relation. It sustains our capacity to seek and find what connects us. Faith, a confidence in yet to be realized possibilities, is an empowerment contained in no single belief – but only in honest conversation between us. Faith is a power based on the reaffirmation of we; a realization that there is no I without we.
The experience of that possibility between us is called love. Love, the great connector and joiner, abides within the enigma of life and death between us.
Strange comfort, love; but the only one that works.
As it is, these remain: faith, hope and love;
the greatest of these is love.
Paul of Tarsus
***
Maydaymayday
virus
screams down the street
outside my kitchen
window
on the world
weirdly
looks the same
the sounds
sounds
no voices
no honking
cops, fire
and hospital
screamings
on their way
to
?
no room in the
inn
refrigerated trucks’
parking lot
for now
the earth
will also have
to wait
its receipts
2020 James Donnelly, DSW.LCSW
All rights reserved
South Garden Press, New York