Advent

2009 12 04

To love means loving the unlovable.
To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable.
Faith means believing the unbelievable.
Hope means hoping when everything is hopeless. - G.K. Chesterton

It is now the season of Advent, the season of anticipation and hope. I have been pondering hope since July when synchronicity brought together my purchase of Joan Chittister's book, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, and the arrival of Peggy Senger Parson's pamphlet "Be prepared to give reasons for the hope that is within you...".

It is true that the time in my life that I felt the most that everything was hopeless was also the time that I was compelled from within to seek healing, growth, and the conversion of becoming new, of opening the heart to the grace of new possibilities. I, the ultimate introvert, was seeking out grief groups and friends to keep reciting the struggle of being a witness to my love’s death without giving in to the death of the soul.

Chittister speaks of “holy indifference” as being the foundation of spiritual discernment. The idea being the openness of the many manifestations of the will of God in life, the awareness of the multiple gifts of God and openness to all of them. “But holy indifference – detachment – teaches me that there is no room for isolation, abandonment, death of the spirit when I lose one thing because I know that there is something else waiting for me in its place. If only I can allow myself to watch for it, to wait for it, to grasp it when it comes.”