First Week of Advent, Wednesday: To Hope Once More

In the Heart of Winter: A Meditator’s Guide to Advent

In December stillness

prayers reach down

into darkness

like winter roots.

Underground they

grow branches and

weave shadow nests

for the winged life

of our dreams.  

     -Ellen Grace O’Brian

Our ability to be open and hopeful is directly related to our willingness to trust God,  truth that our Higher Power is, indeed, abundantly good. Perhaps we have trained ourselves not to hope or not to expect too much and thus avoid the disappointments that seem to inevitably come. In order to protect ourselves from the suffering of disappointment, it may seem safer not to risk hoping. Yet we pay for that kind of safety with our joy and our enthusiasm for life. It takes tremendous effort to continually dampen down the Spirit within which hope ever rises.

Hope is essential to our spiritual journey. It is the way our innate yearning to realize God is expressed. Within us all is the deepest hope to know eternal life, experience unconditional joy, and be completely aware. To hope to know and experience life, joy, and awareness without limits and conditions is to yearn to realize our essential unbounded Self. It is our yearning to know God. Paramahansa Yogananda explained that we must want God with such intensity that we feel we cannot wait another day. Yet, if the realization does not come, we must be willing to wait with fervent hope. 

Advent invites us to consider opening ourselves to hope once again, to dream dreams in the darkness to be celebrated in the light, to be ready to enter the mystery which surrounds us, to lose our old self and to find our essential Self anew.

Practice: To hope is to expect, to anticipate, or look forward to. Cultivate a hopeful attitude based on the assumption that there is a Power for good in this universe and that you are choosing to cooperate with It. Feel that Life supports you. Expect that divine grace, God’s freely given support, is at work in your life in seen and unseen ways. Notice what it is like to consciously choose to be hopeful.

Contemplate:

To hope means to be ready

At every moment

For that which is not yet born,

And yet not become desperate

If there is no birth in our lifetime.

There is no sense in hoping

For that which already exists

Or for that which cannot be.

Those whose hope is weak

Settle down for comfort or for violence;

Those whose hope is strong

See and cherish all signs of new life

And are ready every moment

To help the birth

Of that which is ready to be born.

    -Erich Fromm from The Revolution of Hope

Reflect: What does hope mean to you? Is it a part of your life today?
Ask yourself: Can I allow myself to be truly hopeful?