HOPE, FAITH, AND LOVE — free as the sky

We create because we believe in hope. Hope is the undying, disruptive soul power that fuels and sparks creativity. I had loved Emily Dickinson’s imagery of hope in her poem; Hope is the Thing with Feathers.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

In hope, we live in the present for the future, singing the tune and never stopping. The preferred idealized future keeps us engaging and creating. Though hope and future are inseparable couples, hope draws its source of inspiration from the past, from our stories and the stories of humanity. We look back to delve deeper and be inspired to create. In hope, we live in the present because of the past, having sung the tune and never stopping.

I write, create because of the hope that someday and somewhere, someone will read and connect with my writing. I see it as a message in a bottle drifting on the vast ocean. I don’t know who it will reach, if they will find the bottle among countless bottles, or even read it. As I take the time to open the message from the past, I am hopeful that my message will also find someone. But this is not the main reason I write and create.

I write because I have a vision. Hope is a vision. To hope is to envision something out of nothing, in the sea of what is. I dream that all humanity will relate to and learn from one another as fellow human beings, out of the common ground of humanity, rather than arguing for differences, self-interests, power, and greed. While we can accept and even celebrate our differences, what is and can be shared among humanity, humans as humans, is too edifying and exhilarating to ignore. If we take Carl R. Rogers’ dictum of “what is most personal is most universal” to heart, then each of our stories possesses the vision and quality of connection with others.

Hope paints us a destination, which often is not crystal clear, “dimly or obscurely,” according to Apostle Paul. Faith kicks in and gets us to move toward the destination. Faith is not an absence of doubt. Doubts and questions are an integral part of our faith journey. Welcoming doubt and questions, as friends and not enemies to conquer, faith allows us to move and act, leading to increased faith. Faith without action is a dream of a simpleton. In faith, we act, adjust on the fly, and seek God who is ever close. Faith transforms the vision of a destination from dimness to luminance, which hope has known all along.

Love is the person, the being, who moves, providing us with motives for both the destination and the journey. On another way of saying what love is, I echo the words of Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:12. “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (NRSV) The ultimate vision of love is that “we will know fully as we have been fully known.” This knowing is not an intellectual knowing, but an intimate experiential knowing. And that we are finally catching up with what God has known from the beginning. That is what love is and what love does. Love is to be known, recognizing that we have been known all along. Love is to know, seeing face to face, without dimness and obscurities.