chapter 2: sentences on hope.

[Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God.]

[Hope empties our hands in order that we may work with them.]

[All sin is rooted in the failure of love. All sin is a withdrawal of love from God, in order to love something else. Sin sets boundaries to our hope, and locks our love in prison.]

[It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.]

[But I do not achieve the contact that knows Him, and thereby knows the Father in Him, until my faith in Him is completed by hope and charity:

hope that grasps His love for me

and charity that pays Him the return of love I owe.]

[Hope seeks not only God in Himself, not only the means to reach Him, but it seeks, finally and beyond all else, God's glory revealed in ourselves. This will be the final manifestation of His infinite mercy, and this is what we pray for when we say "Thy Kingdom come."]

excerpts from No Man is An Island: Thomas Merton.