Reflection for the Week - June 18

There are at least two ways a personal crisis of hope may express itself. First, pessimism: cynicism overtakes us and we decide to take matters into our own hands. Second, optimism: naïve idealism saturates us and we decide that God will resolve it all for us. Neither of these false options has much to do with Living Spirituality and both will leave us hopeless. Yet, this may not stop us from spending significant amounts of time and energy floating from pessimism to optimism and back, attempting to solidify and barricade ourselves in one unlivable perspective or the other. Life with God, however, is never this simple, as it will challenge these tendencies and in so doing, refigure the false options into growing opportunities for developing a realistic hope, which affirms that two realities are true at the same time: God is at work and we are to be at work. Embracing and living out the salvific possibilities of redemption in the present is both gift and task, as we await the ultimate realization of God's promises in the future.