Pilgrim Ponderings: August
As summertime slowly wanes, our fields and gardens are yielding abundantly!
For this month’s post on hope, a couple of our sisters would like to share quotations on that very paradox: Hope as most truly embodied by our elders, glowing fullness at life’s far-end.
“For non-believers the future can be very problematic. It is a land of opportunity for those who are young and healthy and talented. As the inevitable aging process sets in, however, the future becomes more and more forbidding. It can only mean further weakness, the need to abandon favorite projects, and finally the spector of sickness and death… That is why the faith witness of an older person is so precious, because it demonstrates the victory of hope over despair in a human life precisely when, humanly speaking, there seems to be little reason for hope.”
-Demetris Dumm, OSB
“It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged; God has kept that good wine until now. It is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst.”
-G.K. Chesterton[For some background information about our Jubilee Year of Hope “Pilgrim Ponderings” series, please see https://mississippiabbey.org/pilgrim-ponderings-may/ .]