HOPE is that thing in us that has wings and flies down in our soul and keeps on singing its songs without words and also without end. You can go through the scriptures and you find first, Abraham.
God said to Abraham: “Go out”. And he became the father of our faith and of all people who have faith in God. Abraham left behind everything and he followed God’s call. He is our example for us to follow God’s call.
Abraham was told by God that he had to offer his son Isaac. He went up the mountain and was about to kill Isaac. Then God prevented him to do that.
We must follow God’s call but we are never forced to do that. We are created by God with a free will. But we are created in such a way that we can have contact with God. We can hear His voice, if we sit down and close our eyes. Then we will know what is God’s will for us and the purpose why He created us. God has plans for each one of us.
The story of hope starts already with Genesis. “God saw that it was good, very good. Just have a look and you will see that everything is good, His creation and the arrangement in there, even where it is unfinished. We people experience ourselves in a creation as if our life is unfinished and imperfect. But just have a look and you will see that God is there.
According to the mystique Eckhart, God will always see to it that we get the best because He wants the best for Himself. It is possible that somebody doesn’t want anything that God is. But that doesn’t matter. God still wants it because that is His promise. He has sworn this. According to Eckhart, God always keeps Himself united with us and He gives us all the hope we need and we can always return to Him, even how far we have wandered away from Him.
We are God’s hope. One, who has the desire to grow in being with God, exposes himself to the hope that God has with him. You can compare that desire with an answer from our side to God’s hope with us. One who has that desire is challenged to “go out”.
Like God said to Abraham: “Go out!”, “Get out”. Thus, we are challenged to get out of ourselves and to enter that unknown land. It is better not to make yourself any images of that land. “Go out!” goes in depth also for our God images. “Get out of there”. You hope for what your memory can not show you yet, according to another mystique John of the Cross.
Our hope on God in us is an empty space, a “dark night”, and you must leave that space empty… Of course, that is very difficult because our memory is full of images and convictions with which we can keep going in life. We have been given an intellect, a memory, with which we can remember our past and with which we can make ourselves images of what we would like to see in the future.
With this we survive, and we develop ourselves. There we sort out also our God images. John of the Cross advices us to unload our memory. To make ourselves empty. Eckhart says regarding this that God, when the inner self disposes itself of these images, must enter into our soul necessarily, because that is God’s promise. We can put our hope on that, we can trust that.
“Hope never stops singing in us”
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