Tomorrow’s Child by Rubem Alves         

What is hope? It is a presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It is a hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress us is not the last word. It is a suspicion that reality is more complex than realism wants us to believe That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual; and that in a miraculous and unexpected way life is preparing the creative events which will open the way to freedom and resurrection – but the two, suffering and hope must live from each other. Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair, But, hope without suffering creates illusions, naivete, and drunkenness Let us plant dates even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. This is the secret discipline. It is a refusal to let our creative act be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience and it is a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren. Such disciplined love is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints, the courage to die for the future they envisaged. They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.