Hope!

A really good soup inevitably leads to soul-sharing, I swear it's true. After a particularly warming Ramen yesterday afternoon, I found myself listening to the love tales of a new friend. The guy had had a rough couple of years, to say the least; too young and too smitten, he had rushed into a marriage only to divorce a few years later. He retreated and bachelor-dom for several months until he eventually fell in love with a beautiful friend. Of course, the divine machine had other plans. He was offered a job in Denver. Alas, his love stayed back in Michigan, a mitten none too warm...The thing that hurt the most, we decided, was not the forced distance. No, it was the fact that he had just gotten a little taste, a tiny morsel, of hope. Real hope, exciting hope, the type of hope that doesn't just say, "things will work out in the end." It's the type of hope where you jump out of bed, feel surges of creativity, and want to act, want to move, want to sip that hope through a candy straw in a 1950's diner. He could love and be loved again.// Yesterday, we both recognized the power of this kind of hope. And today, a little spiritualism taught me why. // One of my favorite religious rituals involves going to the Sacred Retreat Jesuit services in Sedalia. I meet my grandparents there, eat donuts, then go back to their house to spend a good portion of the afternoon discussing the sermon and enjoying their company. I love the Jesuits because they bring a modern mentality to such...dated...stories. Every once in a while they deliver a sermon that tells me exactly what I need to know, perfectly illuminating whatever ideas were stewing in the dark corners of my conscience. Today, they talked about hope.// According to the man in the nice purple dress (it's the second week of Advent, folks), hope is made up of three main ingredients: desire, imagination and mutuality. // Desire is the ability to describe what it is that we want. He challenged the group to wonder, "Do I truly desire to walk in the path of Christ?" He explained that we have the ability to pave the way for Christ. It felt like the Hindu teaching of "attraction," wherein we put into the world what we want to get out of it. Or like when, at my job, we "prime the tubing," which means preparing our medical device tubing by running water through it before the actual medicine. You know, stretching before a big game. // Then comes imagination. So many self-help books evoke the idea of "visualization," instructing us to imagine our desires achieved. Really, isn't that just a lot like prayer? One good idea, said our priest, was to imagine yourself walking in the path of Christ with someone else. Maybe even someone that you don't particularly like. Imagine being with them in that blessed state, without any addendum to your relationship ("I could walk with them if they just..."). A little good hopeful empathy.// Finally, there is mutuality. Mutuality is "excitement," the stimulus to act that is inspired by our relationships with others. Mutuality, said the priest, is where the spirit is.// All this talk about hope walked straight up to the front door of my heart and entered without knocking. You see, I could (and will) apply this hope-help to all the aspects of my life that I value: my spirituality, my career, my personal motivations, my friendships. But in that moment all I could think about was my open, aching heart.// Because it was hard to listen to my friend talk about the electric hope of a new love, since I felt that same hope-- about him. Yes, ye loyal readers, my newest love interest was telling me all about his love interest. I was completely blind-sided. In fact, I felt like I had been led-on. The point was that it hurt. Like mistaking Wasabi for guacamole. // Today I pulled my aching heart out of bed and into the hands of a gray-haired older couple and a man in a white and purple dress. And they told me about hope. My Grandma gave me a hug. The sun poured through the stained glass windows. The pine trees smelled like Christmas. And I felt love, love, hope and love. I sat in church desiring to love and be loved, to form the type of hope that would persist despite Amandas and Evans. I imagined myself finally writing again, putting all of this creative inspiration into the form of words, something I truly love. And then I saw my Aunt and my Grandma, their husbands, and our mutual bond.// Hope. Full.