I've been reading the book pictured in the photo above: Homo Viator: Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope by Gabriel Marcel. Isn't that a great book cover? Classic 60s. The book was written in 1951, but this edition came out in 1962. Homo viator, according to Wikipedia, means "pilgrim man," meaning "man [let's add: or woman] on his [her] way to finding God." It's a book like the one I mentioned here, over-my-head much of the time and requiring rereading of many sentences and paragraphs multiple times but offering a tremendous reward of insights for the effort. In fact, I made a post a couple weeks ago of a quote I found in this book and received notes of appreciation for it from readers.
On this threshold of the new year – 2016 – I want to offer you a couple more excerpts from the book as nuggets of hope and peace.
“Absolute hope…appears as a response of the creature to the infinite Being to whom it is conscious of owing everything that it has and upon whom it cannot impose any condition whatsoever….”
“Hope is engaged in the weaving of experience now in process, or in other words in an adventure now going forward.”
“Might we not say that hope always implies the superlogical connection between a return and something completely new? Following from this it is to be wondered whether preservation or restoration, on the one hand, and revolution or renewal on the other, are not the two movements, the two abstractly dissociated aspects of one and the same unity, which dwells in hope and is beyond the reach of all our faculties of reasoning or of conceptual formulation. This aspiration can be approximately expressed in the simple but contradictory words: as before, but differently and better than before. Here we undoubtedly come once again upon the theme of liberation, for it is never a simple return to the status quo, a simple return to our being, it is that and much more, and even the contrary of that: an undreamed-of promotion, a transfiguration.”
May 2016 be for you, dear reader, an adventure moving forward, a weaving together of restoration and renewal, a transfiguration.
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[Photo: taken of the featured book. How convenient that the cover so nicely matches the rug in my office.]