Daily Thought For January 20, 2017

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Hope - The Fruit Of Faith
Hope is the fruit of faith, we have said: in it our life stretches itself out towards the totality of all that is real, towards a boundless future that becomes accessible to us in faith. This fulfilled totality of being to which faith provides the key is a love without reserve—a love that is an immense affirmation of my existence and that discloses the fullness of all being to me in its breadth and depth. In it the creator of all things says to me: “All that is mine is yours” (Luke 15:31). God, however, is “all in all,” “everything to everyone” (1 Cor. 15:28): the person to whom he imparts all that is his is someone for whom there are no longer any ends or boundaries. The love that Christian hope approaches in the light of faith is not something purely private and individual: it does not enclose me in a little world of my own. This love opens up to me the whole of everything, which through love becomes “paradise.” The worst anxiety of all, as we have already said, is the fear of not being loved, the loss of love: despair is thus the conviction that one has forfeited all love forever,  the horror of complete isolation. Hope in the proper sense of the word is thus the reverse: the certainty that I shall receive that great love that is indestructible and that I am already loved with this love here and now. 
from The Yes of Jesus Christ by Pope Benedict XVI pp.69-70

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