I am full of hope and promise. I have great faith in the desire of people to do good. I sense a great awakening in our country; I can’t speak for the world. I smell the change in the air, an earnest searching and listening.

Hope is a gift, but Thomas Merton wrote that to meet it, we have to descend, almost to nothingness, but certainly to fear and despair. Then afterward, a beautiful sky, a clearing, a fresh smell of rain and earth.

Hope for me is trust in the ultimate goodness of creation. Hope isn’t deliverance from trouble or oppression or disappointment. I spent a lot of time in my life wanting something other than what I had, and other than what is.

I found that the answer is inside of me, not outside. I am at peace with myself.

But whether we believe in God or not, Merton writes, real hope is trusting that what we have, where we are, and who we are is enough, more than enough.

Sometimes, on the surface, there is confusion, conflict, anger, and desire. Deeper down, in the greatest depths of my soul, there is the smallness, the frailty of a hope that nourishes and grows amid despair and frustration.

After bad news or sad news, I journey to the smallness; hope is like a candle that flickers and waves, but never goes out. When I give up on hope, it feels like a betrayal, to me, to others.

A few times, in the past few weeks, I felt as if my world was coming apart, that everything I knew was getting lost. But the smallness never went away, and then I saw so many hearts open up to others, so many hungry people fed, so many older people consoled, so many neighbors helping one another, so many strangers asking others if they could be of help, so many people risking their lives for the rest of us.

Everywhere I looked, there was empathy and selflessness.

Pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice. I can focus on the conflict or the sickness or the anger or the wave of love and humanity that came in its wake like a giant wave crashing into our lives.

We are awakened, alert, and open. Just wait and see, I  tell myself every morning. Wait and see what comes of it.

“The secret country,” wrote Merton, “is a country of loneliness and a kind of hunger, of silence, of perplexity, of waiting, of strange hopes: where men expect the impossible to be born but do not always speak of their hopes.”