the serenity of hope.

Sometimes hope is as impossible to grasp as trying "to catch the wind" as Donovan so beautifully composed in the 60's. His yearning to find solace through love encapsulates our own attempts to seek hope outside of ourselves. We have a tendancy to mesh these two together, or at least I do. Hope and love.........being loved fills us with hope. And so we go off in search of it.

love, love, love........hope, hope, hope......

There's a classic line from a movie which was spoken in angst with a strong Bronx accent by Harvey Fierstein......."I wanna be loved. Is that so wrong?" I don't know why it has always stuck in my head, and for the life of me, I can't even remember the movie if was from. But, the line was expressed in a way that made you laugh and feel eye widening compassion for his character at the same time if that's possible. I think we all can relate.

There are times in our lives when we feel terribly unloved and it's a crushing feeling. It has to be one of the loneliest sensations we can experience. It usually happens when we have done something we are ashamed or simply don't want to face, or when we are trapped in a maze of being misunderstood and dismissed by the people who matter in our lives. When the feeling washes over, it seems to strip you of hope too because it feels like the dark side of eternity.

As much as we may feel like the life raft needed to stay afloat is not within arms reach, as much as we sometimes feel like our arms are just too tired to tread water any longer while searching for that seemingly unreachable reassurance, as much as we don't know how we are going to cope with the onslaught of waves rolling in the windy tide because the strength in our hearts has been zapped of usefulness, we survive. There is an innate drive which can push us beyond what we perceive to be our limit. But, it doesn't come from trying to find it outside of ourselves. Hope and love are nestled in the remnants of our life experiences. I truly believe that. We have many external triggers which most definately surprise us with that uplifting sensation and these matter because they remind us that hope reawakens in every breath we take. It is in the spirit of life. And if you look at it that way, we do have the ability to catch the wind.

Today is a celebration of capturing the wind and transforming it into our breath of life. It's like we have been given a whole new fresh bunch of air to fill our bodies with a sense of being reborn. And by just simply taking one breath at a time, we can regenerate our empty vessels with the necessary ingredients to begin anew. We can't see it or hold it.........just like hope and love, but we can breathe it into us every time we fill ourselves with fresh oxygen.

How miraculous is that? It doesn't matter who we are, or what we are coping with........it doesn't matter what colour our skin is, how disconnected we are with our own communities.....it doesn't matter what we look like, or how old we are, and it surely doesn't matter whether we attend a formal church service, or whether we seek out the meaning of life going down a different path, we are all given the same gifts to quiet our hearts. WE are offered the serenity of hope, one breath at a time. We are loved. It's in the wind around us and in us. That's not so wrong.

Happy Easter.