About 1:02 in is the discussion of witness, Paul describes hope as the person, holding onto both the reality of harm and in the midst of that, accepting, believing in God's goodness. Evangelization must come from this place, this witness. Along with everything that the witness experiences by way of doubt, questions, emotions that rise up - all of the stuff that bubbles up in life, conscience, prayer, relationship with God, relationship with the Church. In other words, our own experience of agony in the garden. The cup is never taken away. But we can choose either to drink of it or walk away. And so hope is only derivatively a thing, a noun. Paul asserts that hope is the person doing the holding, the reconciling. Witness in this sense is the person in the doing, in the drinking of the cup. Just as Jesus is the way, the truth, the life. Hope is fundamentally the person caught in the act of holding. Just as truth is for those who follow, the person of Jesus in the mission of summing up all creation in Jesus' own human/divine self, even when the world and the academy make truth an attribute of a proposition, for the sake of precision and abstraction, at the cost of the transcendental meaning. It is when we are caught in the act that others can see for themselves what we have and what we do on the Way and can be moved to want some of that for themselves. This is a tall order, but it is what we are called to do when we follow and take up our cross.
About 1:02 in is the discussion of witness, Paul describes hope as the person, holding onto both the reality of harm and in the midst of that, accepting, believing in God's goodness. Evangelization must come from this place, this witness. Along with everything that the witness experiences by way of doubt, questions, emotions that rise up - all of the stuff that bubbles up in life, conscience, prayer, relationship with God, relationship with the Church. In other words, our own experience of agony in the garden. The cup is never taken away. But we can choose either to drink of it or walk away. And so hope is only derivatively a thing, a noun. Paul asserts that hope is the person doing the holding, the reconciling. Witness in this sense is the person in the doing, in the drinking of the cup. Just as Jesus is the way, the truth, the life. Hope is fundamentally the person caught in the act of holding. Just as truth is for those who follow, the person of Jesus in the mission of summing up all creation in Jesus' own human/divine self, even when the world and the academy make truth an attribute of a proposition, for the sake of precision and abstraction, at the cost of the transcendental meaning. It is when we are caught in the act that others can see for themselves what we have and what we do on the Way and can be moved to want some of that for themselves. This is a tall order, but it is what we are called to do when we follow and take up our cross.