Fruitless
Quick Thought On Hope
Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash
As part of my Lenten resolve this season, I've been praying the Rosary daily, something I will try to continue even after Easter arrives. We've been blessed the past couple weeks in my area with fair weather, so I've been able to do this while walking outdoors. One thing I've found beneficial is to focus on a particular "fruit" for each mystery that accompanies each decade of the Rosary. For example, yesterday's mysteries were the Joyful Mysteries, the first of which is the Annunciation. One of the fruits of this mystery is hope. While praying this decade, I asked Our Blessed Mother for the grace to have greater hope in this world weighed down so heavily with wickedness and grief. As I'm sure it happens to others, my grip on hope at times becomes weak to the point where I fear it will escape me altogether.
Just as this thought was in my mind, these words came to me, as if perhaps from Our Blessed Mother herself, "Let hope be not merely some external thing to which we cling, but rather something that flows through us like the blood in our veins." ?
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About the Author
After spending four years living in Japan, Mr. Cibenko spent fifteen years as a Catholic high school educator (Theology, German, Japanese). His essays have appeared in The New Oxford Review, and his first book, Masaru, a historical novel based on the early Church in Japan, is available through Arx Publishing (see link below), Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other major book retailers.
