Advent Reflection on Hope: Not a Feeling, But an Action

Vincent van Gogh's simple, but profound, summary of what hope is all about captures for me the theological essence of hope, which is about doing as much as about thinking or imagining.  In a letter to his brother Theo in August 1833, Vincent says, 

To hope for better times must not be a feeling but an action in the present.

And so we carry on, and we continue critiquing, and trying to build anew (and rebuild again, over and over) precisely because we hope.  And because nothing that exists now or appears complete is every really complete, or really adequate, judged against the eschatological horizon of hope to which we keep journeying in our individual lives and as a human community.