Hope is a beautiful painting. The woman is young, calm, and literally radiant.
What she holds are a lamb and a flower. The lamb is innocence, and the flower is rebirth. What I intended by that is that all young things offer us hope. All human beings, no matter how depressed and gloomy—when we see a young thing, a young dog or young child, a young anything, we are flooded with the idea of the immense possibility that is open to them. Just life itself. And that feeling is full of hope. And all nature offers us hope, just by its beauty and persistence.
There is chaos and destruction in the city behind her, but she is healthy and glowing.
That is because hope is an active healer. You read in medical literature that if people give up hope, there is nothing you can do for them. They certainly won’t recover from a serious illness.
What is the difference between hope and faith?
They are very closely linked, but they are different. Faith, you can say, gives you hope. But hope doesn’t give you faith. So that is an important distinction.Hope is the conviction that nothing is set, that nothing is inescapable. And therefore, it is full of optimism. It refuses to accept that what is going on now will keep on going forever the same way and that there will be no escape from it. But it believes the opposite, that things can change overnight….