Family

Amber and I went to the Well today.. it had been a while since I had been to church due to trips and stuff. It reminded me what a great community that is.. i hope my sister stays plugged in I think there are some great people there to connect with. Makes me miss being a part of a church family. I think that's why I got so homesick for grand haven last time I was in the area. I just missed community in general.

I realized I need to start thinking about getting packed up for school I leave in about two weeks!!! craziness!


I am reading A Pedagogy of Hope by Freire and I am loving it. The guy is an artist with words and finds ways to articulate concepts that I never would've dreamed of. My favorite passage so far:

Hope is an ontological need. Hopelessness is but hope that has lost its bearings, and become a distortion of that ontological need. When it becomes a program, hopelessness paralyzes us, immobilizes us. We succumb to fatalism, and then it becomes impossible to muster the strength we absolutely need for a fierce struggle that will re-create the world.

I am hopeful, not out of mere stubbornness, but out of an existential concrete imperative.

I do not mean that, because I am hopeful, I attribute to this hope of mine the power to transform reality all by itself, so that I set out for the fray without taking account of concrete, material data, declaring "My hope is enough!" No, my hope is necessary, but it is not enough. Alone, it does not win. But without it, my struggle will be weak and wobbly. We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water.

The idea that hope alone will transform the world, and action undertaken in that kind of naivete, is an excellent route to hopelessness, pessimism, and fatalism. But to attempt to do without hope, in the struggle to improve the world, as if that struggle could be reduced to calculated acts alone, or a purely scientific approach, is frivolous illusion. To attempt to do without hope, which is based on the need for truth as an ethical quality of the struggle is tantamount to denying that struggle is one of its mainstays. The essential thing... is this: hope as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice.As an ontological need, hope needs practice in order to become historical concreteness. That is why there is no hope in sheer hopefulness. The hoped-for is not attained by dint of raw hoping. Just to hope is to hope in vain.