I’ve been thinking of the line from James Lawson (via David Dark), “You have to keep in your mind an imagery of infinite possibility.” (“I give that to you as an oracle of beloved community,” Dark adds.) And I’ve been occasionally picking back through Pieper’s On Hope, and came across this highlight:

it is above all when life grows short that hope grows weary; the “not yet” is turned into the has-been, and old age turns, not to the “not yet”, but to memories of what is “no more”.

For supernatural hope, the opposite is true: not only is it not bound to natural youth; it is actually rooted in a much more substantial youthfulness. It bestows on mankind a “not yet” that is entirely superior to and distinct from the failing strength of man’s natural hope. Hence it gives man such a “long” future that the past seems “short” however long and rich his life. The theological virtue of hope is the power to wait patiently for a “not yet” that is the more immeasurably distant from us the more closely we approach it.