Insured by Hope

First as to my title: like many other titles it is a quotation, but in this case one that is not very readily identifiable, even by the highly literate. It is a quotation from a sentence I once wrote in a Christmas letter. The sentence was: "The farmer is insured by hope against all failure." It was written at the end of a disastrous season when a combination of drought and excessive rainfall had undone altogether the crops on which our neighbors in South Carolina depended. So autumn found them with almost no reward from their toil of the spring and summer. But as soon as fall rains came, and it was time to prepare the land and plant grain for the next spring's harvest, the focus shifted at once from the failure of the past season to plans for the next. Everybody tightened his belt and looked ahead. It struck me then that the eternal succession of the seasons does in some real sense insure the person who works with soil and growing things. He is "insured by hope."

Then it struck me that we can all be insured in the same way. Life is a continuity, out of one life springs the next, out of one stage of our single experience arises the next stage; we are not the grave of the past so much as the seedbed of the future. And no life stands alone, but we are all knit together in an unending chain of creation and growth and interaction. The Church puts it in the phrase, "We are all one body in Christ." As long as these bonds remain and we know ourselves continuous with the whole life, we cannot fail. The knowledge of this unity makes us whole. We are insured by hope.