One bright and sunny Saturday this past July, I took my high school teacher and almost lifelong mentor Sister Camella Gambale’s advice. Though it meant delaying a cherished annual trip to visit friends at their lovely lakeside summer home in Sunapee, New Hampshire, I attended with her Sister Joan Chittister’s lecture at Boston College. The speech was well worth the detour.

Of course, unknowingly, Sister Joan began her talk with an explanation of some of the guiding principles behind our own “Heart Beats.” She described an awful incident that had taken place in the town where her Benedictine monastery is located. Somehow an unsuspecting, non-violent, and mentally challenged man had been duped into robbing a bank. Whoever had intercepted him was able to rig him with explosives. He committed the theft, making no effort to escape from the authorities, and horrifyingly, before they could defuse the bomb, it exploded, killing the poor soul.

As you can imagine, such an odd and sensational story soon had every inch of Sister’s hometown crawling with reporters. News of the incident was carried to places far across the world and even made it into the “New York Times.”

At around the same time, right across town, lived a nun who had moved home to care for her elderly father. She soon organized a youth group in the badly deteriorated, dangerous neighborhood that her Dad still called home. The teens she mobilized worked as a united front, ridding the area of litter, fixing up property, planting flowers, and obliterating a lot of the crime. What they accomplished was nothing short of amazing, yet, aside from a small article in the local paper, no one cared to report on their activities. Sister Joan wisely asked her audience why we are so preoccupied with the sensational while leaving behind the truly phenomenal.

My husband often tells me that “Heart Beats” is so popular precisely because it is a “good news” paper, presenting articles that show the positive side of life in a world that too often dwells on its negative aspects. I think that there must be some short circuit in our emotional and intellectual wiring that too often leads us to become bogged down in what is wrong instead of exalting in what is right about life. Terrorist attacks in London, hurricanes smashing into the Gulf Coast, casualty lists from Iraq, rapidly and constantly escalating fuel prices, these are the topics of conversation that spin around me whenever someone I don’t know well is talking to me.

Sometimes it’s not much better, even when speaking with my best friends, as they often spin tales of impending personal doom, promising that ill health, joblessness, and advancing old age will be the only outcome to life. People fear not having enough money, forgetting what Mother Teresa once said when opening a home for the destitute in New York: there are many different types of poverty, but one of the worst is the absence of love.

People think that their labor is meaningless, overlooking what St. Francis of Assisi pledged when he said, “Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take with you nothing that you have received – only what you have given: a full heart enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice and courage.” People feel that they are not prominent, attractive or wealthy enough, forgetting their true importance lies in their interconnectedness, as Albert Einstein advised, “...We are here for the sake of each other – above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy.” It’s a thought expressed more simply by George Eliot who asked, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”

Today people seem more pessimistic than ever, more fearful, more upset. They could use a healthy dosage of the following advice from Ralph Waldo Emerson and should swallow it with a spoonful of sugar: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” It is up to us to know what to do with each moment we are given and to work unceasingly toward turning all times into the “best of times.”

Why then is it that our pleasures seem more fleeting than our pain; that our minds too often turn to the darkness and away from the light that shines all around us; that we see our failings more than we celebrate our successes; that we lose hope and lose heart? “Faith, hope and love, these three things,” St. Paul advises, “and the greatest of these is love.” He should have added that the most difficult of these seems to be hope.

Remember when you were a child how effortlessly you bounced around in the bright bubble that was summer’s splendor? Carefree days of little responsibility faded all too fast into the realities of working, bill paying, caretaking, and time managing.

Life can seem to overwhelm us and it will, if we do not have hope. Mary, my spiritual director, provided me with the following quote from Vaclav Havel, “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Our challenge is to connect the dots in the puzzle that is our lives so that we see the divine logic in the seemingly random events and know that the pattern does indeed make sense.

Like most people, every so often I sit around dejectedly thinking that I’m not fully enjoying my life. Take this summer for instance. Having gone to Italy in April, our travel budget was pretty much exhausted, so our summer didn’t feature any vacations, except for our annual trek to the All Ford National Car Show in Carlisle, Pennsylvania during a weekend in June, a highlight for my husband, but needless to say, for me, that place couldn’t quite compete with the splendor of ancient Rome and the beauty of the Amalfi Drive. Now I could have sat around thinking that this was a dull summer, but luckily when that mood struck me, I got out my photo album, now housed on my computer, thanks to the marvels of the digital camera.

In front of me blazed the images of an unforgettable and dynamic summer in pictures of the many friends and family gathered at our home for parties, the “Heart Beats” staff, the Fontbonne Chorus, included; in the visits of long-distance cousins Andrew, Tanya and their daughter Camryn from Cleveland; Joey, Carroll, Raquel, and Laura from New York; and Gabriella from Houston; in the celebrations held here to mark my friend John’s well deserved promotion to the partnership; in lazy sunny days spent swimming in the pool; in the smile of a young girl, laughing at our dog, Belle, the lifeguard; in hospitality extended and companionship shared with newly resurfaced friends and with those who have been there all along in our journeys.

From the computer screen, their faces smile out at me. They have blessed my life, and I can only hope that I have blessed theirs too. The once overlooked realization dawns now in breathtaking splendor. What has seemed a difficult period because of the actions of some has in fact been redeemed by the love of so many others. It’s easy to see in the photos that the good is always greater than the bad. You just have to take time to weigh it in the balance, to look for the evidence and you’ll find that there is cause for hope.

As summer fades into the fall, take time to review your own photo album from the past few months and to rejoice in the joys that are recorded there. You’ll probably be astonished at how many happy “Kodak” or “PC” moments are there to be treasured forever.

I’m looking at the pictures of Joey and his family now. Inspired by his daughter’s college quest, he came to visit us in Boston for the first time in forty-one years, and yet, he was amazed when we took the day off to show them around town and to bring them to Auntie Connie’s house where all the relatives gathered that evening to greet them.

Somehow we never seem to realize how important we are to others, any more than we realize how important we are to God. We are so deeply loved and so capable of loving, and that is perhaps the greatest source of our hope for ourselves and for our world.

– Carole Anne Scott