Everything is riven. Despair would be a natural response. Despair would in some way sidestep for a moment the opacity of a world made by the day more calamitous and unbearable, being that despair has a way of collapsing in on itself, being that despair becomes its own weight to bear, being that it strangely shutters for a time the weight that gave way to it. We are meaning-making beings, after all, and despair is a natural response to that which is abjectly unintelligible. We live in a world that has become abjectly unintelligible.

At certain moments in the unfolding of the human, the world becomes unintelligible by the fact that the way we are conditioned to see it is no longer sufficient for what is emerging.

Read more from Sunday’s meditation on hope.