Hélder Câmara
1909-1999 20th century
Hope that takes risks: keeping watch in the night and believing the desert can bloom.
Who was Hélder Câmara?
A Brazilian bishop of the Northeast, he left the episcopal palace of Recife for a few rooms behind a sacristy. Every night he rose at two to keep vigil and write his meditations; every day he defended the poor and the tortured of the dictatorship, which banned even his name from the press for thirteen years. Several times considered for the Nobel Peace Prize, he spent his life repeating that the desert itself can become fertile.
In their own words
Pilgrim: when your ship, long moored in harbour, gives you the illusion of being a house; when your ship begins to put down roots in the stagnant water by the quay: put out to sea. Save your boat's journeying soul, and your own pilgrim soul, cost what it may.
Hope without risk is not hope, which is believing in risky loving, trusting others in the dark, the blind leap letting God take over.
If you disagree with me, you have something to give me.