love sustains

Hell is the place where nobody loves anyone or anything, and nothing ever happens that is new. You can be surrounded by the hateful, the deceitful and the indifferent - you be can be utterly isolated - and still not remain in that place. You can draw love out of yourself; anything other than none is enough. You can love the trees and the stars and the wide solid ground and the way the wind searches out holes in your coat because it wants to be near you. The silent world echoes back whatever you pour out into it, like a whisper in an enormous room.

Where there's love there's life and where there's life there's hope.
This is causation. Love, and there will eventually be hope.

Consider this also.

You're the result of an enormous succession of people having kids and managing to keep them alive to grow up. Somewhere along that line - your parents, their parents, your great-aunts and uncles from the times of old - somebody dreamed of the future and loved you in advance. Someone was rooting for you even though they didn't know exactly who you'd be. Every time one of your ancestors got fed up with the troubles of their time and thought to themselves, "curse these troubles! someday I hope these are gone from the world!" they might not even have known it but they were hoping it for you. You live in a world they could never have imagined in their wildest dreams.

And you live. You're alive, right now. You may not feel like this is a big deal; it may not seem to be doing you very much good. But every moment you live you have the power to make the world a little more like heaven. Just by loving it. So many people are choosing to do otherwise that it might feel pretty small, but it isn't.

Love is stronger than destruction because it makes connections, it binds together, it multiplies and sustains. It opens up space around itself and makes room for what's new. Like those ancestors dreaming of a world with you in it, when you make room in yourself for something new and good, you open up the possibility of sharing that good with others.

And that's how this world becomes more like the kingdom of heaven. Where we share joyful things with the people we love, and discover new wonders together.