Ken Sehested
Processional. “Tango,” featuring jazz songstress Dianne Reeves. When the Spirit transcends human language, and faith, hope, and love join in a brawl with all who would foreclose history’s predicted demise.
Invocation. “It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
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The power arrangements of every “commonwealth” is to justify uncommon wealth, the status where the few regulate the many. Or in the words of Rebecca Solnit, “They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything. . . .” (Her full quote is below.)
What follows are four testimonies of the subversive character of bona fide hope: hope which emboldens rather than enervates resistance and imaginative response, which spawns agency rather than suppresses it. Such hope leads to “reading history from below,” which means “a type of historical narrative which attempts to account for historical events from the perspective of common people rather than leaders. There is an emphasis on disenfranchised, the oppressed, the poor, the nonconformists, and otherwise marginal groups.” (“People’s History,” Wikipedia)
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Word. “I never have been in despair about the world. Enraged. I’ve been enraged about the world, but never despair. I cannot afford despair. You can’t tell the children that there is no hope.” —James Baldwin
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From Rebecca Solnit
They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.
The Wobblies [nickname of the Industrial Workers of the World, an international labor union founded in Chicago in 1905] used to say don’t mourn, organize, but you can do both at once and you don’t have to organize right away in this moment of furious mourning. You can be heartbroken or furious or both at once; you can scream in your car or on a cliff; you can also get up tomorrow and water the flowerpots and call someone who’s upset and check your equipment for going onward.
A lot of us are going to come under direct attack, and a lot of us are going to resist by building solidarity and sanctuary. Gather up your resources, the metaphysical ones that are heart and soul and care, as well as the practical ones.
People kept the faith in the dictatorships of South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in the East Bloc countries and the USSR, women are protesting right now in Iran and people there are writing poetry. There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good. You can keep walking whether it’s sunny or raining. Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.
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Word. “I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.” —Maya Angelou
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From Brené Brown
Despair is a claustrophobic feeling. It’s the emotion that says, “Nothing will ever change.” It’s different than anger or sadness or grief.
Despair is twinged with hopelessness. People who subscribe to power-over leadership often weaponize despair. They count on people giving up on themselves, their work, and each other. I get it. I’m looking at people I know with suspicion. I’m questioning the value of my work. I’m wondering if courage, kindness, and caring for each other simply don’t matter anymore. I’m desperate for someone to blame because blame is an effective way to discharge pain and it gives us a sense of counterfeit control.
The research shows that hope is a powerful antidote to despair. What’s interesting, however, is that hope is not an emotion (C. R. Snyder). Hope is a cognitive-behavioral process. It’s about having a goal, a pathway to achieve that goal, and a sense of agency or “I can do this.”
Right now, the thing that is helping the most is micro-dosing hope. I have no access to big hope right now, however, I am asking myself how I can support the people around me. The people on my team, in my community. How can I make sure that, in the maelstrom of my emotions, I stay committed to courage, kindness, and caring for others regardless of the choices made by others? Doing the smallest next right thing is hard AF, but sometimes it’s all we’ve got.
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Word. The US economy’s historical context that brought us to where we are now: Between 1979-2021, worker productivity increased by 64.6%. Worker pay was up 17.3%. CEO pay growth increased by 1,460%. —Economic Policy Institute
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From Cody Sanders
Sanders, Associate Professor of Congregational and Community Care Leadership at Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, Minnesota, has written one of the most engaging articles on the substance and source of hope that I’ve read in a very long time. In particular, he calls out the confusion of hope with optimism and the pervasive narrative of historical progression.
If you want to ground yourself in the character of hope that moves beyond a lucky-rabbit’s-foot faith and unicorn fantasy, you need to explore the depths of his essay on “feral hope.”
“In the midst of all the bewildering and enervating aspects of our present life, we are often called on to hope. But some hope is easily captivated by the present of the world, and can, in fact, lead to more anxiety. But true hope, that which the author terms ‘feral hope’ is not domesticated, but is the transforming hope of the God of Jesus Christ.”
“Feral Hope for Futurist Leaders” isn’t a quick read. But I think it’s worth your time.
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Word. “Life is short and easy to sleep through. Let yourself be disrupted. Confusion is a grace. Try not to get over it. And in the confusion of falling in love with the poor, allow your world to fall apart—and let it come back together again, if it ever does.” —words of an unnamed Salvadoran priest, quoted by Katie Funk, a writer from Wichita, Kansas, in a Mennonite Central Committee News Service story, “Confusion Is a Grace,” January 3, 1992
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From our colonial history with my own commentary
Hope is not hope absent the context of threat. In our time, the rise of Christian Nationalism is reminiscent of our nation’s earliest colonial history in New England, when being a church member was coterminous with being a citizen of the state—and the terms of the former were defined by the latter.
In November 1644 the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted legislation which stigmatized Ana/Baptists as the most dangerous to the state, beginning with a refusal to baptize infants (a state-enforced mandate) but extending to additional stipulations.
“Forasmuch as experience hath plentifully and often proved that since the first rising of the Anabaptists . . . they have been the incendiaries of the Commonwealth . . . It is ordered and agreed that if any person, or persons, within this jurisdiction, shall either openly condemn or oppose the baptizing of infants . . . or shall deny the ordinance of magistracy, or their lawful right and authority to make war, or to punish the outward breaches of the first table . . . shall be sentenced to banishment.”
Earlier, in 1635 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony authorities banished religious dissenter Roger Williams (who went on to found the first Baptist congregation in the New World), the first of four charges against him was that he held “that we have not our land by patent from the king, but that the natives are the true owners of it, and that we ought to repent of such a receiving of it by patent.”
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Benediction
Life for many of us—in this aftermath of the election of an authoritarian president, backed by both house of Congress and a majority of Supreme Court justices—seems to be coming apart. Apocalyptic. But remember that the accent on the word apocalyptic is not catastrophe but uncovering.
Such uncovering creates a sphere of freedom: What was hidden is now made clear; accordingly, what was previously obscure and shrouded can now be clearly acknowledged and thwarted. Not only in open acts of resistance but also in counter narratives, of stories created or unearthed that give an alternate account of history’s destiny, rooted in a beatific vision of what life can look like when flourishing and generative, living parables that anticipate the time to come when lion and lamb will dwell together in peace, when swords will be forged into plowshares, when the meek will inherit the earth, when all tears will be dried.
As has been written: For you shall go out in joy and be led back in peace; the mountains bursting in song, the trees in applause. (cf. Isaiah 55:12)
Building resilient communities, of both persevering resistance to the world-as-it-is and joyful enactment of what is promised, guided by beatific vision, is our hopeful and steadfast task.
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Recessional. “Tomorrow’s Cost,” music video by Secret Agent 23 Skidoo, an Asheville-based hip-hop artist and band, with vivid and painful film clips from the aftermath of Helene’s destruction in Asheville. This is the context from which real hope emerges.
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