Hope

Hope

I’ve been thinking a lot about hope lately, perhaps because hope seems hard to come by at times. Yet, hope is fundamental to our Christian faith. We talk about hoping that Covid-19 will no longer be a threat. We hope for peace, justice and unity. We hope our political agendas work out. We hope our children are happy. We hope our favorite football team wins. All of these involve looking to the future with the wish that things happen the way we would like. Is this real hope or wishful thinking? The Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron, says that hope “comes from a feeling that we lack something…from a sense of poverty” and “robs us from the present moment.” I have struggled with her statement for quite a while – a few years to be honest. I can’t deny the truth that focusing on some imagined better future can rob us of the beauty of the present moment. Yet, it seems to me that Christian hope is something more. It doesn’t rob us but rather, propels us.

I came to this notion of hope in a rather surprising way. I had been thinking and talking about “fierce hope” – by that I mean an expectation that fights back against the despair I see around me and at times fall into. A deeper understanding came together for me in a discussion with my grandchildren. As a COVID quarantine activity we have been reading The Lord of the Rings together.  We join each other over Zoom once a week to discuss what we have been reading. If you recall, The Lord of the Rings is all about hope in the face of hopelessness – particularly once you get to The Return of the King. Hope in this context is not a confident expectation that things will work out the way one wishes but rather a force that moves one forward against all odds. Hope, then, is active, full of energy and propels us to create the future we are dreaming of even if that seems futile at the moment. Perhaps the more relevant question is: how do we nurture and sustain that kind of fierce hope?

I would propose two paths that are interwoven. As Christians we believe that all of creation is infused with the goodness of God and that we are moving toward fullness and completion. Hope invites us to be co-creators with God in bringing forth that future. Secondly, in the same way that we need one another to be the Body of Christ, we need one another to sustain hope. There are moments when I can see God at work and can share that with others. There are other times when I am lost and need someone to point the way for me. Let us together live this fierce hope and let it propel us into the future God is inviting us to share.

—Suanne Reed

Putting on the Mind of Christ in Complex Times

How does Christ’s way of thinking influence the complexity and challenge of living in the world while growing into Christ’s set of values-spiritual poverty, a capacity for humiliation or contempt, and humility?

Since Covid-19, the complexity and challenge of living in the world while growing into Christ’s set of values have shifted enormously. Covid-19 has shouted it loud and clear across the length, breadth, height and depth of the entire earth: no to an economy of exclusion; no to the new idolatry of money; no to a financial system which rules rather than serves; no to the inequality which spawns violence( Chapter 2, The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis Apostolic Exhortation).

Covid-19 is calling the whole world, all cultures, all social groupings to purification and growth, offering the Church, the Body of Christ, a marvelous opportunity through social media to bear witness to a…new way of living together in fidelity to the Gospel ( p47, The Joy of the Gospel). Therefore, in this Covid-19 environment, Pope John Paul XXIII’s sentiment is a timeless one…in our times, divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations which, by human effort and even beyond all expectations, are directed to the fulfilment of God’s superior and inscrutable designs, in which everything, even human setbacks, leads to the greater good of the Church (p44, The Joy of the Gospel). — Celpha Sands

Some thoughts on the start of 2021

Hello, 2021

Like so many, I had hoped that 2021 would be a bit, I don’t know, easier.  Gentler.  A word that comes frequently to my mind is gentle – one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit according to St. Paul, and the opposite of how our world feels right now.  Perhaps, in the chaos of the news cycle and the instability COVID has exacerbated or created in so many lives, God is still whispering, gently, for us to pay attention – not only to creation, but to each other.

How do we do this?  There’s a wonderful commentary on the Spiritual Exercises by Dean Brackley where he insightfully notes that very few of us can really look at reality; it’s simply too hard.  The number of 400,000 COVID deaths is almost too much to take in.  The riot on the Capitol and violence in the hearts of so many invites us to look away, to want to make the situation we are in less dire—less manifestly ugly.  God does not invite us to look away from a world that is hurting, but to sit with God sitting with that world, looking for how to grow peace and love.

How do we do this?  I would say that January 6th was not so much an invitation but an imperative – a call to root out racism, misinformation, and violence.  And I do not want to say this from a place of self-righteousness or virtue-signaling, but as a difficult task in which we are all asked to take part.  After the election in 2016, I made a conscious decision to leave social media.  My conclusion was that it was making me a more angry, less connected human being.  Since the advent of COVID, like so many, much of my connection now comes on-line, but I have not returned to Facebook, Twitter, or the like.  This has helped me take each human that I meet as they are when I meet them. It has helped me see my own self-righteousness and dismissiveness more clearly. My own spiritual director reminded me, yesterday, that this how Jesus meets people – even when their demons are manifest, he sits with them, talks to them, and for those who want it, heals them.

As anyone who has come back from surgery knows, healing sometimes hurts.  Healing can leave scar tissue or even change the shape of and substance of the person or thing healed.  We also rarely heal ourselves – healing often calls for listening to experts and letting go of power and control.  Healing involves trust and humility.  This country needs healing, and racism, which still exists even in so many churches, needs to recognized as the malignancy it is and excised. The fact that the same mob that chants Jesus can erect a gallows is something with which I am sitting, something that breaks my heart. Our churches and faith clearly need to change. What emerges will look different, and that’s good. We have to trust that God still has a dream for us and for this world, but that it’s time for some old forms to pass away. 

Take a minute, today, and try to dream a better world with God.  God speaking, even now. Maybe, especially now.  Can you make space to listen? To change?

Alison Umminger Mattison