Yes, there is reason to hope!

I confess that I am a bit of what I will call a click-aholic.  I sign up for Zoom workshops that are recorded so you can watch them later and subscribe to newsletters from people and organizations that I like.  All of which then puts me on other lists of other interesting organizations (and some I could care less about), and my inbox becomes unmanageable.  There is no way that I could actually read or watch all of the things that I subscribe to and I often go for weeks without looking at any of it, but once in awhile my eye catches something that captures my attention.  It happened this morning when I noticed a post from Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation.  This is part of what it said:

Organizer and activist Mariame Kaba reflects on hope as a discipline. 

For me, hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism….

The idea of hope being a discipline is something I heard from a nun many years ago who was talking about it in conjunction with making sure we were of the world and in the world, [not focused on the afterlife but the here and now]…The hope that she was talking about was this grounded hope that was practiced every day….

I bowed down to that. I heard that many years ago, and then I felt the sense of, “Oh my God. That speaks to me as a philosophy of living, that hope is a discipline and that we have to practice it every single day.” Because in the world we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that nothing is going to change ever…. I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. I choose to think a different way, and I choose to act in a different way. I choose to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy.

I take a long view, understanding full well that I’m just a tiny, little part of a story that already has a huge antecedent and has something that is going to come after that. I’m definitely not going to be even close to around for seeing the end of it. That also puts me in the right frame of mind: that … [what] I’m doing is actually pretty insignificant in world history, but if it’s significant to one or two people, I feel good about that….

When I read this, I reflected on a question that was asked in our service last week, “What can I do?” There are certainly things that we all can do in these difficult times:  write letters; make phone calls; contribute to organizations, stay informed.  As was also shared last Sunday we can do small and caring things for the people around us.  And, of course, we can pray. 

I also believe that staying hopeful is “doing something.”  One of the other posts that I stumbled upon this week was from a Juneteenth sermon delivered by Dr. Lauranett Lee.  She was preaching on the mustard seed text and talked about seeds being planted during the horrendous years of slavery, she said:  “And yet—within that system of oppression, seeds were planted.  Hidden seeds. Seeds of faith.  Seed of resistance and resilience.  Seeds of prayer and possibility.  Seeds of family and a future life in freedom. Seeds of hope.”

Yes, it is true, that there is much to grieve these days, things that break our hearts every day, and the good news is that we can still plant seeds of hope—who knows when or how they may sprout.  But it begins with the planting and that is something we can do now.