Ministers Musings
From Whence Cometh Hope?
I’ve seen Hope. I’ve smelled it in dank hallways of Single Room Occupancy Hotels, when would-be loners dared to open their doors to a twenty-something young whipper-snapper of the community organizer, because she, in turn, had dared to invite herself into their lives.
I’ve seen Hope. I’ve heard it in the fierce determination of gritty grandmothers, reaching out to their neighbors to ensure safety for their grandchildren whom they are raising in the midst of apartment buildings filled with drug dealers.
I’ve seen Hope. I’ve walked it with immigrants shedding fear and meekness to demand their basic rights of heat and hot water in the rat infested studio apartments where they raise their families.
I’ve seen Hope. And it was a privilege to behold.
The Hope I’m talking about isn’t the idealistic hope wrapped in pietistic prayers for world peace, nor is it the shallow hope for the trappings of the ego – the Hollywood hopes for thinner thighs, or the Walmart hopes for the best deal. The Hope I’m talking about is that hope that brings new life to the ice-encrusted soil of our souls. It’s the hope that arrives when we’ve been down so long, we don’t even know what up is anymore.
And I saw that hope most vividly when I worked as a community organizer in one of San Francisco’s most diverse and treacherous neighborhoods, called, oddly enough, the Tenderloin. In the barren soil of a neighborhood where strung-out prostitutes roam the streets with Vietnamese immigrant children, where mentally ill seniors go to disappear for the rest of their lives, where buses from San Quentin prison in posh Marin County drop off their paroles — in this neighborhood, any sign of hope shone as brightly as the first vivid yellow crocuses that broke through the barren earth of my desert plains front yard.
Rachel was a thirty-something schitzophrenic woman living with her stumbling alcoholic partner, Martin, in a studio apartment on the fringe of the Tenderloin. When I met Rachel, she spoke with her hands covering her mouth, as if her words were of no import. Rachel was an artist and a poet, with, as you might imagine, a brilliant imagination. Martin, although also insightful and artistic, had never managed to get out from behind his addiction in the close to 10 years that I knew him. And Rachel, the dutiful co-dependent, always made sure he had enough beer to remain placated.
Initially, as I met with Rachel and her neighbors about the safety problems they were experiencing in their building, Rachel would share in private both her fears, and her rights. But when it came time to plan a tenant association meeting, Rachel would only volunteer to make coffee.
Over the course of many, many months, Rachel’s hands dropped from her mouth, her voice became louder, and she began to be able to articulate not only to me, but to her neighbors, and ultimately to her landlord, not only her wishes, but her demands for dignity and respect, made manifest in a building that was safe and secure. She became a pivotal leader in this little tenant association’s David and Goliath victory over a powerful landlord for basic housing rights.
As she became able to name for herself these demands for leading a life of respect, she slowly was able to remove herself from a relationship that was disempowering her. Within a year of the experience of working together with neighbors to name and claim her tenant rights, Rachel left Martin and named and claimed some more rights to her own soul.
You may have heard me say before that it was in the Tenderloin where I saw what I sometimes call “God” moving in the world – in that space where I witnessed people moving from despair to hope. Rachel’s story is but one of many that inform my theology of Hope.
For we religious liberals have a history of being a hopeful lot. Liberal theology is a child of the Enlightenment of the 18th century, when the use of reason first challenged traditional theological constructs of unquestioned divine revelation. In this country, liberal theology sprouted in the mid-eighteen hundreds, primarily through the oration of Congregationalist-turned-Unitarian minster, William Ellery Channing, and primarily in opposition to oppressive Calvinist theology and Puritanical thought. Unitarianism, and to a much quieter degree Universalism, emphasized divine benevolence and human goodness in a time when such thoughts were preposterous. The “Transcendentalist” strand of Unitarianism in particular highlighted humanity’s capacity to ‘transcend’ any obstacles put before it by sheer moral will-power.
By the end of the 19th century, liberalism had transcended the marginal denominations of Unitarianism, liberal Congregationalism and Universalism, and become a part of mainstream Protestantism. Two main factors contributed to this: Darwinism and the theory of evolution, and the use of biblical and historical criticism. The Bible, as the unerring word of God, was being dismantled by scientists and historians alike, while human ethical morality was elevated to Godly proportions.
But liberalism’s optimism was shaken in the 20th century, first with World War I and the rise of fascism in Europe, followed by the Great Depression, World War II, and the horrors of the Holocaust. God’s infinite goodness to create moral human beings also capable of infinite goodness was seriously challenged by the humanity’s seemingly infinite capacity for evil. At this point, we ‘good liberals’ were rightfully criticized for not having an adequately articulated theology of sin and evil, allowing neo-conservative religions with doctrinal answers to good and evil to gain footing again in this country. Even more shameful were the vast majority of churches that failed to live up to liberalism’s theological imperatives around ethics and morality.
Since the 1970’s, liberation theologies, especially those from Latin America, which interpreted the life of Jesus as that of a radical transformer of the social order, gained prominence and were a significant part of social revolutions in Central America. Feminist theology, with its focus on dismantling oppressive patriarchy, also contributed to liberal theology’s resurgence late last century. The resurgence of liberal theology came about in a new way – through the lived experiences of the oppressed. Perhaps as a corrective to earlier religious liberalism, liberation theology, feminist theology, and later muerhista and womanist (Latina and Black women’s theology) along with Queer theology, were all accompanied by liberation movements. Theology in this case was derived from lived experience, not from ivory tower intellectuals.
Today, liberal theology has divergent strands, typical of what we often experience in our Unitarian Universalist congregations – a post-Christian, often post-theistic humanist strand, and a strand that seeks to blend mysticism with living in the modern world. But the center of liberal religion remains constant – an optimistic belief in humanity’s moral tendencies toward the Good. Even in the face of continued violence, we believe, as a broad religious movement, that the Universe bends toward justice, perhaps in a very, very long arch, but toward justice nonetheless. [I am grateful to my colleague, the Rev. Paul Rasor, and his book, “Faith Without Certainty: Liberal Theology in the 21st Century (Skinner House, 2005) for this synopsis of the history of liberal theology.]
Ron asked me “From whence cometh hope in our UU movement?” While tracing its historical roots, I started to wonder if Ron’s question to me isn’t really about whether we are in another crisis in the history of liberal religion.
Did God, or Hope, die in the World Trade Center, or on the streets of Kabul or Baghdad, or on the melting polar ice caps, or in Guatenamo Bay? Are we, in the face of continued violence and destruction, finally reaching the end of our capacity to believe in the Good?
Unitarian Universalists need Hope grounded in reality. And when reality is a body politic that debates whether holding someone’s head under water until he almost drowns is a form of torture or not, reality can look appear pretty dismal.
Yet hope is far more than a reasoned response to life. I’m not sure we can think our way into a hopeful state. I think Hope needs to be experienced. Not only that, I think it is essential that we continue to seek out hopeful experiences, even if, or especially if, we are beginning to experience more and more of life as destructive, and having a harder and harder time noticing the crocuses bursting forth, or imagining those 5th and 6th graders being the ones to cure AIDS, as Michelle Itano has sought out to do.I actually think that’s why people seek out religious congregations like our own. In the midst of a world that seems chaotic and fragmented, where many of humanity’s actions can be characterized as simultaneously shameful and frightening, hope is the re-weaving of the threads of beloved community amongst the carnage of destruction.
I know that this alone may not seem like enough, and sometimes, it surely isn’t. Sometimes, rather than seeking the comfort of another’s hand, our hands must reach out in protest. Sometimes, rather than connecting in the comfort of a community of like-minded souls, our bodies must travel to unknown, beaten down places, sit down with the oppressed, ask them how it is with them. Sometimes, rather than bemoaning the state of the world, we must rise to meet it, knowing that our own privilege may be at stake.
Hope continues to be a powerful thread in liberal religion, despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the state of the world.
Today’s UU theologians still center around the theme of hope:
Sharon Welch, now a provost at our UU seminary in Chicago, Meadville Lombard, talks about the need to develop an ‘ethic of risk’ –risking to get out of our comfort zones, perhaps out of our comfortable despair, and engage in the world, knowing that “we can not guarantee decisive change in the near future, or even in our lifetimes”, but that we must continue in the work of justice nonetheless.
Thandeka, UU theologian and senior research professor at Meadville-Lombard, our UU seminary in Chicago writes an even more personal theological account of hope in our hymnals:
Despair is my private pain
Born from what I have failed to say
Failed to do, failed to overcome.
bq. Be still my inner self
Let me rise to you, let me reach you
Down into your pain
And soothe you.
bq. I turn to you to renew my life
I turn to the world, the streets of
The city, the worn tapestries of brokerage firms,
bq. Drug dealers, private estates,
Personal things in the bag lady’s cart
bq. Rage and pain in the faces that turn from me
Afraid of their own inner worlds.
bq. This common world I love anew,
As the life blood of generations,
Who refused to surrender their humanity
In an inhumane world
Courses through my veins.
bq. From within this world
My despair is transformed to hope
bq. And I begin anew
The legacy of caring.
As I’ve circled around this topic of hope, wondering ‘from whence cometh hope?’ in our UU context, and, perhaps, how do we keep hope alive in a troubled world, I’m starting to wonder: Can we afford not to? Living in our despair only allows us to create a self-fulfilling prophesy about the desparate state of the world.
The hope we must keep alive must be powerful enough to roll away stones, powerful enough to break through the encrusted winter of our souls. It must involve connection –connection to our communities of solidarity so we can replenish ourselves. It must involve risk –risking to extend ourselves beyond our comfort zones, ask the hard questions, speak truth to power, and lend our hands, our thoughts and our actions toward endeavors toward good of which we may or may not ever see the consequences.
Let the Springtime be a reminder that renewal is possible. And let the outstretched hands of this community be a reminder of the legacy of caring that exists in our little corner of the world alone.
I’ve seen Hope. It is a privilege to behold, and essential to our survival.
Amen, and Blessed Be.