01.27.06
Born into Hope
I’m kind of at a loss as to what to say about this film. I thought Kyle’s words, “Art is Nonviolence” were appropriate.
Art is also hope. Art is change.
I almost titled this entry “Born into Complacency” because I left the film with somewhat of the question “What on earth am I wasting my time doing?” But I realized that not only is this film, about the children of prostitutes in calcutta, NOT about despair, but it is intrinsically about Hope.
Surely I can sit and applaud those who are at this moment living lives of reckless abandon to create change. I hope my time will come soon. I know my time will come soon.
I’ve emailed the kids this morning already. I wanted to email Kochi in particular. Apparently like most people, Missy and I fell in love with her almost immediately. But there were others that needed to hear how incredibly hopeful I was after the film.
Please see this film. Please buy a print if you can. Please envision a future of hope.
01.19.06
Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day, who founded her Houses of Hospitality and the Catholic Worker movement and newspaper in New York in the 1930’s and 40’s, combined a radical social critique with almost daily Mass attendance and a sometimes soft Catholic piety and practice. She remains for many Americans an icon of a proper and pricely integration of politics and spirituality. Her Catholic Worker houses have spread all over North America, and they insist on both hands-on service to and solidarity with human suffering. Her vision combined immediate service, healing and education of persons, along with public and institutional critique-each a necessary and needed level of social justice ministry. When people asked her if she was a saint, she said, “Don’t try to dismiss me that easily”! The Archdiocese of New York has, nevertheless, appealed for her to be formally canonized as St. Dorothy Day of New York.
01.13.06
Early
It’s 3:47 in the morning. In the next hour, I’ll see Phil Storer on my way to picking up Blake and Eric Skidmore. The three of us are on our way to this:
http://www.cacradicalgrace.org/conferences/politics/politics_overview.html
01.04.06
No good thing ever dies…
In light of all the aching, all the hurt, I want to remind us of some hope, some beauty.
In Life is Beautiful, Guido and his son, Giosue, are taken away to a concentration camp. During that time, Guido convinces his son that they are at summer camp and that they are playing a large secretive game. The boy does not see the hurt, the pain, the torture and the hate around him. He only sees joy, beauty, happiness and the love of his father…a father who sacrifices himself in order to save the son. We hope and pray and believe in a Kingdom come, a reality among us, so that we too may only see joy, beauty, happiness and love in the midst of our hurt, pain, torture and hate.
Denison Witmer says in his song Remember the Things You Have Seen:
Day after Day
Buildings that stretch
Only hope can touch that high
Rivers Divide
Treetops that line
How I tried
How I tried
Remember the things you have seen
The sun that shines down on the world so still
Think of the places you’ll go
Somewhere the language sounds like music to your ears
Only hope can touch as high as we sometimes need to go. If we can remember our lives as things of beauty, including the pain and sorrow, then we will see as He sees. Do we have ears to hear and eyes to see?
Theologian N.T. Wright reminds us in this essay that the Kingdom is among us. No longer are we to see “heaven” as a future place to inhabit. We are to see it as a possible and necessary reality of our lives here on earth. We are invited to the table of suffering in order that we may more deeply understand forgiveness, reconciliation and peace:
In the new heavens and the new earth there will be no more sea, no more chaos, no more monsters coming up from the abyss. And, as with all Christian eschatology, the best news of all is that we don’t have to wait for the future to start experiencing our deliverance from evil. We are invited, summoned, bidden to start living this way right now. I suspect that the problems this poses for us, the immediate problems of forgiving ourselves and forgiving our neighbours, are the real problems, and the philosophical ones the smokescreen behind which we hide from them. And I suspect, therefore, that the more we learn the meaning of forgiveness in our own lives, the more we shall glimpse the deep theological truth that all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne patterns his life in such a manner that the walls, the wardens and Hadleys of the world cannot quench the hope inside of him. Hope for justice, hope for freedom, hope for peace. His quiet manner of living out this reality had a profound and eternal impact on those others who were with him, particularly Red.
Before he fully understands who Andy is and therefore who he can be himself, we find Red uttering the following warning to Andy: “Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane. It’s got no use on the inside. You better get used to that.”
Later in the story, we find Red reading these words of Andy’s after being released from Prison, a place Andy escaped years earlier: “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
By the end of the story, our man is so transformed by the power and beauty of hope and love that he says the following: “I find I’m so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.”
May we live our lives with such power.
Henri Nouwen says it all so well, I can do nothing to improve it:
The years that lie behind you, with all their struggles and pains, will in time be remembered only as the way that led to your new life. But as long as the new life is not fully yours, your memories will continue to cause you pain. When you keep reliving painful events of the past, you can feel victimized by them. But there is a way of telling your story that does not create pain. Then, also, the need to tell your story will become less pressing. You will see that you are no longer there: the past is gone, the pain has left you, you no longer have to go back and relive it, you no longer depend on your past to identify yourself.
There are two ways of telling your story. One is to tell it compulsively and urgently, to keep returning to it because you see your present suffering as the result of your past experiences. But there is another way. You can tell your story from the place where it no longer dominates you. You can speak about it with a certain distance and see it as the way to your present freedom. The compulsion to tell your story is gone. From the perspective of the life you now live and the distance you now have, your past does not loom over you. It has lost its weight and can be remembered as God’s way of making you more compassionate and understanding towards others.
In light of all the struggles my friends and family are facing, and in memory of Luis, Deybi and millions of others, let us remember hope. And let us see the beauty of our communities, of our friends and family. Let us walk with hope and joy through our doors in Columbus, Boston, Springfield, Emden, Kansas City, Honduras, Ada, Cincinnati, Newark, and elsewhere with the full knowledge that as we do, we present the Kingdom even as we are confronted with it.
Please, God be with us always.
