After a year of cyclones, climate disasters, inequality, poverty, social anxiety, massive Covid debt, and war, few could be blamed for feeling like our god has left the building. In a world full of fear, stress, and sadness there seems to be more pain than you can heal, more dissent than you can mediate, and more uncertainty than you can make sense of. More than ever before this year has taught me I sometimes have to borrow other people’s hope, other people’s faith.
I took some inspiration from an odd source. Nick Cave and his book Faith, Hope and Carnage.
The question of how to hope effectively comes up often in Cave’s online forum, the Red Hand Files, which he launched in 2020. Named after one of his most famous songs, Red Right Hand (inspired by John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where the hand represents divine vengeance), it’s a place where a wide range of people, not only fans, write in to share their troubles and questions, and Cave writes back.
Many people who write to the Red Hand Files are almost obsessed with the idea that the world is shit. The world is f***ed. Why would they want to have a child and bring it into this world? “How can you talk about these things when we’re on the point of environmental collapse and the threat of world war?” I guess the message at the heart of Faith, Hope and Carnage — a religious message essentially — is that we have to look beyond our despair to imagine a world worth saving. Hope is an act of the imagination.
My sister told me the Buddhist parable of the man running from a tiger and coming to a cliff edge, scrambling down a few feet and hanging on to a fragile root protruding from the cliff face. In a cleft in the rock in front of him is a small flower. The man suddenly says, “That’s beautiful!”
When all we can see and feel and think about is all the personal and political adversity happening now, it’s important to remember we are part of an old, old story. One that starts in the beginning of time and only brushes the skin of the present and reaches into a promised future where hope is not done. As we look ahead to a new year, I find it helpful to remember examples of those who not only saw problems early but brought people together to find solutions.
In 1967, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called for a “radical redistribution of political and economic power” to address poverty, war, and racism. To do so, he turned to those who were on the frontlines of these crises, not those who perpetrated them.
He worked tirelessly to organise the original Poor People’s Campaign, bringing together welfare advocates, farm workers unions, anti-war advocates, and Native, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and poor white organisers with the civil rights movement.
King never wavered in his commitment to unite those who’d been divided for too long by politics, race, religion, and geography. “It has been one of my dreams that we would come together and realise our common problems,” he said just a few weeks before his assassination, and to “make the power structure of this nation say yes, when they may be desirous to say no.”
More than 50 years later, the powerful of our world are still invested in systems and structures that may carelessly control or destroy us. We know the status quo even democratic ones won’t come forth with solutions to these problems, why should they compromise their interests or influence. That’s true whether we’re talking about the climate, inequality, poverty, what our kids endure on social media or war. The answers will come from those who are confronting these systems directly.
And that’s the good news. In many places, people standing up against injustice are shifting what’s possible. Our hope is found in examples, such as King, Mother Teresa, and Dame Whina Cooper.
Author Julie Neraas describes hope in this way,
“Hope, in contrast with religion, seems refreshingly spacious. It is roomier and more inclusive because it does not require assent to particular beliefs, nor is it wedded to ideology. Indeed, hope, while necessary to our wellbeing, can exist with equal strength within religious traditions and outside of them.
Hope is compelling because it is universal. It crosses all human boundaries: age, race, class, gender, ethnicity, and religious, political, or any other persuasion. Everyone needs it, and almost everyone exhibits at least some measure of hope if they have made it as far as this day.”
This is what hope looks like in times of great crisis, war, and inequality. It’s not foolishly romantic to celebrate this hope. It’s what gives us the courage and compassion to stand up another day, to find each other, unite, and to make what seems impossible, possible.
This year more than ever the setting of the Christmas story is so real. lt has nothing to do with the glitter and glamour of Christmas time with fairy lights around a plastic crib. If Christ were born today it would be under the rubble of war. Many are coming together across politics, race, religion, and geography to demand peace, life, and freedom for Palestinians as well as Israelis. For peace to reign and for damaged families to be reunited. They are also telling Russia, enough already, war no more in Ukraine. That too is hope in action.
Each one of us has the capacity to influence each other to stay hopeful. “Where there is hope, there is life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.” — Anne Frank. The capacity to hope is an indispensable human quality; even in times of crisis when confidence and trust have been broken, hope sustains us in our living.
Thank you for your support over this tough year. You, my brothers and sisters, are the heroes of hope in justice. Go, rest, and be of good heart whānau.
The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn His face toward you and give you peace.
— The Aaronic Blessing (Numbers 6:24-26, NIV)