People with passion for the freedom and justice of democracy face more anguish than those who choose to be numb and cloistered, who claim to be neutral and “non-political”. If the hope for a world of Truth and Love seems impossibly blocked, some would rather die, and they weep while others hide in aloof personas.
But the fact that we weep and mourn the loss is witness that the ideal is not just fantasy but is real. This passion for the Good is prompting us to look for passage through the Evil and out to freedom. It draws people around us to bond in our trek, for lone individuals are not equal to the work of democracy. None of us can do it all even if we have a sense of all that needs doing. Love for one another creates a new kind of hope as we bear one another’s burdens together.
Children in the Wilderness
Think of the story in Exodus of the whole population of slaves who were led out of Egypt into a wilderness. Imagine standing with them having left unbearable circumstances and looking ahead to a journey free to be a people with a future. However unknown it was, they were walking a new life, not a dead-end slave life, but one of possibilities, — provided they worked together.
This new life was scary with mystery and hardship, but they had gotten this far, and they had each other which inspired love. Love and bonding together encouraged them to forge ahead and make a life of this trek. It gave them space to allow new ideas to emerge about the cosmic nature of their lives together, to become aware of the spiritual Will for them to survive and become more than what the world had been thus far. True evolution was manifesting.
This was the creation of a new hope in an open-ended growth, a blossoming, instead of the old hope of snatching a moment’s rest between the demands of the empire. We read in the Exodus account of many physical manifestations of divine intervention which would have awakened their faith. But believing in the Will beyond them ultimately manifested in seeing themselves, their whole group, standing together despite the empire’s efforts to own them. This was a realization of their membership in something greater than the abuse and injustice that had been the norm.
Their cooperation in walking out together, even fearing and trembling into the unknown, created a new perspective which we have come to call faith. Their example has become a model for all people since, to believe despite impossibility and to put our walk to our talk; to let love bind us together accomplishing what cannot be done as independent individuals.
The Unconventional Hope
Fierce love creates hope. Love comes first. In love faith, endurance and perseverance arise. Then we realize hope which does not disappoint because it is connected beyond these circumstances. We are members of a Greater Body Universe willing us to live and flourish.
Abuses, injustices, and hoarding of resources away from us, all become petty and temporary to our perspective of nurturing the Greater Body Universe. In about the same era (sometimes called the “Axial Age”) when Moses represented this new perspective, significant spiritual leaders in other cultures pointed out similar sensitivity to the spiritual realm in other languages and metaphors. Awakening to the Greater Body was happening in our human development.
The Jewish Prophets kept reminding the people of it through millennia until Jesus revealed it on the personal level as the Spirit of God within our inner Self. The integrity of the individual to commune with that Will nurturing humanity prompts us to bond in love as members of one another. Those heeding it feel the unfairness, oppression, and tragedy perpetrated by the empire and weep. It is a prompt which we can choose to follow or reject. Cameron Trimble points out “The prophets remind us that societies change long before laws change. They change when ordinary people begin practicing a different way of belonging.”
Brian McLaren says,
"… even if we lose hope for a good outcome,
we need not lose hope of being good people,
as we are able: courageous, wise, kind, loving,
“in defiance of all that is bad around us.” [1] …
We feel arising within us this
sustained declaration:
We will live as beautifully, bravely, and kindly
as we can as long as we can,
no matter how ugly, scary, and mean
the world becomes, even if failure and death
seem inevitable.
In fact, it is only in the context of failure
and death that this virtue develops.[2]"
Sallie McFague says,
"This faith, not in ourselves, but in God,
can free us to live lives of radical change.
Perhaps it is the only thing that can.
We do not rely on such hope as a way
to escape personal responsibility—
“Let God do it”—but rather this hope
frees us from the pressure of outcomes
so that we can add our best efforts
to the task at hand. [3]"
Countless people in recent history have pointed us in that way and lived as beacons of love generating the new hope: the Obamas, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter, Gandhi, Berni Sanders, Mother Teresa, Pope Francis, Mrs. Mackinson my high school journalism teacher, Robert McKee my college filmmaking professor.
You name those in recent years who have inspired you to persevere in Good.
May we each add our call for our circles of influence to embrace that prompt and come along on this trek into the unknown.
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