In a world where most news is disheartening at best, it is hard to keep a perspective of hope. Yet hope and constructive action are essential in this world of uncertainty and turmoil. This service will explore the duality of the challenge in maintaining a "realistic" perspective and not getting lost in the heaviness of it.
Welcome:
“Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.” ~Mignon McLaughlin.
And another by Don Quixote:
“Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.” ~Don Quixote
Call to Worship:
Affirmation:
We affirm the unfailing renewal of life. Rising from the earth and reaching for the sun all living creatures shall fulfill themselves.
We affirm the steady growth of human companionship Rising from the ancient cradles and reaching for the stars, people the world over shall seek the ways of understand.
We affirm a continuing hope That out of every tragedy the spirits of individuals shall rise to build a better world.
Chalice Lighting:
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
Maya Angelou
First Reading:
The Waters of Life: by Ida Folsom
There are times in the lives of all of us when the greatest and most imperative need is for a sense of security and confidence that cannot be shaken by the winds of chance.
The waters of life never run smoothly. Every day has its darkness and its light, its bitter and its sweet, its pleasure and its pain. There are always unfulfilled promises, hopes that fade into the mists of years, the dreams from which we rudely awaken. It is in moments like these when we feel the futility of dreams, the cruelty of promise and the wastefulness of hope.
One of the great song writers, who understood life, challenges us with these words: “Unless you have a dream, how can you have a dream come true?” and we might follow his thought by asking: “Unless we have a hope, how can we find courage for the road, and unless we have a goal, how shall we know when we have arrived?” Dreams with purposes, hopes with purpose, aspirations with purpose, are the “everlasting arms” that bear us up and make sure our confidence in ourselves when the current seems to be running against us.
I will say to my soul: “Thou shall not be shaken by the exigencies of life, for all experiences are necessary to thy shaping,” and I will look hard at the hammer and anvil that shape them.
Homily/Meditation:
Hope as Redemption
I wanted to use the metaphor of the snowball because it is the taking of what can be pretty light and fluffy and making it into something that is hard and rather uniform in appearance. It also is cold and hurts your hands, much like despair. Sharon Salzberg in her book “Faith” says that we tend to look at emotion pain in a monolithic way and that one way through is to begin to take that apart. “Emotional pain, she writes, “such as anger may be made up of fear, hopelessness, frustration. Learning how to work with pain in this way, a musicologist once said, ‘We would call that taking apart the chord’. When we take apart the chord of our pain, even though the experience may remain difficult, the pain becomes an alive system, with movement and variation and flux. Just as the world is breathing, the pain is breathing. It’s inhaling and exhaling, and there is space between its arisings. Rather than feeling overcome and helpless in the face of the wall of pain, we can find hope, relief in that rhythm of change."
The cornerstone of hope is the theme of the 1994 movie Shawshank Redemption. Some of you may recall the movie. It is a story about a banker, Andy, who is convicted of killing his wife and her lover, a crime he did not commit, who is sentenced to two consecutive life sentences. At the Shawshank Prison, Andy, played by Tim Robbins, meets Red, a man who has spent his whole life in that institution and a friendship begins. Red is adept at getting whatever anyone wants on the inside, but he has no hope, something than Andy carries in his head and heart.
Reviewers Siskel and Ebert, two men who also shared a special friendship, talk about how one might think about this movie as a prison movie, but that that’s only the landscape in which to place the story about deep friendship and the themes of mental and physical imprisonment and institutionalization. Institutionalization is when prisoners become so dependent on the prison routine that living on the outside becomes a threat and a transition that some cannot make.
The bulk of the movie, narrated by Red, who is played by Morgan Freeman, follows Andy’s experience in the prison. And there, he creates a library, helps inmates get their GED diplomas, and is conscripted by the evil warden, to provide the means for him to launder money.
There is one scene in the movie where Andy receives a shipment of books and records, because he has written a letter every week to the state library system. They send him the books and tell him that they have fulfilled his request and that he shouldn’t write anymore. He tells one of his guard friends, that he will now write them twice a week to get more. When the guard leaves the room to go to the bathroom, Andy locks the door and broadcasts a Mozart opera over the prison loudspeaker system. All of the men stop and listen to words that they don’t understand, but in that moment, they are the prison routine is broken and the men have a moment of feeling alive and possibility soars.
Andy eventually breaks out of Shawshank, has access to the money the warden laundered, and makes his way to a seaside in Mexico. He sends a postcard back to his friend Red. There is no message, and the name of a Texas border town is circled on the front.
Here’s the clip:
Holding onto Hope – the conclusion
Hope is a good thing – it is the best of things. And good things never die.
I’m not sure that good things never die, but I do know that hope is a powerful energy, and it is a fragile energy. It is a single flame that has the capacity to dispel the darkness. And as a single flame has the capacity to be blown out.
I know that our relationship to hope is very specific to us individually, and that it is set in a landscape.
I know that we have to beware of institutionalization: that a system of power, or a world in despair, wants us to believe that we are powerless.
I know that sometimes when our own sense of hope is absent, we can look to others.
I know that when we look at the world in despair, we can take “the chord” apart and find small bits of change that give us a sense of hope.
And I know that hope is a breathing thing, it moves like the cloud cover and that we will find places where there will be patches of clouds that allow the sun to break through when we look for them.
I know that when we take the time for reflection, that it changes our thoughts.
I know that if you want to hold onto hope, you hold onto hope.
Closing:
This I believe by Josh Ritterberg, February 27, 2006
I'm 16. On a recent night, while I was busy thinking about important social issues, like what to do over the weekend and who to do it with, I overheard my parents talking about my future. My dad was upset — not the usual stuff that he and Mom and, I guess, a lot of parents worry about, like which college I'm going to, how far away it is from home and how much it's going to cost. Instead, he was upset about the world his generation is turning over to mine — a world he fears has a dark and difficult future, if it has a future at all.
He sounded like this: "There will be a pandemic that kills millions, a devastating energy crisis, a horrible worldwide depression and a nuclear explosion set off in anger."
As I lay on the living room couch, eavesdropping on their conversation, starting to worry about the future my father was describing, I found myself looking at some old family photos. There was a picture of my grandfather in his Citadel uniform. He was a member of the class of 1942, the war class. Next to his picture were photos of my great-grandparents, Ellis Island immigrants. Seeing those pictures made me feel a lot better. I believe tomorrow will be better than today — that the world my generation grows into is going to get better, not worse. Those pictures helped me understand why.
I considered some of the awful things my grandparents and great-grandparents had seen in their lifetimes: two world wars, killer flu, segregation, a nuclear bomb. But they saw other things, too, better things: the end of two world wars, the polio vaccine, passage of the civil rights laws. They even saw the Red Sox win the World Series — twice.
I believe that my generation will see better things, too — that we will witness the time when AIDS is cured and cancer is defeated; when the Middle East will find peace and Africa grain, and the Cubs win the World Series — probably only once. I will see things as inconceivable to me today as a moon shot was to my grandfather when he was 16, or the Internet to my father when he was 16.
Ever since I was a little kid, whenever I've had a lousy day, my dad would put his arm around me and promise me that "tomorrow will be a better day." I challenged my father once, "How do you know that?" He said, "I just do." I believed him. My great-grandparents believed that, and my grandparents, and so do I.
As I listened to my Dad talking that night, so worried about what the future holds for me and my generation, I wanted to put my arm around him, and tell him what he always told me: "Don't worry Dad, tomorrow will be a better day." This, I believe.
