Let’s leave this difficult year behind and move forward with hope
Go deeper than the glitzy, consumer-driven Christmas message
I feel the need, and as I read my culture, so does my community, to refill my hope chest these days.
It’s been a bruising year, psychologically, and, for the Earth, physically. There is hardly any need to recite the pressures: the shock and dread we’ve been undergoing: global climate reports ever more dire, even as we in our region live blessedly immune from, but emotionally fixated on, the misery of forest fires on our continent, and the sight of thousands of climate refugees on the move from drought-ridden parts of the world.
To be dreary, 60 per cent of living mammals, birds and fish, which were alive in 1960, are extinct today. We plunge headlong into a hothouse of a world where many will not survive. Psychiatrists have identified ecoanxiety as a serious depressive condition and are empowered to write prescriptions for people to get outside in nature.
In the liberal democracies, we have seen deep vulnerability as strong men rise to power (the U.S., the Philippines, Egypt, Brazil, Russia, Saudi Arabia). We have seen America eat its young, betray its values, cling to an intemperate and ignorant man as its leader, a man and his cronies who lust for continuing power and run roughshod over historically hardwon systems of justice and honesty.
It has been woeful and disturbing. I saw him up close at Charlevoix in June at the G7 summit. I shuddered. Until the United States comes to its senses and gets a new government, the rest of us must go on without them as much as possible, quarantining them in their illness.
I am indebted to writer Rebecca Solnit, an editor at Vanity Fair, for her little book Hope in the Dark (2016). “It is a nightmarish time,” she writes. “It is a time of hideous economic inequality and climate chaos faster and more devastating than all our predictions.”
For Solnit, hope doesn’t mean denying anything. It means facing reality, not with the belief that everything will be fine, but with a steady look at “the possibilities that invite or demand that we act.”
“Complexities have openings,” she says. While rooted in grief and rage, we don’t know what will happen, and what we have is “the spaciousness of uncertainty.” Her “faith” is grounded in a knowledge of history.
I am also strengthened by the great Quaker, Parker Palmer, who says, “When we feel certain that the human soul is no longer at work in the world, it’s time to make sure that ours is visible to someone, somewhere.”
My third spiritual mentor has become Timothy Snyder of Yale University. “Believe in truth” he says. “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle”.
Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender. But it’s not naive optimism. Nor is it cynicism. It should be, says John Berger, a “detonator of
“It is a time of hideous economic inequality and climate chaos faster and more devastating than all our predictions.” REBECCA SOLNIT
energy for action today” An antidote to despair.
My cup personally right now runneth over. I think of the memorable ceremony at the YMCA on Nov. 27, at which I received the 2018 Peace Medallion. Such a good time, thanks to Cindy Mytruk of the Y, and to my nominators Sheila Nabigon Howlett, Cath D’Amico, Cam Douglas, Anne Orfald and Julie Stoneberg, who wrote sufficient material for my obit, when such is necessary.
Unprompted, granddaughter Emma, age 9, leapt to the mike and recited the Girl Guide pledge. Anyone remember it?
I’m pondering two responses: have I not been sufficiently combative that I should receive a peace prize? And though I’m not given to quoting Christian scriptures in public discourse, a passage from Luke 6 (26) jumps to mind. It admonishes one not to take pride in “praise from men.”
All the great faiths have resources to strengthen hope. One has to go deeper than the glitz and the banal “Baby Jesus” message, not to mention separating oneself from the Consumer-in-Chief, Santa Claus, and false cheer.
More next week.