John Pavlovitz says we all can make the world better
John Pavlovitz feels your pain. Now he wants to help you channel it into action.
“Many of us are lamenting the despair and divisiveness around us, aching for something more redemptive but no longer sure how to get to it from where we stand,” Pavlovitz writes in his new book, “Hope and Other Superpowers: A Life-Affirming, Love-Defending, Butt-Kicking, World-Saving Manifesto” (Simon and Schuster).
Pavlovitz is the North Carolina-based pastor known for his progressive, increasingly political, increasingly anti-President Donald Trump writings and teachings. His blog, Stuff That Needs to Be Said, pulls no punches.
“This administration and its supporters have shown themselves to be largely bereft of empathy for the poor, for the sick, the marginalized; for foreigners, for outsiders, for the wounded — for diverse life here,” he writes in a recent post. “They don’t deserve to claim ownership of the living.”
He despairs about the state of the world and the values of the leaders tasked with repairing it. But he holds tightly to hope, and his new book is an impassioned plea for his followers to do the same.
It’s a refreshing message at a time when hope feels, in far too many of the conversations I have with friends and family and readers, like a distraction — a wishywashy sentiment that doesn’t quite grasp the state of our planet.
Pavlovitz defends it as both prudent and necessary.
“Hope is saying that the things we’re fighting for right now, the things that we value so greatly, are the product of the people before us who had hope and lived forward-thinking,” he told me last week by phone. “The rights we have, the things we treasure, they’re our inheritance from people who came before us. What I’m asking people to think about is that we’re going to leave something for the people who come after us. Hope is saying, ‘I want to leave something beautiful and something worth inheriting.’”
He calls the 2016 presidential election “an existential earthquake, a seismic upheaval in the bedrock of our normal that rattled our foundations and is still sending us regular emotional aftershocks.”
Families separated at the border. A president who delights in mocking and belittling his opponents, even as he embraces dictators and despots. Dismantling of environmental protections even as scientists sound an increasingly urgent alarm about climate change.
“At no point in recent memory has apathy and cynicism been more dangerous,” Pavlovitz writes, “because the world you and I are standing on is in desperate need of people still willing to reach and do and believe and, most of all, to be fierce caretakers of hope.”
The question at the heart of the book is: What kind of person does the world need right now?
“Answer that question, and then embrace those things,” he said. “If you believe the world lacks compassion, then seek to be a compassionate person. If you believe it lacks generosity, then go out and be generous. Where’s the burden? Where’s the injustice? What is the thing that bothers me?
“Is it how refugees are being treated and immigrants are being treated? Instead of just getting angry and railing against that, I can actually go to the places in my community that are working with those folks and I can actually give my time and speak into those people’s lives and affirm them and tangibly push back against the forces that are hurting them.”
His father’s unexpected death four years ago shook him to his core, Pavlovitz writes, and reminded him of the Christian tradition of “rejoicing in trials: the awareness in the moment that present difficulty is infinitely valuable and uniquely formative.”
Particularly, he contends, if trial stirs us to action.
“Over the past year or so,” he writes, “the term thoughts and prayers has come under great public scrutiny, as politicians and ministers so often wield the words on social media in response to shootings and other tragedies, seemingly as a substitute for doing anything else.
“As a Christian and pastor I have no aversion to prayer, but in the face of injustice and suffering, prayer without behavior change or measurable movement isn’t something I’m all that interested in. Whether religious or not, heroic people move from burden to action, from heart to hand; they evolve from simply feeling empathy to tangibly expressing compassion. The people who are the difference-makers don’t wait for someone else to stand up to corrupt power or oppose unjust legislation or advocate for people who are hurting so that they can join in — they stand up and oppose and advocate regardless of the cost.”
“Hope and Other Superpowers” goes on sale Nov. 6. For every copy preordered by Oct. 29, Simon and Schuster will donate a superhero cape and mask to a child through Family Promise, an organization that helps families transition from homelessness.
“So a kid is affirmed and recognized and reminded they’re amazing,” Pavlovitz said. “It’s a little kindness revolution.”
Hopefully, one of many.
Join the Heidi Stevens’ Balancing Act Facebook group, where she hosts live chats every Wednesday at noon. On Oct. 24 she’ll be joined by clinical psychologist John Duffy to talk how much is too much when it comes to digitally monitoring your kids.