Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given on Sunday, Dec. 19, 1999

First Unitarian Church, Portland, OR

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Hope is elusive. She has a cousin called optimism and a sister called faith, but she herself is hard to ferret out. One would think she could be found in mansions, but strangely enough, she is more likely to be found in hovels. One would think that she would be at a holiday party, full of smiles and glitter and wassail and wine, but the truth is she is more apt to be found at the bedside of one who is dying.

Wendy Wright, a teacher of theology, says that she was 50 years old before she found hope. She met her on the island of Hispaniola, on the westward side of Haiti. Wright was accompanying students on a semester-abroad program.

Passing through innumerable tiny Dominican villages, their little troop saw concrete block one-room houses painted bright pink, blue, and green. A family goat might be tethered by the roadside, and there was always a rooster strutting as if he owned the place. Outhouses are the norm, but just about every hamlet features at least one colmado, where Coca-Cola can be purchased.

The border between the nations is an arid stretch of land miles inland from the tropical beaches you see in the ads. The officials haggled over passports, and the group, as Wright says, was "processed, herded, and parked." They drove down a barren road, passing Haitian buses—really open-air transport trucks—each with its own evangelical message, in French, the official language, or in Creole: "Jesus sauvez!" (Jesus saves!)

Haiti is the poorest nation in the hemisphere. Haitians typically earn $200 a year. Seventy-five percent of the people are illiterate. Seventy percent are unemployed or underemployed. The hills, once lush, have been plundered for wood, leaving the landscape barren. For decades the cruel military dictatorship run by the Duvalier family took the wealth of the land. When Baby Doc, the last of the dynasty, finally went into exile, he took a vast personal fortune with him. Today, 90 % of the country’s wealth is owned by the most affluent 1 % of the population. There is no infrastructure of roads, electricity, sanitation, and education—things we take for granted. Memories of political bloodletting are everywhere: a guide intones, "On that street in front of the president’s palace five hundred peaceful protesters were mowed down with machine guns."

So what did Wendy Wright find hopeful about this scene? Where could hope possibly lodge? Perhaps in the fledgling democracy. Or in the amazing resiliency of the Haitian people. Or in the color and vitality of the culture. But no, Wright said. She said, "Hope met me in all the places where I least expected her." She met me in the empty spaces. In absence, abuse, neglect. In the ravaged soil. In the palpable sense of danger left over from the years of vicious repression. Where there was no reason for hope, there she appeared. She was found where everything else was stripped bare. Hope lives at the deepest layer of reality, beyond reason, beyond expectation, beyond what might be dreamed.

Wright’s definition pushed me deeper. Hope is the very bottom layer of reality, is bedrock, she says. Hope is not wishing, since wishing has an object of its desire, and wishing takes us into an imagined future, into a place where we might not actually want to be, once we get there. We need to take care in our wishing. Hope is not optimism—optimism is more a gift of temperament, I think. Hope is not deciding and planning and controlling, for when we live with hope, in hope, all plans are open to revision—every day, every moment. Hope is not self-confidence, but rather confidence in something larger than the self. Hope is not the blissful but totally unfounded belief that everything will turn out all right. Sometimes the diagnosis is bad. Sometimes your husband does leave. Hope is what holds you to life when, in fact, nothing is turning out all right. It is the paradoxical, inexplicable connection to the Holy that will not let you go. You can’t think your way to it, or capture it because you desire it. It is a gift freely given. When hope fills your being, you can be sure it has wafted in on the wings of grace.

Emily Dickinson captured it so well. "Hope is the thing with feathers," she says, "That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/ And never stops at all./ . . . . I’ve heard it in the chillest land/ And on the strangest sea,/ Yet never, in extremity,/ It asked a crumb of me."

We use the word hope casually, don’t we. And that’s all right. But I’m using the term in a different way from "I hope I can get a reservation," or "I hope it doesn’t rain today." Hope is something we live by, something we are rooted in that fills our very being. Hope is what makes us open to the never-before-thought-of, the "wow!" It is not specific, it is generic. It is the more that we never think to ask for.

I had a dream night before last. I was back home in Louisiana, and my father was there with me. We were looking up into our apple tree. I wanted to make a pie (I do have these food fantasies, you know), but we could see only one apple in the tree. My father said, "Well, you can’t make a pie. You don’t have enough apples." I suggested that we shake the tree, and he said, no, that wouldn’t do any good. But I decided to shake the tree anyway, and I went up to it and I grabbed the limbs and I shook that tree as hard as I could. The lone apple fell from the tree and then another and another and another until the sky was raining apples and the ground was covered with apples. And I received the more I never thought to ask for.

How does hope relate to her sister faith? The fact is that faith falls away. The saints themselves experience what is commonly called the dark night of the soul, when the felt absence of the Holy brings fear and anguish: Jesus on the cross, calling out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" But if we persist, we will learn that the Holy is hidden, not absent. Hidden is not the same as absent. Hope is what keeps us on the road when faith can’t take another step. Hope is a kind of certainty, paradoxically enough, that our existence makes sense. "Now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."

I was pondering this question of hope on Friday, when I visited with a woman who is dying. She was crying, fearful. An understandable response when a person is about to lose everything she ever loved—and about to cross over to the other side, to the unknown. I listened to her fears, encouraged her to cry, and then after a while, I asked her, "What is the source of your hope?" thinking to myself, this may be a really stupid question, considering the state she’s in. But in spite of her tears, I thought I saw hope in her face. And so I asked. She was quiet for a while, thinking, and then she said, with eyes wide open, "Hope is the essence. It’s not about ego. It asks nothing. It just bubbles up within me, from some source other than me." Whoa! There it is.

What does hope look like when you see it in action? I want to share a few stories with you. In another parish where I was serving, I had two congregants who were diagnosed about the same time with a terminal liver cancer. Let’s call them Sybil and Lillian. Sybil was an angry person, always was. Always finding fault. With her husband. With the church. And now with God. She said to me, flashing her dark eyes, "There is no God! This proves it! If there were a God, this never would have happened to me." And she raged up until the end. A difficult passing.

Lillian, the other woman, was in the hospital recovering from an operation when I went by to see her for the last time—I was leaving town for good the next day. She was in pain, she said. But she wanted to talk. Somehow we started talking about our grandmothers. She said that her grandmother was Baptist and had taught her the old Baptist hymns. "’Precious Memories’ was my grandmother’s favorite," she said, and smiled, thinking back. "That was my grandmother’s favorite, too," I said. "Precious memories, how they linger, how they ever fill my soul." I felt very close to Lillian then. Just before I left, she said to me, "You know, if I recover from this surgery, that will be all right. And if I die now, it will be all right." As a matter of fact she did recover and had another year and a half of life. She went back to the church and took up her duties as a greeter once again, and I am told that her smile was as wide and constant as always.

Another story. I am thinking of a conversation with my spiritual director, a Catholic nun and an academic. I came for my session one day and said a perfunctory, "How’re you doing?" And she said, "Well, I just saw my doctor yesterday, and he said that I might very well go blind." I was stunned. A scholar who can’t read, I thought. Finally I said, "That’s terrible! How are you feeling about this?" And she said in a kind of matter-of-fact way, "I just wonder what new calling God has for me." I’ll never forget that response. Not despair—but curiosity. Absolute knowing that she was moving at the beckoning of the Mystery. She did not go blind—but she was willing to go blind. She did not understand, but she followed.

I think of other people. Nelson Mandela comes to mind. He was put in prison in 1964 and came out 27 years later. For 18 of those 27 years, he was on Rabben Island, where he had a small cell, where his bed was the floor, where his toilet was a bucket. He was made to do hard labor in a quarry. He was allowed one visitor a year for 30 minutes, and he could write and receive one letter every six months. Finally, political pressures grew, and his captors offered to free him, and he said he would not come out of jail until apartheid ended. He grew old in jail. He lost his wife. But he brought a people hope where the very idea of hope had been a mockery before. Against all evidence, he steadfastly anticipated a new way of life in South Africa.

I think humor is a good signifier of hope. Where there is laughter, there is hope. Journalist Roger Welsch remembers interviewing an old farmer, who first came to the Plains at the turn of the last century. This farmer told Welsch about the first year his family planted land on the Nebraska-Kansas border. They planted their first crop with the only implement they had—an ax. His father walked across the prairie, chopping into the ground with that ax, while he and his brothers walked behind, planting potatoes. He said they planted 12 bushels of seed potatoes like that, cultivated them, and carried water to the plants through the long hot summer. That fall they harvested exactly 12 bushels of potatoes. "But it was our own fault," he said philosophically. "We could have planted more."

The old man had quite a repertoire of jokes and stories, but he also told Welsch about the rest of his life. Two sisters died in the 1918 flu epidemic. He lost several fingers in encounters with farm machinery. Fires came and took barns, crops, even whole towns. There were bank failures and crop failures, dust storms, grasshoppers, tornadoes and blizzards. Welsch asked the farmer how he could tell so many funny stories and at the same time have a life that was punctuated by one tragedy after another. He said, "Well, I’m not an educated man, so I can’t tell the psychology or philosophy of the matter, but I can tell you another story.

He began, "My dog and me were hunting in the river bottom once when that dog ran right into a bobcat about three times his size. Bobcat took out after my dog, gaining on him every jump. That dog looked over his shoulder and saw the bobcat was just about to get him, so he ran up to a big cottonwood tree growing along the river and ran 30 feet right straight up its trunk. Now that dog didn’t climb the tree because he could. He climbed it because he had to."

As I was thinking on this subject of hope, I began to ponder--as I always do--about how I relate to these words I’m speaking. How did my own hope develop over time?

When I grew up in that little N. Louisiana town, my dream was to visit the city—the city of Shreveport, some 50 miles away. I perused the Shreveport Times, looking at the ads and imagining the skirt or sweater that I might buy there in the city. But I never went. The closest I came to it was when some of my friends were going to hear this new young singer—his name was Elvis Presley. My father, disapproving of the pelvis part of Elvis, offered me fifteen dollars not to go. And I took it. One of the biggest mistakes of my life.

As I was growing up, I knew there was a bigger world out there where I would feel more at home. And my hopes grew as my world grew. Yes, when I went to college I found people who liked books and ideas. There were boys to date. I had the simple hopes of any girl of that era—to fall in love with a man who had money, to marry my hero and live for him and the children while he was out being heroic. I would teach high school until he showed up. And I waited and waited and waited. I was a good Baptist girl. Surely God knew my needs. Well, God? I got just what I asked for—a man of good character, of some means, a family man, and a Southerner, to boot. We had our life all carved out for us.

Little known to the two of us, the world was changing. In fact, I met the man I was to marry at a book discussion group where we were dissecting a controversial new book—you may have heard of it: The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan. And we were caught, along with many others, in the fissure that opened up in the social fabric of the time. I found out that I didn’t really want to worship a hero, that I wanted to have my own life. But what to base my hopes on in this brave new world? There were no road maps, and so we made it up as we went along.

As a semi-liberated woman, my hopes shifted—I would be a famous something-or-other. Maybe an educator. Or a writer. Or a therapist. I had this sense that I was destined for great things. I was smart, I was savvy, I was sexy. This state of mind is called, in therapeutic terms, inflation. I was full of my own ego, and that is where I placed my hope—in myself.

That was about the time things started falling apart. The marriage failed. The job market disappeared—you see, I had had the misfortune of becoming a social worker on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election, and all the social work programs started shutting down. Not only was I not famous, I couldn’t even get a job. I was depressed. I had little money. I remember going to a financial advisor and presenting my household budget and asking how I could manage it better. She said, "Your budget is fine. You need more money." I could see no future at all. My life seemed to come crashing down.

At that very moment, though, hope arrived. Not my adolescent hopes for pretty new clothes; not a new man; not my hopes of becoming a well-known something-or-other, and making my mark. I had two little boys, ages 2 and 3, and I was just trying to get through the day. I more or less hit bottom. Then all at once it occurred to me. My life was really messed up! And I wasn’t doing so well in trying to fix it. So I decided to give myself away. It’s that simple. I didn’t know if there was a God—if there was, I wasn’t getting any messages from that deity. But I sensed that there was something larger than myself that I had to give myself to. Now I suppose I would call this "other" the Mystery. Unfathomable. Unknowable. Unpredictable. Yet this is where I had to place my hope. I had no other place to go. So I just said, "OK, I give up. I’m lost. You show me the way."

And so with surrender came hope. With relinquishment. I gave up the wanting, wanting, wanting. I gave up the control. Got myself a little humility. Not that I couldn’t use more—but that day was a turning point for me. It is the day that I was saved, so to speak, that I was restored, that the fragments came together.

It is not uncommon, really, to discover that the bucket of our dreams is full of holes. That what we had staked our life on has proved unreliable. The heart gets hollowed out, carved out. Then what? When we have nothing, that is when we begin to have something. That’s when hope shines most brightly.

But I don’t believe, you say. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter a fig. In fact, when you can no longer believe, hope shows up. Belief can get in the way of hope. The less you know, the less you think you know, the more dependent you are upon the Mystery. Am I saying that you no longer will make decisions, lay plans? Not at all—of course you will. But you won’t be drawing the map. Not that the whole map shows up at once. Bits and pieces appear and show us the next step. Just stay awake. Watch. Distrust pride. Be always thankful. Stand in awe of the universe.

Here we are on the cusp of Christmas once more. The baby comes, and nothing is ever the same again. This is the hope of the season. It’s knowing absolutely, bedrock, with no evidence whatsoever, that you are in the care and keeping of something much larger than yourself.

It’s like when you were very little—very, very little—and going swimming for the first time. You’re standing on your wobbly legs on the side of the pool, and your father is urging you: "Jump in, it’s OK, I’ll catch you. Go ahead and jump in." You look down. It looks like a big leap from where you are. And what if Daddy doesn’t catch me, and I go under and stay under? "Come on," he says. "I’ll catch you." And you believe him, you trust him, and you jump in, jump toward the arms, your heart beating wildly, and your daddy catches you, and you are safe, and the water is safe, and nothing will ever be the same again. So be it. Amen.

PRAYER

Great Mystery, we cannot know you, cannot discern your ways, but somehow let us trust. May we anticipate the good, open ourselves to the unexpected, receive the more that you would give. May we, in all humility, fashion a free space within, that your blessings may have a place to lodge. Amen.

BENEDICTION

May hope warm you on these wintry days, and may you be companioned by the Holy in all your endeavors. Go in love, and go in peace.

CALL TO WORSHIP

In this season of rushing, may you find quiet;

In this season of cold, may you find warmth;

In this season of giving, may you give from the heart.

Come, let us worship together.

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Copyright 1999, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.