"WHEN HOPE IS HARD TO FIND"


What do we do "when hope is hard to find?"

What do we do when despair fills our souls?

What do we do when anxiety is our constant companion and sadness makes 
every moment miserable?

What do we do when we look out on a world filled with hatred, violence, 
greed, and stupidity?

What do we do when we look inside ourselves and find weakness and 
vulnerability, disease and fear?

What do we do "when hope is hard to find?"

Certainly we live in an age when it is not easy to find hope. 

War blights numerous countries, with the heaviest toll exacted on children 
and adult civilians.

In a world full of food, hundreds of millions are starving or malnourished.

In our own rich land, greed too often replaces compassion in the 
management of corporations,  in our free market approach to health care 
insurance,  and in the design of our tax systems.

Civility is losing out to meanness and vulgarity in radio, television, movies, 
and other media.

We are already weary of the candidates for president, and they haven't even 
been nominated yet!

Illness besieges us. Joblessness threatens us. Technology controls us.

Hope is hard to find in our age, perhaps in any age, but find it we must. To 
live meaningfully, purposefully, happily, we must have a sense of hope. 
Where there's hope, there's life, not just existence.

Where can we find hope? 

In many places if we are willing to look. Like children searching for Easter 
eggs, eager to get at the delights inside them, let us look for hope and the 
good things it can bring to us.

Let us begin by looking for hope in honesty.

Hope is not about evading the truth. The truth is that life is hard, sometimes 
painful, and rarely works out the way we want it to. The truth is that there is 
no place to hide, no security, no guarantees of happiness and laughter ever 
after.

Hope begins with the truth of life's burdens and perils, and finds a way to 
rejoice in the face of that truth.

Hope is about what Paul Tillich called having "the courage to be" in spite of 
all the threats to our being that life thrusts at us.

Thursday night I attended a performance of William Bolcom's SONGS OF 
INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE. The songs are "musical illustrations of 
the poems of William Blake.

The very last song we heard is called "A Divine Image." These are the 
words:
           Cruelty has a Human Heart,
           And Jealousy a Human Face;
           Terror the Human Form Divine,
           And Secrecy the Human Dress.

           The Human Dress is forged Iron,
           The Human Form a fiery Forge,
           The Human Face a Furnace seal'd,
           The Human Heart is hungry Gorge.
These harsh descriptions of the dark side of humanity—what experience 
teaches us—were sung to a reggae beat. When the chorus and other soloists 
joined the man singing these words, several of them were swaying and some 
of us in the audience were tapping our feet, so infectious was the Caribbean 
rhythm.

Admit the truth: life can be dreadful. Sing and dance and be joyful anyway!

If we can enjoy ourselves only when peace and justice reign everywhere in 
the world and pain and death are no more, we shall never know a moment of 
happiness. 

If we can laugh despite our hardships, then life can be glad.

Like the prisoners in the death camps who made up jokes, like the 
Universalist minister who composed doggerel verse on his deathbed, like the 
countless people who have lost jobs and seen that moment as an opportunity 
to recast their work life, we need to be honest about the mess we're in and 
live with it with as much light-heartedness as possible.

Honesty is the beginning of hope.

A second place to look for hope is in history.

Consider the song  "A Divine Image," with its grim words about human 
wickedness. Perhaps the reason those singers could sing to a happy beat and 
dance as they sang is because they remembered an earlier song in the cycle. 
It too speaks of "The Divine Image," but its description of that Image is 
quite different: 
           For Mercy has a human heart,
           Pity a human face,
           And Love, the human form divine,
           And Peace, the human dress…

           And all must love the human form,
           In heathen, turk, or jew;
           Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell
           There God is dwelling too.
We need to remember earlier moments of seeing the good, the divine, in 
humanity. 

We need to remember the goodness of Oskar Schindler and numerous other 
Righteous Gentiles who during the Holocaust saved the lives of Jews at risk 
of their own.

We need to remember the goodness of those who donate one of their kidneys 
to save a life, who rescue children from drowning, who bind up the wounds 
of war's victims.

I remember the three Internal Revenue Service clerks who over a period of  
several weeks were gracious, helpful, courteous, friendly, and even played 
Beethoven and Mozart when they put me on hold.

Each of us needs to remember the strength we showed in an earlier crisis, 
remember that we survived it, remember and reclaim that courage because 
there is hope to be found there.

History can teach us about hope.

A third place to seek hope is in our hands.

What is it that we can do to make this situation better? How can we improve 
the spirit or the actual condition that has us in despair? 

If we are concerned about the violence that is so prevalent in the world, how 
can we help to moderate if not stop the violence.

We can begin with ourselves, recognizing our own violent impulses, 
committing ourselves every day to resisting those impulses, reading about 
and meditating on ways of living peacefully. If we are able to do nothing 
else, that much we can do, every one can do.

If we have time and energy and health we can do more. We can join the 
efforts of the Ann Arbor Area Committee for Peace. We can work for 
legislation to establish a Peace Tax Fund. We can write letters to our 
governing representatives and our newspapers. We can encourage the 
creation of Peace Departments in more universities. These are a few of the  
many activities possible.

If we are challenged by poor health, we can learn more about our disease or 
condition. Such knowledge can help us to understand how to live with what 
ails us. If our mortality is at stake, then we can do what each of us is going 
to have to do at some point: figure out how we want to live in the time we 
have. 

The sportswriter Red Smith observed in his later years that "Dying is no big 
deal. The least of us will manage that. Living is the trick."

Living so that every one we love knows that we love them. Living so that we 
share gladness not bitterness. Living gratefully not angrily. Living like that 
is good living any time, and great living in hard times.

We can find hope by doing something. It's in our hands.

Oxygen.

Breathe it in.

Breathe out the carbon dioxide.

Isn't that wonderful! Not just essential to life, but beautiful. Ponder that!

Hope can be found in the basics of life itself. Breathing is as basic as it gets. 
Breathing is life. Where there's life, there's hope.

A fifth thing is the Olympics.

This is the year of the Summer Olympics, to be played in the country of their 
origin, Greece. First held some 3500 years ago, the games took place every 
four years from 796 BCE to 393 CE, a period of almost 1200 years. They 
were revived in 1896 and, with a few interruptions because of war, have 
continued since that time. 

There are many problems with the Olympics, from corruption to 
commercialism to outright cheating. But the fundamental idea is still 
embraced by many people: that it is better to compete fairly on the fields of 
play than to compete fiercely on the fields of battle. 

In ancient times, wars were suspended, truces granted to all who wished to 
come or to compete in the Games, and for a period of one month human 
beings acted out of the best side of our nature. 

Today's world is more complicated than the world of the Greek peninsula 
and the Mediterranean countries that participated in the Games. But the 
decency of the concept, the fact that so many do honor the Olympic Code of 
Sportsmanship, and the remarkable achievements of the athletes makes it a 
source of hope for a world needing signs that human beings can get along 
with each other, even when competing with one another.

We can also seek hope in our ordinary daily experiences. There are  marvels 
of beauty and kindness and intelligence and interest all over the place.

Here's a partial list of my own from recent times: the sun coming up through 
our bedroom window, a friendly clerk that helped solve a confusing problem 
with a purchase, deviled eggs when I had no right to expect them, two of my 
grandchildren moving closer to me by 2,000 miles, the first sight of 
crocuses, a new piano that holds a tune, reading a description by his younger 
brother of my father making peace in a family quarrel, getting a new 
keyboard for my computer that doesn't stick, seeing the flaming chalice high 
on the corner of our new religious education wing,  and wearing my first 
baseball tie of the season the day after the Cubs won their opener.

Life is full of ordinary things that can lift our spirits. Of course, they are 
temporary. So are we. The point is not to let them pass without noticing. The 
point is to let them touch our souls and brighten our lives.

There is hope in the ordinary.

There is also prayer.

Prayer is inward examination. Prayer is taking time alone—in a quiet corner, 
walking to work, in the shower--to meditate on the truth of our lives, 
resolving on new ways of living, girding up our loins to take on a new 
discipline.

Prayer is a way of pausing in the midst of ferociously busy lives to collect 
ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, our hurts and happiness. Prayer is a 
way of pausing to see if we are doing today what we need and want to do. 
Prayer is a way of pausing to see if we are doing harm to anyone or anything 
and reflecting on how we can repair that harm. Prayer is a way of 
remembering our values, our commitments, our strengths so that how we 
live helps in however small a way to make the world a better place. 

Prayer is a way of reminding ourselves of what really matters. Hope can be 
found there.

Hope is found as well in the astonishing pharmacopoeia of the 21st century.

This is a dangerous place to look because drugs can be addictive, have 
baleful side effects, or interact with other drugs in harmful ways. But clearly 
our lives are better for the wise use of the wondrous products now for sale 
over the counter or available through prescription.

Pains that once had to be borne—in surgery, for example, and with dental 
procedures—can now be reduced significantly or eliminated. Conditions that 
were threatening to our well-being—from high cholesterol to depression—
can often be controlled by the use of drugs. The minor aches and pains of 
daily life, from headaches to tummy upsets to cuts and scrapes to skin 
problems, can mostly be relieved with the pills and powders and ointments 
and lotions and creams that fill the shelves of our drug stores.

Carefully controlled, drugs are a wonderful source of hope. 

So are persons.

One on one, men and women can just be terrific: inspiring, funny, 
instructive, helpful, comforting.  Romantic bonds, deep friendships, 
professional associations, even casual contacts, every way we relate to other 
individuals can boost our spirits.

The poet Mary Oliver writes of the woman she has lived with "more than 
thirty years, so far. I would not tell much about it. Privacy, no longer 
cherished in the world, is all the same still a natural and sensible attribute of 
paradise. We are happy and we are lucky…We make for each other: 
companionship, intimacy, affection, rhapsody. Whenever I hear of 
something horrible, I want to cover M.'s ears. Whenever I see something 
beautiful, and my heart is shouting, it is M. I run to tell about it."

Hope is in individual persons and our relationship with them.

Hope is also in persons gathered in community.

Communities—political, social, religious, educational, familial, or any 
other--give us a sense of belonging. We can share who we are and know that 
others care about us. That is what Joys and Sorrows are intended to do in our 
services, and All in the Family in our Newsletter.

Michael Perry, in his superb book about his home town of New Auburn, 
Wisconsin, POPULATION: 485, writes about the growing community of 
the earth's peoples "via everything from satellite dishes to online 
boutiques…There was a time when ignorance—and the prejudice it 
fostered—could be grossly excused as a result of cultural or geographical 
isolation. Nowadays, ignorance must be willfully tended, like a stumpy 
mushroom under a bucket…Trouble thrives, but more and more humans 
share a general sense of life as it is on this spinning rock, and that is due, in 
part, to war correspondents in Kabul, The Food Network, and lesbian chat 
rooms."

Community does not solve all the problems any more than individuals do. 
But there is so much courage, strength, cleverness, and sheer good will in 
this man and that woman and in the aggregate of humanity that hope rises 
naturally when we look for it in persons.

Let us look for hope as well in evolution.

Evolution is a code word for an earth that is billions of years old.

Evolution is about how we are connected to all living things, sharing genes 
with plants and animals.

Evolution tells us of the enormous community of life of which we are a part. 
"We are the stuff of the stars," said Carl Sagan, and that is literally true. 
When we die, our stuff will become part of the earth and its many 
inhabitants. What we are is all mixed up with elephants and ants, rutabaga 
and mushrooms, babies to come and old men and women long gone.

What a story! What a saga! What a grand mystery! What good fortune that 
we can be conscious of this amazing process! How could we not have hope 
for life in such a marvel-filled world!

The Reverend Will Campbell, aware of all this magnificence, mused about 
his apocalyptic hope that in some distant day there will be "an Osama bin 
Laden and a George W. Bush…arm in arm, saying, 'We've got to save the 
planet Earth.'"

Now that's hope!

Evolution teaches hope in time. The environment teaches hope in space. In 
the midst of this lovely spring, when even the formerly dreadful Detroit 
Tigers are winning baseball games, we need not to forget to look for hope in 
nature. Who better than Henry David Thoreau to find the right words.

"In a pleasant spring  morning all men's sins are forgiven. Such a day is a 
truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may 
return. Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of 
our neighbors. You may have known your neighbor yesterday for a thief, a 
drunkard, or a sensualist, but the sun shines bright and warm this first spring 
morning, re-creating the world, and you meet him at some serene work, and 
see how his exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless 
the new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy, and all 
his faults are forgotten."

So are ours.

This is the meaning of spring, the meaning of baseball. Hope is there in the 
environment.

There's one more place from which hope springs, the extraordinary.

The extraordinary is the unexpected that changes our lives. The 
extraordinary is a creative act that alters perception and reality. The 
extraordinary is life seen from a different angle.

The folk-singer Pete Seeger launched a schooner on the Hudson River 40 
years ago—to help clean it up and to educate people about its beauty and the 
peril in which our wasteful industrial ways had placed it. Tens of thousands 
of people have become involved in the protection of the Hudson River 
because of this schooner. Seeger says today: "I didn't know what the hell I 
was doing, but something wonderful has happened. The water is clear. You 
can swim in it now."

Others have followed his example. There are now educational, clean-up 
schooners on the Great Lakes, on the Chesapeake and in New Bedford.

Two thousand years ago Jesus of Nazareth taught an extraordinary moral 
lesson: that we should not only love our family and friends and neighbors 
but our enemies as well. Those who do that hold the key to our planetary 
future.

Among those who practice that lesson are the members of Peaceful 
Tomorrows, relatives and friends of  people who died in the attacks of 9/11. 
Instead of demanding vengeance, they say that their grief is not a cry for 
war. They went to Afghanistan to bring food and clothing and medicine to 
the people in that desperately poor and violent land. They march and petition 
the President and Congress for non-violent solutions to the world's ills.

They have learned to love even those who hate them and threaten them with 
harm.

There are parents and spouses and children who go to meet the murderers of 
their loved ones, who embrace these people without embracing what they 
did, who seek to help these people turn their lives towards worthy endeavors 
even though they face years in prison.

No example is more telling than that of Nelson Mandela, who befriended his 
jailers, who opened his arms to his oppressors, whose actions motivated 
others so that South Africa has been spared the massive bloodshed everyone 
expected in the transfer from minority white to majority black power.

The extraordinary reveals and inspires hope.

Hope can be found in H--honesty, in history, and in hands. It can be found in 
O--oxygen, the Olympics, and the ordinary. Hope lies in P--prayer, the 
pharmacopoeia, and persons. Hope may be drawn from E--evolution, the 
environment, and the extraordinary.

We can use all 12 or only enough to make up one spelling of hope. What 
matters is that where each of us can find hope, we should. When we find it, 
then we can share it. 

Imagine a world where we were all sharing hope. Imagine it, and then let's 
all begin creating that world, singing together as we do "And I'll bring you 
hope when hope is hard to find, and I'll bring a song of love and a rose in the 
wintertime." 



                                                       BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.	Pema Chodron, WHEN THINGS FALL APART: HEART ADVICE 
FOR DIFFICULT TIMES, Shambala, 2000.
2.	John Izzo, PhD, SECOND INNOCENCE: REDISCOVERING JOY 
AND WONDER; A GUIDE TO RENEWAL IN WORK, 
RELARTIONSHIPS, AND DAILY LIFE, Berrett-Koehler, 2004.
3.	Mary Oliver, WINTER HOURS: PROSE, PROSE POEMS, AND 
POEMS, Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
4.	Michael Perry, POPULATION: 485: MEETING YOUR 
NEIGHBORS ONE SIREN AT A TIME, Perennial, 2002.
5.	Studs Terkel, HOPE DIES LAST: KEEPING THE FAITH IN 
DIFFICULT TIMES, The New Press, 2003.
6.	Henry David Thoreau, WALDEN, OR LIFE IN THE WOODS and 
ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE, Collier Books, 1962.




Sermon delivered 4/11/04 by Kenneth W. Phifer
Copyright 2004, Kenneth W. Phifer, All Rights Reserved








     






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