Running today, I listened to an On Being podcast, Falling Together, in which Krista Tippett interviewed Rebecca Solnit. It was recorded some time back but played again this week because of the appropriateness of the topic – how we maintain hope in adversity. If you are so inclined, here is the link to the hour-long interview – what else do you have to do???
https://onbeing.org/programs/rebecca-solnit-falling-together/
This from Solnit talking about the difficulty to have hope when change is slow:
“Sometimes, cause and effect are centuries apart. Sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the universe [which he sermonized “is long, but always bends toward justice”] is too long for you to see its curve. Sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward, to study the line of that arc.”
I like this thought that sometimes hope is gathered by looking back, not by looking forward. It makes sense, of course, because my ability to predict/understand the past is WAY better than my ability to predict/understand the future. Yet in this “what have you done for me lately” world, hope seems to be understood as exclusively forward looking. We look forward for hope, and if we can’t see any in the next _____ [fill in your personal temporal tolerance amount] then we despair, even wallow. And in the midst of this Covid 19 pandemic, anyone taking in the news and internet chatter can find it easy to despair, easy to wallow. I’m all in for hand washing and social isolation, but perhaps I should give up trying to become an epidemiologist and figure this pandemic out in my spare time and instead look backward a bit and think of those instances when, against all logic and reason, over time, it (whatever “it” was then) somehow worked out. And if that seems to difficult, then perhaps reading Luke 21-25 will do the trick.
It occurs to me... 