If we are truly strong -- if we love with all our strength -- we must face these questions. Strength is exhibited not by manufacturing a sense of hope that ignores reality but by facing up, while not succumbing, to a situation that may be hopeless. It doesn’t mean hope is unavailable to us, but that we have to find honestly what Albert Camus called a “stubborn hope”:
Tomorrow the world may burst into fragments. In that threat hanging over our heads there is a lesson of truth. As we face such a future, hierarchies, titles, honors are reduced to what they are in reality: a passing puff of smoke. And the only certainty left to us is that of naked suffering, common to all, intermingling its roots with those of a stubborn hope.
[Albert Camus, “The Wager of Our Generation,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, (New York: Vintage, 1960), pp. 239-240.]
If we are to claim a stubborn hope, we must come to it honestly and act from it with integrity. That is what it means to speak prophetically. Never before has it been more important for all of us to find our prophetic voices.
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This essay is excerpted from Robert Jensen’s new book, All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, from Soft Skull Press.
For more information, go to http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=978-1-59376-234-6
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