I have discovered, as have many others, that this is a world in which from the global to the personal, virtually no one is really safe. It is a world in which powerful nations unleash a grotesque yet sanitized violence that supposedly is for the benefit of those whose homes will be destroyed. It is a world in which men invade the most intimate spaces of women, and then demand that women remain silence about that violence. It is a world in which the affluent step over the homeless on their way to the mall. It is a world in which white people continue to demand that non-white people bear the burden of our inability to confront our own white pathology. And, most frightening of all, it is a world in which we are drawing down the ecological capital of the planet in a fashion that is unsustainable, not just over the long term but now even in a much shorter calculus.
This is the simple discovery we must confront: We were given a place in creation, with a beauty beyond the telling, and we have failed to care for it. And as our collective contempt for the non-human world has intensified, so has our contempt for each other. We have failed to care for each other.
Those are our failures, and we must step up to our responsibility for them. But we must also be clear that these failures are not just ours as individuals, but are the failures of the systems in which we live. The answer is not simply to make ourselves better individuals. We could transform ourselves individually into saints, but as long as those systems and institutions endure, we will be coping with the inevitable failures that are part of their nature. Capitalism produces inequality. Nation-states make war. A high-energy/high-technology society destroys the basis for sustained life.
As hard as it is for any one of us to become a better person, it would be comforting to think that such a personal transformation would be enough. But it isn't, and it never will be. It is hard for us to confront ourselves and change. But it is immeasurably more difficult to become part of a long struggle to change that which is outside of us. But that is exactly what hope demands of us in this broken world.
But that is not the most difficult thing that hope demands. Perhaps the hardest discovery from which we must not shrink is related to that first point, about the limits of our knowledge. As we intensify our commitment to analyze and act, we have to abandon any certainty about that analysis and action. We must cope with a fundamental uncertainty that will dog us as we must take up our place in the struggle, and that is hardest of all. I believe that to claim to know "for sure" is to mark oneself a coward. It is to say, "I have looked into the face of the crisis, but I cannot bear it, and I have retreated to certainty."
I see conservative Christians do this. I see agnostic sectarian leftists do it. I see my academic colleagues do it, endlessly. I see my political allies do it. And every day I battle it in myself.
These are radically uncertain times. No one has the answer. There is no "the answer." There is a rapidly deepening crisis that we first must struggle to understand before we can begin to imagine answers. As Wes Jackson puts it, we have to pose questions that go beyond the available answers.
Can we hold onto our uncertainty and our convictions at the same time? Can we identify values which we will not surrender and also understand that the path to living those values may be unclear at any given moment? I don't think we have a choice. If we cannot do this, we cannot honestly claim hope, and if that is our fate then I believe creation will be forever lost to us.
To borrow from a poem by Wendell Berry, it is time to face "the real work."
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The Real Work
Wendell Berry
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
--------------
I do not pretend to know where we're heading if we follow the singing stream. I do not know where this journey will lead us. To quote a 90-year-old radical activist friend, Abe Osheroff, "There's no destination for the train I'm on. No destination, just a direction." (http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html)
Okay, Abe, easy for you to say. Abe is 90, and he knows his time is limited. I find the lack of a destination more troubling. At this point, since we're in a church, I am going to do what preachers do when they aren't sure about the answer: Quote the Bible, mumble a bit, and hope nobody notices I haven't a clue.
This is the simple discovery we must confront: We were given a place in creation, with a beauty beyond the telling, and we have failed to care for it. And as our collective contempt for the non-human world has intensified, so has our contempt for each other. We have failed to care for each other.
Those are our failures, and we must step up to our responsibility for them. But we must also be clear that these failures are not just ours as individuals, but are the failures of the systems in which we live. The answer is not simply to make ourselves better individuals. We could transform ourselves individually into saints, but as long as those systems and institutions endure, we will be coping with the inevitable failures that are part of their nature. Capitalism produces inequality. Nation-states make war. A high-energy/high-technology society destroys the basis for sustained life.
As hard as it is for any one of us to become a better person, it would be comforting to think that such a personal transformation would be enough. But it isn't, and it never will be. It is hard for us to confront ourselves and change. But it is immeasurably more difficult to become part of a long struggle to change that which is outside of us. But that is exactly what hope demands of us in this broken world.
I see conservative Christians do this. I see agnostic sectarian leftists do it. I see my academic colleagues do it, endlessly. I see my political allies do it. And every day I battle it in myself.
These are radically uncertain times. No one has the answer. There is no "the answer." There is a rapidly deepening crisis that we first must struggle to understand before we can begin to imagine answers. As Wes Jackson puts it, we have to pose questions that go beyond the available answers.
Can we hold onto our uncertainty and our convictions at the same time? Can we identify values which we will not surrender and also understand that the path to living those values may be unclear at any given moment? I don't think we have a choice. If we cannot do this, we cannot honestly claim hope, and if that is our fate then I believe creation will be forever lost to us.
To borrow from a poem by Wendell Berry, it is time to face "the real work."
--------------
The Real Work
Wendell Berry
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
--------------
I do not pretend to know where we're heading if we follow the singing stream. I do not know where this journey will lead us. To quote a 90-year-old radical activist friend, Abe Osheroff, "There's no destination for the train I'm on. No destination, just a direction." (http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html)
Okay, Abe, easy for you to say. Abe is 90, and he knows his time is limited. I find the lack of a destination more troubling. At this point, since we're in a church, I am going to do what preachers do when they aren't sure about the answer: Quote the Bible, mumble a bit, and hope nobody notices I haven't a clue.
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