On Hope 
Reading and sermon preached by Reverend Carolyn Patierno
October 16, 2005

From Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, By Joan D. Chittister

Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside us to get better.  It is about getting better inside about what is going on inside. It is about becoming open to the God of newness.  ...  Surrendering to the demands of the moment, holding on when holding on seems pointless, brings us to that point of personal transformation which is the juncture of maturity and sagacity.  Then, whatever the circumstances, however hard the task, the struggles of life may indeed shunt us from mountaintop to mountaintop but they will not destroy us.
            We always think of hope as grounded in the future.  That’s wrong, I think.  Hope is fulfilled in the future but it depends on our ability to remember that … we have survived everything in life to this point and have emerged in even better form than we were when those troubles began.  … Hope is what sits by a window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there isn’t an ounce of proof in tonight’s black sky that it can possibly come.

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Let me begin with a prologue.  For most sermons, my research and study informs an already in motion understanding of the topic I am considering.  But occasionally, I begin with merely a hunch.  It is a hunch that tells me that there is something more beneath a seemingly straightforward topic   What lies beneath has as yet eluded me.  I’m having a hard time untangling this knot. The sermon series I preached on “help” is the most recent example of this type of process.  I found a brilliant writer who wrote what I consider a brilliant book on the topic and I shared what I learned with you.  Same goes for today’s topic.  I have been long unsatisfied with most discussions on hope.  And blessedly, I found a book that brought it all home for me.  As my thinking on help was most definitely formed rather than informed by Garrett Keizer, the author of the book that inspired me; Joan Chittister’s thinking has indeed formed my emerging understanding of hope.  I’ll never look at hope in the same way.  This is the type of sermon in which I share what I’ve learned and the stories that confirm the hunch and the new learning. 

End of prologue.

Hope is an interesting idea.  I have known that hope is the muse we rely on in the creation of a better day.  I intuitively believe in hope.  But as I said, I have long felt unsettled with my lack of understanding.  I have wanted to get at the guts of it.  But of what, exactly?  For starters, I sense that our understanding of hope’s construct largely stands on a shaky foundation.  We consider hope in terms of what we aspire to in the future.  We harbor hope largely because the alternative, is too painful.  Then hope is tossed around like so much fluff.  As in, “just what makes that little old ant think he’ll move that rubber tree plant?  Why, he’s got high hopes.” right?

Actually, the ant’s got a big, ‘ole mountain in front him and unless he struggles mightily, it will not be moved, high hopes or no.  But the struggle is the point and the triumph, less so. 

What a world we’re living in of late.  You all know.  There is the world and then there are our private, individual worlds – the pain we each endure each day.  I know that we must have hope.  But what does that mean? 

Here’s where it begins.  My own sense of hope is connected to faith.  I still haven’t preached that sermon on faith I’ve been meaning to preach.  So for our purposes this morning, I’m going to lean on Chittister’s definition of faith as “that early notion that life is bigger than we are, that there is something out there that is eternally just, eternally loving.  … Life is obviously good.” 

“Obviously good.”  It takes a certain nerve for a woman as acutely aware of suffering to name life as “obviously good.”  It takes a certain nerve and it takes faith.  Call it what you will.  Today, we’ll call it faith.  Faith lives on the other side of the shadows of doubt.

I wish I could read this book out loud to all of you.  And you’re so deeply grateful that such a thing is not possible, I know.  But what I will do is describe how she begins and then outline two concepts for your reflection. 

Chittister’s book is entitled Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, and she begins by distinguishing hope from optimism.  She says that optimism does not interest her.  “To be blissful in the midst of pain, to avoid bad news like the plague, … is no great indicator either of mental health or spiritual depth.”  Like Chittister, I find cock-eyed optimism to be less than helpful and lagging far behind hope in its ability to sustain.  Case in point, I had a friend in seminary who had been estranged from her grown daughter for some time.  During orientation of her first year, she participated in a small group facilitated by a young seminarian.  My friend had been estranged from her grown daughter for a long, lonely period of time.  She shared this very sad story only to be told by the facilitator that she shouldn’t worry about it.  That surely everything was going to be okay, that my friend and her daughter would basically wake up one day ready to reconcile and then it would happen.  Trust God and all that malarkey.  This mother was devastated by this blind optimism because it was not, and rarely is, based in reality.  Her life had changed in the wake of the break in relationship with her daughter.  Her task was neither to pretend that it hadn’t happened nor that it didn’t matter to her.  Her task was to live a life of integrity through her struggle.  Her task was to be transformed by her struggle so that she would once again know hope and find joy in her life despite the devastation she also held.

We are more likely to cultivate hope after we have known struggle.   Before we slog through struggle and then emerge with hope in our hearts, we are, and I say this with all due compassion, merely optimists. 

Chittister posits that hope is not possible without struggle.  She set out to answer the question, “Where in pain does hope lie?” and in answering she built an anatomy of struggle.  She came to understand that “it is not struggle that defeats us, it is our failure to struggle that depletes the human spirit. We survive struggle with new insights, with new heart.”

And then she laid out a kind of call and response process of struggle and hope.  One process leads to the other.  “The spirituality of struggle is a spirituality that takes change and turns it into conversion, takes isolation and makes it independence, takes darkness and forms it into faith, takes the one step beyond fear to courage, takes powerlessness and reclaims it as surrender, takes vulnerability and draws out of the freedom that comes with self-acceptance, faces the exhaustion and comes to value endurance for its own sake, touches the scars and knows them to be transformational.”

All of these ideas inspire.  But I want to unpack the point with which a Unitarian Universalist is likely to have some trouble:  the struggle of powerlessness and the gift of surrender. 

There is something about a Unitarian Universalist that does not go quietly into the night, does not trust or understand surrender.  My friend and colleague, Josh Pawelek, preached a sermon series last year on UU identity claiming our tradition as the first modern faith tradition.  Control is a modern concept.  However, struggle begins with a real change such as death, illness, a break in relationship – anything that radically changes our personal landscape.  The unnatural disasters that befall us – leave alone the natural disasters that we have witnessed in the south, in Pakistan, in southeast Asia  - prove to us once again that at best, control is a naïve concept.  We believe we are in control.  As it turns out:  not so much. 

“Powerlessness brings us face to face with the frustration that comes when life is out of control.  The struggle with powerlessness is the struggle for effectiveness, yes, but more than that it is the struggle for simplicity of heart. … Powerlessness strips away all pretenses and renders us human.  And then it is indeed time to save ourselves.” 

And then surrender.  I think you will be surprised by what Chittister means by this concept.  Surrender dwells on the other side of powerlessness.  She understands surrender as “the final act of human openness. …[T]he moment in which we realize that it’s time to become someone new.  [I]t is not about giving up; it is about moving on.”

“Moving on.”  In this context surrender is the liberating force that allows us, yes, to move on.  Born of powerlessness, surrender births the person who we are meant to become.  “There are times to let a thing go.  There is a time to put a thing down, however unresolved, however baffling, however wrong, however unjust it may be … There  … is a time to let surrender take over so that the past does not consume the present, so that new life can come, so that joy has a chance to surprise us again.”  Please do not hear me say that moving on is the equivalent of “get over it.”  Hear the nuance that distinguishes one response from the other.

In two weeks I will be considering the topics of dying, death, and grief, as we do each year.  You’ve heard me say that grief does not leave us but rather we learn how to balance grief over time.  Chittister would agree, I think.  In this context,  “moving on,” does not mean, “get over it.”  It means laying down the struggle in order to embrace the life that will emerge in a new form.  Surrender means surrendering to new meanings and circumstances, says Chittister. 

Grief is just one way that we are scarred.  We are scarred by any number of struggles.  And these struggles have effects on who we become or conversely who we refuse to become.  “Struggle is never done without cost.  Real struggle marks us for life.  The woman who comes to say of herself … , ‘My name is Ellen and I am an alcoholic,’ knows the meaning of the one inside who wrestles with us and is never completely subdued.  Whatever the wound on the soul with which struggle marks us, it leaves us limping.  We limp forever to remind us, not that we are weak, but that inside us lies the strength … to struggle and survive.”

So … what?  What am I saying to you?  I’m saying that although I believe in hope, I believe that getting there requires travel over the rough road and it is a road that we choose whether or not to travel.    “Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside us to get better.  It is about getting better inside about what is going on inside. It is about becoming open to the God of newness”

And an epilogue:

Last week during the check-in at the CBD ministers gathering, I shared this congregation’s tale of woe concerning our search for a new building.  My colleagues have been witness to this ongoing saga for four years.  Save one, they gasped as I told them the building had been sold to another congregation in town.  The one who did not gasp was sitting next to me.  Bless his well-meaning heart, he put his arm around me and quoted the Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich, whose role (in the 16th century) was to watch over the church building, never leaving her post in the structure that stood beside it.   Julian said and my friend quoted, “All will be well.  All will be well.  All manner of things will be well.”  To which I blurted out, “Oh yeah, sure.  She lived in a room this big.”  And my friend Tom added, “And she didn’t have a car to park.”  

I harbor a great and sincere hope that we will fulfill our vision of being settled in our new home fully integrated in worship, learning, and outreach.  I harbor that real hope because it is grounded in the struggle.   The last thing we may feel we need is another personal growth opportunity, true.  But it is precisely these opportunities that give us the hope and strength to endure.   I have been – along with nearly two dozen companions on the Building Leadership Team - steeped in the struggle these years.   We’ve got nothing if we don’t have struggle.  What keeps these leaders going?  Hope. 

This congregation dedicated six souls this morning.  We offer them the gift of hope as we acknowledge that life is largely about suffering and then learning how to move through it.  We do them and each other great favor when as a community we acknowledge this – while we claim the joy living in such truth brings.  “Hope is what sits by a window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there isn’t an ounce of proof in tonight’s black sky that it can possibly come.”

You have all seen that proof.  You are yourselves proof that there is always one more dawn. 

Don’t forget.

Amen.

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