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For years, one of my favorite hymns of hope has been Carolyn McDade’s “We’ll Build a Land.” It opens with: “We’ll build a land where we bind up the broken; we’ll build a land where the captives go free…” It is a song affirming a better world ahead, which we can build together. The chorus begins, “Come build a land where sisters and brothers, anointed by God, may then create peace…”

I have often requested this hymn when I preached about social justice issues, as a rallying cry of unity to close the service. It challenged, comforted, and centered me.

And then I heard a Native American UU say that the hymn is very hurtful for her. To hear rooms full of white people singing about building a land does not bring hope to her; it brings grief and anger. I heard her say this, but truthfully, I didn’t listen to her. My inner voice—the all-knowing voice of whiteness I have been trained to respect and obey—said something like, “My, she is oversensitive. This is a Biblical text—the words are adapted from Amos and Isaiah, written long before Columbus even sailed to ‘the New World.’ And anyway, I love it.”

Of course, I didn’t say that out loud. We who have privilege, who choose the songs, don’t have to speak out loud—most of the time we just quietly presume that we know better, and keep doing what we are doing. Had I said it out loud, perhaps she could have corrected my ignorance sooner. As it was, I probably continued to sing the song for another five years before I was introduced to the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. Then I realized with a start just how much Biblical narratives were, and continue to be used in legal authorization for past and ongoing theft of Indian lands and rights.

For years, I located my hope in the beautiful, compelling, words of this song—in affirmations of a better world that we could someday make. But at some point—and it was a gradual waking up, not a sudden one—I realized that this beautiful future is not, actually, where I might find hope. Hope is found in transforming narratives of oppression and injustice into new stories of equality and justice—and that always has to happen in the present. You can’t move from the past to the future without going through the present!

For me, finding hope in the present means that I look away from the mountaintop, where people might someday stand like “oaks of righteousness,” and I look into the valley of the relationships right around me. In all of their imperfection. At some point, and slowly, I realized that in this case, real hope was to be found by listening to the Native American people right next to me, honoring what they were saying, understanding the harm that this narrative does, and ceasing to sing that song. It meant deciding that I was more committed to right relationship in the present than to poetry about a beautiful future.

(Later, I learned that others also felt excluded by this particular song—folks who don’t live on the gender binary and consider themselves left out from the “sisters and brothers” who would be anointed by God to create peace.)

I still love the song, though I don’t request it any more. I know Carolyn McDade, who put that scripture to music, and I love her. I also know that she is an activist to her bones and would never want anyone to be hurt by her words. This is not a message that she is bad, or the song is bad, or I am bad for singing it. It is a message about inclusive hope.

Grounded in knowledge derived from the hardest times in my life, not from books or abstract ideas, here’s what I have come to believe about hope: Hope has to be found in the present, and the only way to find it is to create it. The only way to create it is to take risks, to try something new when the old ways hurt. In those parts of ourselves that have privilege, what is generally new is listening to those who do not share that privilege.

Hope means interrupting the authoritative inner voice—one white woman I know calls this voice Super-Whitey—the inner voice that assures us we already know everything that matters. Hope is found as we admit that we can’t ever know what it is like to not have the privileges we have. Hope emerges as we recognize that we can listen to those who do not have those same privileges, and believe them, thus expanding what we know.

Paul Wellstone, greatly beloved and still-missed senator from my home state of Minnesota, said: “Politics is what we do; politics is what we create, by what we work for, by what we hope for and what we dare to imagine.” He was a politician, speaking about politics, but he was also talking about hope.

Hope is what we do. Hope is what we create, by what we work for, what we hope for and what we dare to imagine.

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Rev. Meg Riley

Senior Minister at Church of the Larger Fellowship

Meg has been a Unitarian Universalist minister for more than twenty years. As a UU kid in West Virginia, she quickly learned to enjoy being "different," which has served her well in a "different" life. Meg lives in Minneapolis, where she enjoys walking by lakes, gardening, reading and writing. She also lives online, where she enjoys hanging out, keeping up with people, and playing the occasional game of Scrabble. She is the parent of a teenager, and the companion of a number of four legged friends.

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