From Your Minister
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I believe that the CLF mission statement is a recipe for hope: We seek to cultivate wonder, imagination, and the courage to act. More specifically, I believe that this is the basic recipe for restoring hope when it is lost.
My observation comes from my own experience of almost three decades of ministry, in which I have been privileged to hear the struggles and triumphs of hundreds of other people’s lives. Wonder, imagination, and the courage to act—a three-legged stool designed to bring hope. No two legs of the stool will do, any more than we’d sit on a two-legged stool and expect not to fall.
The beat poet Diane Di Prima wrote: “The war that matters is the war against the imagination,” and goes on to describe real wars as failures of imagination. Decades later, in another depressing time in history, Adrienne Rich noted Di Prima’s words and then wrote: “Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
When I am feeling despair, as I often do, about the wars being waged against so many people, communities, places, and ideas, I often feel a complete absence of imagination. Instead, I am filled with helpless rage and a sense that nothing I do will make a difference. For me, what helps most at these times when my own ability to act has disappeared is to connect with someone who used imagination in a situation with far fewer options than I have.
Our CLF members who are currently incarcerated often use their imaginations in ways that lift me from despair, as much as the ways they are mistreated fill me with it. These are people who need their imaginations to save their lives daily, because virtually nothing around them reflects humanity, love or compassion. One memorable piece I read was written by a UU in solitary confinement in response to an assignment in a CLF correspondence course about creating joy. The curriculum, designed by CLF friend and self-proclaimed minister of joy, Rev. Amanda Aikman, asked participants to use the colors of the rainbow to lift up practices that are shown to increase joy. The color green asked participants to align themselves with something living around them. This person, in solitary confinement, wrote that at first he thought that he was the only living thing in his cell. But then he realized there were some ants in the corner. He got down on the floor and studied them carefully for a long time, and observed that this practice did, in fact, bring him joy.
This brought me up short. He was magnifying his joy in life by practicing the observation of ants, and I—sur-rounded by so many signs of life I could drown in them—could only focus on reasons for despair? There are a couple of ways to respond to being brought up short in this way. One route, that does not in fact lift me from despair, is to feel guilt and shame about my lack of appreciation for all that I have. The other route, which does in fact lift me up, is to deploy the first leg of the CLF triangle—wonder. Instead of looking at myself with dismay or disgust or shame, I can look at this other person. I can take time to feel the wonder of the imagination of this other person. Such creativity! Isn’t the human spirit amazing! There are so many sources to connect with—authors, artists, activists, healers, neighbors, friends—who can offer us this gift of wonder if we take time to notice, as this incarcerated UU took time with the ants.
Wonder, imagination, and the courage to act. Connecting with someone else’s imaginative acts can bring me inspiration and courage to act myself. So many things I have done out in the world—actually the huge majority of them—have been done because of someone or some place or some idea that I love. When I am connected in love with plants, or land, or communities, taking action to protect them is not optional. The mother tiger in me emerges, and I’m going to fight.
For me, the misery of helpless rage drives me (eventually) to come out from under the covers and see what tiny act I might accomplish. And always, for me, this begins with prayer. Holding someone in prayer, even when I can’t heal their illness or stop the oppression against them, is an active choice which brings me a sense of connectivity and hope.
Years ago, when I was helping to launch the Standing on the Side of Love Campaign (now called, more wonderfully, Side with Love!), we decided never to post on Facebook in a way that someone couldn’t click “like” about. We did not want to end our posts leaving people feeling worse than when they began them. So even if we posted about a horrific hate crime, we would end with, “Please pray for the family of so and so, and remember all of the people who are praying with us.” Or we would include some small step that people could take—calling a representative, sharing on their own page, etc. Giving each other prompts for action, grounded in wonder and imagination, is a way to help each other along in these difficult times.
There are endless reasons to despair. Each day we need to make choices about how we will respond. But when we join together in wonder, imagination and the courage to act, we can keep hope alive.
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