BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH
slouching toward hope
by barbara hale
February 25, 2024
Because I needed an idea for today’s service, I put a post on Facebook to see if I could find something to inspire me. Here’s what I asked:
I am interested in hearing from you what home means to you? Is it a physical building? Does it have primarily to do with family? Is it a state of mind? Does it have to be a place of quiet refuge, or do you like it to be a place of creativity? Are you a homebody or do you like to venture out into the world often? Any and all answers would be appreciated. Anyhow, I am looking for inspiration. Thanks!
I am fortunate I have Facebook friends who answer my posts seriously. This one was no exception. I got many answers and the recurring themes defining home were safety, acceptance or where one can be oneself, loving people or family, refuge, memories and peace and contentment.
And I got one answer that said: I simply don’t know how to answer that.
I will admit that I have fallen into all those categories at different times over the years, including not knowing, because to me, the definition of home changes as one’s life progresses. When I was younger, home always felt somewhat temporary to me. The truth is that until I moved into my latest place, I never really felt “settled” except for the people and pets I had around me. And my books. I’ve always had my books. So, although the building I may have found myself in felt transient, I was able to feel mostly grounded wherever I went.
So, I pondered the question of home looking at the answers I got from my friends, and it occurred to me that those answers were all given from people who had no worries that home would not be there tomorrow. Same as me. We were all blessed with comfortable homes that even if the physical places changed over time, we never needed to worry that we wouldn’t have a place to lay our heads comfortably at night.
It's an interesting thing to think about knowing that as we sit here today, more than 600,000 Americans don’t have this luxury. And the solutions to that seem to be, while seemingly simple, impossible for us to achieve because, apparently, we don’t have the will.
But I don’t want to talk about homelessness in America today as heartless as it is. That wasn’t what came to my mind when I decided to ask this question about home. What I had been picturing was the rubble that I had been seeing nightly on the news since the war started two years ago in Ukraine and is now is underway in Gaza. Crumbling buildings and wrecked cities. People standing in front of these ruined structures crying. Unidentified lumps covered with cloths. We all know what those cloths hide. The complete and absolute destruction of home as those people knew it. Chaos. Utter chaos. I have asked myself over and over again who would want to do that to another person? I simply don’t understand it.
It made me think of a poem I remembered from my college lit class. "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Well, that’s dark! But I see where Yeats is coming from. He is certain that the end is near. He sees a dark future for the world. In his view, Christian morality is dead and something else is headed toward Bethlehem to be born – the Anti-Christ maybe?
In 1919, William Butler Yeats was despairing at the end of World War I, the beginning of the Irish War of Independence and the flu epidemic that almost killed his pregnant wife. With all that in his mind, he wrote this poem The Second Coming. In the poem, he sees a world out of control. The Spiritus Mundi, the Spirit of the World, is dim and dreadful and how can one not fear what might come next?
Like Yeats, I have days when I don’t think we’ll see another tomorrow. It’s a nightmare. The world is a flipping mess and it’s really hard to see things getting better. Where’s the end to the Ukraine and Gaza wars? When will the famine in Ethopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia end? The Genocide in Dafur? What can we possibly do about the climate crisis when so many countries live on economies built on fossil fuels? How do we stop the drift away from democracy in this country? How do we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless when so many don’t seem to care? Is it actually possible to make this world a better place?
That’s my nightmare and perhaps yours too.
But here’s the thing. Yeats’ poem gives me hope. Yeats himself went on to live another 20 years in relative peace after he wrote The Second Coming and would die in 1939 at age 73. His child Anne who was born in 1919 during the flu epidemic lived to the ripe old age of 82 and his son William lived even longer, dying when he was 86. World War I ended. Don’t the Irish get along these days for the most part? We have vaccines for many of the illnesses that would have wiped out large swaths of populations back in 1919. Things are better in many ways though things certainly are not and never will be perfect.
But, to give up and to despair means that things are assured to get worse, at least in our own minds.
Of course, hope takes courage. And let’s face it, courage is hard to find. What do we do when we fear the spread of wars, the outcome of the next election, our own or others’ economic downturn, illness of ourselves or a loved one, the loss of people or pets dear to us? What do we do?
Well, one day when my daughter Carrie and I were coming back from Auburn for some reason that
I can’t remember, we were traveling down Route 20. It’s always nice when traffic is light on Rt. 20 as it was that day fortunately. Because along the way, I spied in the distance a woman in the middle of the road. As we approached, I realized that she was in the process of picking up a rather large snapping turtle who was trying to cross. We were far enough away that I couldn’t do anything to help but slow down. Truth be told, it happened so quickly, and my mind processed the action so slowly, that I am not sure I could have stopped safely anyhow had I been traveling quicker. I mean, who in their right mind would be out in the middle of Route 20 even on a light traffic day? But in the time it took us to reach her, she had the turtle on the other side of the road and out of harm’s way. And so we went on.
I thought about that woman for days afterwards. And I still think of her now off and on when I am discouraged. You all know what Route 20 is like. In my mind, what that woman did was a true act of courage. And she most likely saved that turtle from being smashed by a truck and possibly she saved people from accidents that may have been caused by swerving out of the turtle’s way.
I built a scenario of the woman in my head. She looked ordinary. Her car wasn’t covered with “Save the Turtle” bumper stickers or anything like that. I wonder if she even had a clue about how courageous her act was. She saw a turtle in desperate need, and she saved it. It was probably as simple as that.
I think as humans, we tend to think of courage coming when one embarks on a trek up to the peak of Mt. Everest or when one swims the English Channel or when one decides to blast off in a spaceship headed for months revolving around the Earth. And without a doubt, that takes a certain kind of courage. But it’s not the kind of courage that gives me hope. The action of the woman on Route 20 does give me hope.
Every day when we get up in the morning, we make an act of courage, because we don’t know what the world has in store for us, but we get up anyway. Did the woman on Route 20 think she was going to save a turtle’s life that day? Probably not. Nor did I think I would witness such a sheer though small act of bravery.
Here’s my point: Stuff happens, and we react. Most of us don’t have a clue how we will react until we are in the middle of a situation. And then, for the most part, we step up and do what we can. And therein lies hope.
Recently I heard an interview with American pediatrician Seema Jilani of the International Rescue Committee who spent two weeks working at the al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza. Her descriptions of the conditions in that place were horrifying and heartbreaking. I wanted so badly to turn it off, but I listened to the end. This brave woman has spent her time as a doctor working in war-torn areas including Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza.
Of the Gaza war, she said: You know, as a pediatrician, I didn't think I would be very useful. Because this is war, and in war I would imagine and think that the victims or the war-wounded or the killed would be predominantly young men. I can say that on one day in our code resuscitation room, out of our five patients, four were children. And I'm very sad and deeply disturbed to say that I was very useful as a pediatrician in a war zone. And that should never be the case.
And yet Dr. Jilani persisted in her work even though pain relief and simple medical supplies were not available. When asked if she thought that she was able to make a difference to the patients despite the conditions, she replied: I believe it means something when I'm holding a gentleman's hand and he's dying and he's looking at me in the eyes. And I think that's worth something, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this. And I think it means something to the doctors there to see us in solidarity with them. Gaza is a space that is hyper aware of the political situation outside and the forces that exist outside of it, and they feel forgotten. And the moment they see someone standing with them and offering support to them, not even in a material way — in a symbolic way to say, "We are here to see your patients while you mourn the death of your friend or your family member" — it means something. And it certainly means something to me.
She continued: And I think it's worth holding space for that, however little that feels. Some of those things are intangible, but they're not intangible to the ones that are feeling it, that are soaking blood through their clothes. They're not intangible to the mothers that are having to bury their children. And they're not intangible to the orphans whose heads I've held in my hand.
And in Dr. Jilani’s courage and perseverance, I see hope.
Consider Rosa Parks. On the day after she died in 2005, then Senator Barack Obama gave a short speech in Congress praising her. He said, in part:
Her life, and her brave actions, reminded each and every one of us of our personal responsibilities to stand up for what is right and the central truth of the American experience that our greatness as a nation derives from seemingly ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
Rosa Parks' life was a lesson in perseverance. As a child, she grew up listening to the Ku Klux Klan ride by her house and lying in bed at night fearing that her house would be burnt down... Although she attended Alabama State Teachers College, Rosa Parks would later make her living as a seamstress and housekeeper.
But she didn't accept that her opportunities were limited to sewing clothes or cleaning houses. In her forties, Rosa Parks was appointed secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP and was active in voter registration drives with the Montgomery Voters League… Well before she made headlines across the country, she was a highly respected member of the Montgomery community and a committed member of the civil rights effort.
Of course, her name became permanently etched in American history on December 1, 1955, when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. It wasn't the first time Rosa Parks refused to acquiesce to the Jim Crow system. The same bus driver who had her arrested had thrown her off a bus the year before for refusing to give up her seat.
Some schoolchildren are taught that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat because her feet were tired. Our nation's schoolbooks are only getting it half right. She once said: "The only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
This solitary act of civil disobedience became a call to action. Her arrest led a then relatively unknown pastor, Martin Luther King, Jr., to organize a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. That boycott … culminated in a landmark Supreme Court decision finding that the city's segregation policy was unconstitutional.
This solitary act of civil disobedience was also the spark that ignited the beginning of the end for segregation and inspired millions around the country and ultimately around the world to get involved in the fight for racial equality.
What Rosa Parks did on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, probably seemed relatively minor to her at the time. At least minor in the sense that it would spark a movement the way it did. As she said, “I was tired of giving in.” A simple act, a simple statement, but look at the result. She changed our world as we know it.
Later President Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly and said, "We choose hope over fear. We see the future not as something out of our control, but as something we can shape for the better through concerted and collective effort. We reject fatalism or cynicism when it comes to human affairs; we choose to work for the world as it should be, as our children deserve it to be."
So what do you do when you feel like things are falling apart? When “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world?” When you feel like “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity?”
You can despair like Yeats or you can think of what it means to be a “seemingly ordinary person doing extraordinary things”, like the woman who saved the turtle, like the brave people who help others in desperate struggle and need, like Rosa Parks, you can symbolically stay seated on the bus when others are telling you to get up and get out. And when you do, remember that almost every act we take in this world from helping someone in need to going to the voting booth leaves an impact, either small or large, good or bad. We can’t tell whether what we do will merely save a turtle and thus give someone hope in difficult times or make a change that helps create justice for thousands in the future.
I don’t know about you, but I am tired of giving in.
Blessed be.
I am interested in hearing from you what home means to you? Is it a physical building? Does it have primarily to do with family? Is it a state of mind? Does it have to be a place of quiet refuge, or do you like it to be a place of creativity? Are you a homebody or do you like to venture out into the world often? Any and all answers would be appreciated. Anyhow, I am looking for inspiration. Thanks!
I am fortunate I have Facebook friends who answer my posts seriously. This one was no exception. I got many answers and the recurring themes defining home were safety, acceptance or where one can be oneself, loving people or family, refuge, memories and peace and contentment.
And I got one answer that said: I simply don’t know how to answer that.
I will admit that I have fallen into all those categories at different times over the years, including not knowing, because to me, the definition of home changes as one’s life progresses. When I was younger, home always felt somewhat temporary to me. The truth is that until I moved into my latest place, I never really felt “settled” except for the people and pets I had around me. And my books. I’ve always had my books. So, although the building I may have found myself in felt transient, I was able to feel mostly grounded wherever I went.
So, I pondered the question of home looking at the answers I got from my friends, and it occurred to me that those answers were all given from people who had no worries that home would not be there tomorrow. Same as me. We were all blessed with comfortable homes that even if the physical places changed over time, we never needed to worry that we wouldn’t have a place to lay our heads comfortably at night.
It's an interesting thing to think about knowing that as we sit here today, more than 600,000 Americans don’t have this luxury. And the solutions to that seem to be, while seemingly simple, impossible for us to achieve because, apparently, we don’t have the will.
But I don’t want to talk about homelessness in America today as heartless as it is. That wasn’t what came to my mind when I decided to ask this question about home. What I had been picturing was the rubble that I had been seeing nightly on the news since the war started two years ago in Ukraine and is now is underway in Gaza. Crumbling buildings and wrecked cities. People standing in front of these ruined structures crying. Unidentified lumps covered with cloths. We all know what those cloths hide. The complete and absolute destruction of home as those people knew it. Chaos. Utter chaos. I have asked myself over and over again who would want to do that to another person? I simply don’t understand it.
It made me think of a poem I remembered from my college lit class. "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Well, that’s dark! But I see where Yeats is coming from. He is certain that the end is near. He sees a dark future for the world. In his view, Christian morality is dead and something else is headed toward Bethlehem to be born – the Anti-Christ maybe?
In 1919, William Butler Yeats was despairing at the end of World War I, the beginning of the Irish War of Independence and the flu epidemic that almost killed his pregnant wife. With all that in his mind, he wrote this poem The Second Coming. In the poem, he sees a world out of control. The Spiritus Mundi, the Spirit of the World, is dim and dreadful and how can one not fear what might come next?
Like Yeats, I have days when I don’t think we’ll see another tomorrow. It’s a nightmare. The world is a flipping mess and it’s really hard to see things getting better. Where’s the end to the Ukraine and Gaza wars? When will the famine in Ethopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia end? The Genocide in Dafur? What can we possibly do about the climate crisis when so many countries live on economies built on fossil fuels? How do we stop the drift away from democracy in this country? How do we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless when so many don’t seem to care? Is it actually possible to make this world a better place?
That’s my nightmare and perhaps yours too.
But here’s the thing. Yeats’ poem gives me hope. Yeats himself went on to live another 20 years in relative peace after he wrote The Second Coming and would die in 1939 at age 73. His child Anne who was born in 1919 during the flu epidemic lived to the ripe old age of 82 and his son William lived even longer, dying when he was 86. World War I ended. Don’t the Irish get along these days for the most part? We have vaccines for many of the illnesses that would have wiped out large swaths of populations back in 1919. Things are better in many ways though things certainly are not and never will be perfect.
But, to give up and to despair means that things are assured to get worse, at least in our own minds.
Of course, hope takes courage. And let’s face it, courage is hard to find. What do we do when we fear the spread of wars, the outcome of the next election, our own or others’ economic downturn, illness of ourselves or a loved one, the loss of people or pets dear to us? What do we do?
Well, one day when my daughter Carrie and I were coming back from Auburn for some reason that
I can’t remember, we were traveling down Route 20. It’s always nice when traffic is light on Rt. 20 as it was that day fortunately. Because along the way, I spied in the distance a woman in the middle of the road. As we approached, I realized that she was in the process of picking up a rather large snapping turtle who was trying to cross. We were far enough away that I couldn’t do anything to help but slow down. Truth be told, it happened so quickly, and my mind processed the action so slowly, that I am not sure I could have stopped safely anyhow had I been traveling quicker. I mean, who in their right mind would be out in the middle of Route 20 even on a light traffic day? But in the time it took us to reach her, she had the turtle on the other side of the road and out of harm’s way. And so we went on.
I thought about that woman for days afterwards. And I still think of her now off and on when I am discouraged. You all know what Route 20 is like. In my mind, what that woman did was a true act of courage. And she most likely saved that turtle from being smashed by a truck and possibly she saved people from accidents that may have been caused by swerving out of the turtle’s way.
I built a scenario of the woman in my head. She looked ordinary. Her car wasn’t covered with “Save the Turtle” bumper stickers or anything like that. I wonder if she even had a clue about how courageous her act was. She saw a turtle in desperate need, and she saved it. It was probably as simple as that.
I think as humans, we tend to think of courage coming when one embarks on a trek up to the peak of Mt. Everest or when one swims the English Channel or when one decides to blast off in a spaceship headed for months revolving around the Earth. And without a doubt, that takes a certain kind of courage. But it’s not the kind of courage that gives me hope. The action of the woman on Route 20 does give me hope.
Every day when we get up in the morning, we make an act of courage, because we don’t know what the world has in store for us, but we get up anyway. Did the woman on Route 20 think she was going to save a turtle’s life that day? Probably not. Nor did I think I would witness such a sheer though small act of bravery.
Here’s my point: Stuff happens, and we react. Most of us don’t have a clue how we will react until we are in the middle of a situation. And then, for the most part, we step up and do what we can. And therein lies hope.
Recently I heard an interview with American pediatrician Seema Jilani of the International Rescue Committee who spent two weeks working at the al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza. Her descriptions of the conditions in that place were horrifying and heartbreaking. I wanted so badly to turn it off, but I listened to the end. This brave woman has spent her time as a doctor working in war-torn areas including Afghanistan, Lebanon and Gaza.
Of the Gaza war, she said: You know, as a pediatrician, I didn't think I would be very useful. Because this is war, and in war I would imagine and think that the victims or the war-wounded or the killed would be predominantly young men. I can say that on one day in our code resuscitation room, out of our five patients, four were children. And I'm very sad and deeply disturbed to say that I was very useful as a pediatrician in a war zone. And that should never be the case.
And yet Dr. Jilani persisted in her work even though pain relief and simple medical supplies were not available. When asked if she thought that she was able to make a difference to the patients despite the conditions, she replied: I believe it means something when I'm holding a gentleman's hand and he's dying and he's looking at me in the eyes. And I think that's worth something, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this. And I think it means something to the doctors there to see us in solidarity with them. Gaza is a space that is hyper aware of the political situation outside and the forces that exist outside of it, and they feel forgotten. And the moment they see someone standing with them and offering support to them, not even in a material way — in a symbolic way to say, "We are here to see your patients while you mourn the death of your friend or your family member" — it means something. And it certainly means something to me.
She continued: And I think it's worth holding space for that, however little that feels. Some of those things are intangible, but they're not intangible to the ones that are feeling it, that are soaking blood through their clothes. They're not intangible to the mothers that are having to bury their children. And they're not intangible to the orphans whose heads I've held in my hand.
And in Dr. Jilani’s courage and perseverance, I see hope.
Consider Rosa Parks. On the day after she died in 2005, then Senator Barack Obama gave a short speech in Congress praising her. He said, in part:
Her life, and her brave actions, reminded each and every one of us of our personal responsibilities to stand up for what is right and the central truth of the American experience that our greatness as a nation derives from seemingly ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
Rosa Parks' life was a lesson in perseverance. As a child, she grew up listening to the Ku Klux Klan ride by her house and lying in bed at night fearing that her house would be burnt down... Although she attended Alabama State Teachers College, Rosa Parks would later make her living as a seamstress and housekeeper.
But she didn't accept that her opportunities were limited to sewing clothes or cleaning houses. In her forties, Rosa Parks was appointed secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP and was active in voter registration drives with the Montgomery Voters League… Well before she made headlines across the country, she was a highly respected member of the Montgomery community and a committed member of the civil rights effort.
Of course, her name became permanently etched in American history on December 1, 1955, when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. It wasn't the first time Rosa Parks refused to acquiesce to the Jim Crow system. The same bus driver who had her arrested had thrown her off a bus the year before for refusing to give up her seat.
Some schoolchildren are taught that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat because her feet were tired. Our nation's schoolbooks are only getting it half right. She once said: "The only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
This solitary act of civil disobedience became a call to action. Her arrest led a then relatively unknown pastor, Martin Luther King, Jr., to organize a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. That boycott … culminated in a landmark Supreme Court decision finding that the city's segregation policy was unconstitutional.
This solitary act of civil disobedience was also the spark that ignited the beginning of the end for segregation and inspired millions around the country and ultimately around the world to get involved in the fight for racial equality.
What Rosa Parks did on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, probably seemed relatively minor to her at the time. At least minor in the sense that it would spark a movement the way it did. As she said, “I was tired of giving in.” A simple act, a simple statement, but look at the result. She changed our world as we know it.
Later President Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly and said, "We choose hope over fear. We see the future not as something out of our control, but as something we can shape for the better through concerted and collective effort. We reject fatalism or cynicism when it comes to human affairs; we choose to work for the world as it should be, as our children deserve it to be."
So what do you do when you feel like things are falling apart? When “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world?” When you feel like “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity?”
You can despair like Yeats or you can think of what it means to be a “seemingly ordinary person doing extraordinary things”, like the woman who saved the turtle, like the brave people who help others in desperate struggle and need, like Rosa Parks, you can symbolically stay seated on the bus when others are telling you to get up and get out. And when you do, remember that almost every act we take in this world from helping someone in need to going to the voting booth leaves an impact, either small or large, good or bad. We can’t tell whether what we do will merely save a turtle and thus give someone hope in difficult times or make a change that helps create justice for thousands in the future.
I don’t know about you, but I am tired of giving in.
Blessed be.
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