hope

January 5, 2025

Well-lived Words in a Time of Uncertainty

A man you have never heard of should be heard about. His name was William Sloane Coffin, Jr.  (1924 — 2006), longtime Chaplain at Yale University. He also lived in a time of uncertainty and did his part to create “good trouble,” as Congressman John Lewis called his own effort to improve the world.

You needn’t be religious to appreciate either man, though they both were devout.

Coffin’s many words demonstrate the scope of his thought and commitment to justice. Coffin’s dedication to living out his credo might well rank him among the few of us who are both great and good.

Those words touch on truth, love, taking a stand, intimacy, race, war, justice, poverty, faith, anger, fear, homophobia, forgiveness, and hope. I have selected 33 quotations below, along with three brief videos.

You can find his impressive Wikipedia biography here. Keep in mind that he died almost three years before Barack Obama became President.

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  • The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
  • Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.
  • Anybody who takes a stand is going to be wrong sometimes, but he who never takes a stand is always wrong.
  • Prophets from Amos and Isaiah to Gandhi and King have shown how frequently compassion demands confrontation. Love without criticism is a kind of betrayal. Lying is done with silence as well as with words.
  • I am reminded of all the undergraduates I knew and loved, many now crowding sixty, even seventy. Some of them have aged like vintage wine, heeding Albert Camus’s wisdom: ‘To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.’
  • A few of them, however, looking back on the springtime of their lives, say, ‘Ah, those were the days!’ — and the worst of it is, they’re right! It was not the days, I suspect, but they who used to be better!
  • Fear destroys intimacy. It distances us from each other; or makes us cling to each other, which is the death of freedom…. Only love can create intimacy, and freedom too, for when all hearts are one, nothing else has to be one–neither clothes nor age; neither sex nor sexual preference; race nor mind-set.
  • Love is to make us more human, and that demands that we care so much for each other that we have not to be nice but to be honest. We have to be honest, for most real faults are hidden and therefore demand an outside revealer.
  • The consequences of the past are always with us, and half the hostilities tearing the world apart could be resolved today were we to allow the forgiveness of sins to alter these consequences…. if we were to say of ourselves, ‘The hostility stops here.’
  • No sermon on love can fail to mention love’s most difficult problem in our time–how to find effective ways to alleviate the massive suffering of humanity at home and abroad. What we need to realize is that to love effectively we must act collectively…
  • There are two ways to be powerful. One is to seek and acquire power, the other is not to need it. There are also two ways to be rich. One is to gain riches, and the other is not to need them.
  • Remember, young people, even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.

And more …

  • The banality of guilt is that it is such a convenient substitute for responsibility. It’s so much easier to beat your breast than to stick your neck out.
  • Socrates had it wrong: it is not the unexamined (life) but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.
  • You have to unlearn as well as learn, to clear away the weeds and thickets in order to see more clearly the various paths ahead.
  • Over the years I have been convinced that the more important question is not who believes in God, but in whom does God believe? Rather than claim God for our side, it’s better to wonder whether we are on God’s side. Faith is being grasped by the power of love, and there are many atheists with ‘believing’ hearts — the part of us that should be religious if you can offer only one.
  • Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If you heart’s full of hope, you can be presistent when you can’t be optimistic. You can keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. So while I am not optimistic, I’m always very hopeful.
  • Christians have to listen to the world as well as to the Word – to science, to history, to which reason and our own experience tell us. We do not honor the higher truth we find in Christ by ignoring truths found elsewhere.
  • For example, I don’t see how we can proclaim allegiance to the Risen Lord and remain indifferent to our government’s [and the world’s] intention not to abolish nuclear weapons. Or how can we think that the Risen Lord would applaud an economic system that reverses the priorities of Mary’s Magnificat – filling the rich with good things and sending the poor away empty? (Almost one American child in four lives below the poverty line, and one in three children of the world exist in terribly horrible poverty.)
  • To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.
  • Few of us are truly evil; the trouble is, most of us mean well — feebly. We are just not serious. We carry around justice, love, and peace in our shopping carts, but along with a lot of other things that make for injustice, hatred, and war. Churches in our day are a bit like families: they tend to be havens in a heartless world, but they reinforce that world by caring more for its victims than by challenging its assumptions.
  • Love measures our stature: the more we love, the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself.
  • In reality, there are no biblical literalists, only selective literalists. By abolishing slavery and ordaining women, millions of Protestants have gone far beyond biblical literalism. It’s time we did the same for homophobia.

And the last group …

  • Every time people see the innocent suffering, and lift their eyes to heaven and say, ‘God, how could you let this happen?’ it’s well to remember that exactly at that moment God is asking exactly the same question of us:  ‘How could you let this happen?’
  • People in high places make me really angry — the way that (some) corporations are now behaving, the way the United States government is behaving. What makes me angry is that they are so callous, really callous. When you see uncaring people in high places, everybody should be mad as hell.
  • Self-righteousness destroys our capacity for self-criticism. It makes it very hard to be humble, and it destroys the sense of oneness all human beings should have, one with another.
  • My understanding of Christianity is that it underlies all progressive moves to implement more justice, to get a higher degree of peace in the world. The impulse to love God and neighbor, that impulse is at the heart of Judaism, Islam, Christianity (and the other religions of the world). God is not confined to Christians.
  • I am not a pacifist. About the use of force I think we should be ambivalent — the dilemmas are real. All we can say for sure is that while force may be necessary, what is wrong — always wrong — is the desire to use it. It is hard to get even with violent people (especially terrorists). What is easy is to get more and more like them. ‘The warhorse is a vain hope for victory, and by its great might it cannot save.’ (Psalm 33) War is a coward’s escape from the problems of peace.
  • President Bush rightly spoke of an ‘axis of evil’ but it is not Iran, Iraq and North Korea. A far more dangerous trio would be: environmental degradation, pandemic poverty, and a world awash with weapons. Far beyond individuals, communities and nations, the world itself is on the brink of destruction. If we were serious, with the other nations, to engage the war on poverty around the world, that would stem the flow of recruits to the ranks of terrorists.
  • Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and defends them on the basis of morality. In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for a few good men to be a little wrong and have a great deal of power and for the vast majority of their fellow citizens to remain indifferent. The danger today is that we might become more concerned with defense than with (being a country) worth defending.
  • (We) can either follow (our) fears or be led by (our) values and (our) passions. All of this fear-mongering today (of immigrants, homosexuals, crime, and terrorists), I’m afraid, is quite deliberate because the more you can make people fear, the more a government can control you. The American people don’t feel a sense of personal accountability for what the nation should stand for. No one need be afraid of fear; only afraid that fear will stop him or her from doing what’s right.
  • (Yet, in the face of this), I remain hopeful. Hope needs to be understood as a reflection of the state of your soul, not as reflection of the circumstances that surround your days. Hope is not the equivalent of optimism. The opposite of hope is not pessimism, but despair. Hope is about keeping the faith despite the evidence so that the evidence has a chance of changing.
  • There never was a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope!
January 2, 2025

Words for the Second Day of the New Year

Lord … Number us, we beseech Thee, in the ranks of those who went forth … longing only for those things for which Thee dost make us long, men for whom the complexity of issues only serves to renew their zeal to deal with them, men who alleviated pain by sharing it, and men who are always willing to risk something big for something good — so may we leave in the world a little more truth, a little more justice, and a little more beauty than would have been there had we not loved the world enough to quarrel with it for what it is not — but still could be.

Oh God, take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, and take our hearts and set them on fire.

Amen.

The words are those of William Sloane Coffin, Jr. (1924 -2006). I will write more about him in a future post, but this is enough for today. Check out Coffin on Wikipedia if you’d like to know more now.

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The first painting is Chimera by Gustave Moreau from 1884. The last is Blueberry Eyes by Franz Kline, 1960. Chimera is sourced from Wikimedia Commons, while Blueberry Eyes comes from Wikiart.org.

January 10, 2021

Consolation and Hope in a Challenging Time

On most days, I wouldn’t be quoting President Abraham Lincoln. At a different time, this atheist might not be looking for solace in scripture, though I am often comforted when I do.

Today I’m doing both and offering their consolation to you.

Lincoln, this country’s Civil War President, authorized a day of “national prayer and humiliation” in the midst of that war. His proclamation reads, in part:

I do … designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer. And I do hereby request all the People to abstain, on that day, from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite … in keeping the day holy to the Lord, and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.

Humiliation fits for this time, too, just after the storming of the Capitol. Fasting fits, as is expected on the annual Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Self-reflection is necessary. Humility and prayer create the appropriate attitude and mood for the occasion.

People are dying. Loneliness overwhelms many, poverty and joblessness terrify, sadness covers the homes and the hearts. Then came the mob.

Humiliation, indeed.

Yet, there is hope.

Lincoln’s leadership continued under even more challenging circumstances.

As the Civil War neared its end, the President offered these lines in closing his Second Inaugural Address of March 4, 1865. His message was one of reconciliation between opposing sides:

With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Abraham Lincoln knew our job is always to repair the world.

Reverend William Sloane Coffin, 100 years later, knew it, too. He offered this in prayer: 

Lord … Number us, we beseech Thee, in the ranks of those who went forth … longing only for those things for which Thee dost make us long, men for whom the complexity of issues only serves to renew their zeal to deal with them, men who allieviated pain by sharing it, and men who are always willing to risk something big for something good — so may we leave in the world a little more truth, a little more justice, and a little more beauty than would have been there had we not loved the world enough to quarrel with it for what it is not — but still could be. …

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The top painting is called Woman at Prayer by Harry Wilson Watrous. Next comes The Morning Prayer by Ludwig Deutsch. The final image is the photo of a Nomad Prayer taken in an African desert, sometime between 1931 and 1936. The photographer was Kazimierz Nowak.

William Sloane Coffin’s prayer can be heard near the end of the award-winning radio collage/documentary created by Studs Terkel and Jim Unrath, Born to Live: https://beta.prx.org/stories/118275

September 17, 2017

Alone

Loneliness is a desperate thing and a thing desperately hard to capture in words. But when the wish for connection becomes reality, the heart trembles …

We are isolated for several reasons. What happens in our head is unique. Intimate communication is a struggle. We are surprised at the blunt instruments words become. The indefinable essence is too often lost, subject to the way we sound, our facial expression; and the auditor’s capacity to listen. Without his ability to identify some likeness between his experience and our own, the effort is futile.

Nor do we even fathom ourselves fully. Messaging cannot deliver a meaning unknown to the sender. The most insightful among us still are trapped looking at themselves from the inside, unable to escape a claustrophobic perspective – unable to discern the unconscious. Meanwhile, the vantage point from outside is second-hand news, told to us, but not known by us.

Self-knowledge is imperfect, not comprehensive. Humans accept obvious motivations and easy explanations to explain themselves to themselves. Who even considers the many causes of a simple task like deciding to grocery shop today? Hunger, scheduling, a sale on peaches, your child’s request for a particular food, a friend’s comment about a good meal, a cooking show you watched, or all of these? We admit, at least, that love is inexplicable, our heart a mystery.

Hope of connection lives, nonetheless. The desire for understanding overpowers the complications. And sometimes hope is fulfilled.

Dostoevsky, the great Russian novelist, understood this. Two characters in his masterpiece The Idiot – a towering achievement in reckoning with the complexities of personality – express their separation from the mainstream of society.

Dostoevsky presents an embittered young man, Ippolit, within weeks of death; who himself believes he will never be understood, yet strains to be heard, recognized, and accepted:

In any serious human thought born in someone’s head, there always remains something which it is quite impossible to convey to other people, though you may fill whole volumes with writing and spend thirty-five years trying to explain your thought; there always remains something that absolutely refuses to leave your skull and will stay with you forever; you will die with it, not having conveyed to anyone what is perhaps most important in your idea.

The novelist’s title character is a casual friend of Ippolit, a saintly and open man named Prince Myshkin. Ippolit and Myshkin, despite their differences, both want connection.

The following narrated passage recalls a time when the young Prince was in treatment in Switzerland. Expressing himself was then a particular challenge. He led a life alone, separate, cut-off:

Once he went into the mountains on a clear, sunny day, and wandered about for a long time with a tormenting thought that refused to take shape. Before him was the shining sky, below him the lake, around him the horizon, bright and infinite, as if it went on forever. For a long time he looked and suffered. He remembered now (years later) how he had stretched out his arms to that bright, infinite blue and wept. What had tormented him was that he was a total stranger to it all. What was this banquet, what was this everlasting feast, to which he had long been drawn, always, ever since childhood, and which he could never join. Every morning the same bright sun rises; every morning there is a rainbow over the waterfall; every evening the highest snowcapped mountain, there, far away, at the edge of the sky, burns with a crimson flame; every ‘little fly that buzzes near him in a hot ray of sunlight participates in this whole chorus; knows its place, loves it, and is happy’: every little blade of grass grows and is happy! And everything has its path, and everything knows its path, goes with a song and comes back with a song; only he knows nothing, understands nothing, neither people nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a castaway.

Notice the character’s reference to a fly. He is quoting his young friend Ippolit, the man near death, the one struggling to be understood. And in this moment, the Prince recognizes his own sentiment. Dostoevsky continues:

Oh, of course he could not speak then with these words and give voice to his question; he suffered blankly and mutely, but now it seemed to him that he had said it all then, all those same words, and that Ippolit had taken the words about the ‘little fly’ from him, from his own words and tears of that time. He was sure of it, and for some reason his heart throbbed at this thought …

At such moments in the mountains – in the empty spaces of life – we wait for the voice of another to utter our thoughts, intuit our mind, touch us by understanding our sentiments. It is as close as one can come to escaping the solitude of the human species, finding a soul who matches us at least a bit, at least for a time …

Those most desolate among us, those most cut-off, quietly despair of finding such a witness: one who not only sees, but understands. The inhabitants of hope’s waiting room are on every street, in every therapist’s office. If they persist – as they often do – the moment of hope’s fulfillment is transcendent.

As William Blake wrote in Auguries of Innocence: 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour.

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The first image is William Blake’s Ancient of Days. Next comes Jean-Jacques Henner’s Solitude. These are both sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Finally, a photo of Cadillac Mountain in Arcadia National Park.

September 4, 2016

The Secret Role of Hope in Psychotherapy

512px-Moon_in_Sunrise_Sky

I am always amused when a TV pitchman offers to sell a secret “they won’t tell you about,” promising to make you a million dollars. Well, the “secret” I’m about to disclose is something rarely discussed, but not intentionally hidden: a form of hope. This type of optimism, however, is not what most imagine when they think of such words.

The standard well-acknowledged place of hope in therapy is for the therapist to communicate that the future can be better. His authority and experience are implied and therefore increase the chance of belief in him. They tell the patient, in effect, “I’ve seen others recover. People can overcome depression and anxiety. This is also possible for you.”

For some of his clients, however, his cradling of hope takes an additional form. Too many of us live in a psychological concrete canyon, like ones found in the narrow avenues bordered by tall buildings in major cities. We cannot witness what is behind these skyscrapers, nor a sunrise that is the gift of the horizon. Less metaphorically, we cannot recognize what role we might occupy in the world, beyond filling an unsatisfying, modest or disadvantaged place similar to those in our past. Dr. Seuss gave this encouragement:

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…

Oh the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done! There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winning-est winner of all.”

This is not meant to be fanciful. As one of the founders of the Zeolite Scholarship Fund at an inner-city public high school in Chicago, my friends and I met too many youngsters who, by age 16, couldn’t imagine themselves achieving a life past what was available in a dead-end community. For some, a hopeful future died aborning. Imagination died, as well.

A therapist faces this, too, in the blinkered vision — the crumpled expectation — of the person sitting opposite him. His patient might not be able to conceive of a different, more adventurous life of high level skill, romantic abandon, achievement, and abundance. He is, in a sense, like a child who hears early she can be President of the United States, but discovers this has never happened — not yet anyway —  in the USA’s 240-year history and therefore crosses off the goal. Yes, some individuals periscope beyond the concrete canyon, their parents’ bleak lives, and their country’s prejudice without a counselor’s help. Yet others need their therapist’s belief to develop an x-ray vision piercing invisible barriers, the walls so taken-for-granted one might not even be aware of them.

Hope of this kind is not simply founded in the counselor’s confidence you can overcome symptoms. Rather, it is aspirational — the hope beyond hope to a world of possibility your peers laugh at if you are one of the 16-year-olds I mentioned.  For those who never beamed at a respected person’s consistent belief in them before, the words come as a revelation.

Therapy is an enterprise driven by heartbreak in the direction of hope. “I’ll try anything,” you say to yourself, “even this.” Usually, however, the wish is to remove the negatives, not obtain a sense of fulfillment in life. Make no mistake. The two may not be mutually exclusive. Envisioning a future worth living is more than encouragement to wellness, but a step toward it.

What Robert Kennedy said on several occasions applies no less to changing the world than changing ourselves:

Some men see things as they are and say why.

I dream things that never were and say why not.

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 The top photo by Jessie Eastland is described as 72 Seconds Before Actual Sunrise, Southern California, USA. It comes from Wikimedia Commons.
January 1, 2011

Courage For the New Year

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Churchill_V_sign_HU_55521.jpg

Many of you, I suspect, have had a tough time over the holidays. Perhaps lonely, perhaps worried about what the future will bring. Many all over the world are yet unemployed or underemployed. Things have been difficult.

I offer you, therefore, an audio excerpt linked below, from a late 1941 speech given by Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister during most of World War II.

I hope that it will provide some solice and some reason to believe that a better future is possible.

Things were particularly dark for England in 1940. All of continental Europe had been conquered by the Nazis and night after night, the great cities of that island nation were bombed by the Luftwaffe, Hitler’s air force. The British Empire stood alone against the Third Reich and expected a land invasion. The United States had not yet entered the War and there was no certainty that it would.

Virtually no one thought England would survive.

But Churchill did and the Nazis were defeated.

In October of 1941, still prior to the USA’s entry into the war, Churchill was asked to speak to the students of Harrow School, an independent boarding school that was his alma mater.

What he had to say applies quite well to those, even today, who might fear that worse is to come in their lives, as well as those who despair over their current condition.

Listen to the first three minutes and ten seconds and take heart.

The entire excerpt is just over four minutes long.

Once you click on the blue link just below this paragraph, look at the upper  right corner of the page. Then scroll down and click on the Speech #33 (incorrectly identified as having been given in November 1941):

BBC Winston Churchill Speech to Harrow School

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The image above is Winston Churchill on Downing Street Giving His Famous ‘V’ (For Victory) Sign, June 5, 1943. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

December 30, 2009

Hope For the New Year: Old Words After a Tough Twelve Months

Its been a tough year, but not the first in human history. These old words from the great nineteenth-century Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson seem just right:

“Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare us to our friends and soften us to our enemies. Give us strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death loyal and loving to one another.”