"The Politics of Hope"
Jim Farrell
Sunday, October 31st 2004
"The Politics of Hope"
Jim Farrell
Sunday, October 31st 2004
Today I’d like to begin with my favorite paragraph of the last two years. In a beautiful essay called “Doing Good Work Together,” William Kittredge writes that “We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in. Late in the night we listen to our own breathing in the dark and rework our stories. We do it again the next morning, and all day long, before the looking glass of ourselves, reinventing reasons for our lives. Other than such storytelling there is no reason to things.”
Politics is a way of telling stories. Like religion, politics provides a way of linking our personal stories with larger narratives of meaning. During the Christian liturgy, during a Mass like this one, we bring our individual stories into conversation with the larger stories of God’s creative love and redemption. We re-tell the story of God’s embodiment—the incarnation—and the story of his death and resurrection. In the process, we connect our stories to a story of consecration— a story of becoming holy—and we commit ourselves to be whole and healing people in a fractured world. Eating and drinking together, we connect our stories in communion and community, nourishing each other for the work we do as the heart and hands of God on earth. And then, of course, we stop for coffee and cookies and share more stories together.
An American election is like a liturgical celebration—although not nearly as clean. An election is one story in a larger story called democracy. It’s also a place where we weave our personal stories into a common story. It’s a place where we tell stories that tell us who we’ve been, who we are, and who we hope to be. It’s a time when we tell stories about the character of candidates and the meaning of America, and it’s a time when we decide which stories we want to live in. On Tuesday, we’re all going to our polling places to determine one plot of America’s political story.
An American election is also a time when we weave our religious stories and our political stories together. This is inevitable and good. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.” But the relationship is always complex, as people translate religious conviction into social policy. There’s no simple test, as recent newspaper stories and full-page ads have suggested. The Church advises its members on matters of morality, but it always requires its members to form their own conscience. And the issues that seem to be a litmus test in the newspaper are not the central elements of Catholic social teaching.
Catholic social teaching requires, for example, a commitment to social justice and a preferential option for the poor. In their pastoral letter “Economic Justice for All,” the American Catholic bishops sum it up beautifully: "The needs of the poor,” they say, “take priority over the desires of the rich; the rights of workers over the maximization of profits; the preservation of the environment over uncontrolled industrial expansion; the production to meet social needs over production for military purposes." Conscientious Catholics must consider these issues as we make our decisions on Tuesday.
As people of faith and as citizens, we express our hopes in both liturgies and elections. Many of us—on both sides of the political divide—have staked our hopes on the results of this election. On Tuesday—or maybe just sometime before Inauguration Day—the election will be decided and some of us will believe in the politics of hope. But only if we misunderstood the politics of hope in the first place, because hope isn’t about winning: it’s about faithfulness.
Vaclav Havel made this clear in his book Disturbing the Peace. Havel was the Czech writer who used his words to change the world, inspiring hope and then institutionalizing it as he became his country’s first democratically elected president after the fall of communism.
In conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now, it’s important to remember the history of hope, which is another way of telling stories to live by and live in. In the history of God’s people, for example, there are countless stories of hope. Abraham and Sarah are sterile, but they bear children. The Israelites are slaves to Pharoah, but God guides them out of Egypt. The people of God lose their way, but the prophets call them back. Jesus is crucified on the cross, but three days later there’s resurrection. In the history of the Catholic Church, too, there have been times when the church has gotten out of touch with its core tradition. But each time there are reformations. The church marginalizes the vitality of faith, and there’s Martin Luther. The church ignores the importance of the industrial revolution, and Leo XIII initiates reform with Rerum Novarum, an encyclical that means “New Things.” The church gets stuffy and antiquated, and John XXIII opens the windows and lets in the fresh air of Vatican II. There is, in our religious tradition, a history of hope. We are a resurrection people.
In political conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now, it’s important to remember that many stories of the United States are also histories of hope. In April in 1775, Minutemen in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts fired shots at British troops. Those people, Paul Revere included, were crazy. There was no hope of beating the British Empire. The British had just defeated the French in Europe and they had won the French and Indian War in North America. They were the only superpower of the late-18th-century world.
One year later, a 33-year-old Virginia planter spent 17 days drafting a Declaration of Independence with its radical assertion that “all men are created equal.” 21 years after that, there was a Constitution, which begins with one of the most radical statements ever written—“We, the people.” This nation was founded on the history of hope.
During the 1850s, a self-taught Illinois lawyer, tall and gangly and ugly, began to think about slavery and the Constitution. He began to wonder if “we, the people” was inclusive enough. He was not a particularly religious man, but he was wise, and he might have been impressed, as I am, by the incredibly contemporary passage we read from Wisdom today: “For you love all things that are, and loathe nothing you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned.” This lawyer was elected President with just 40 percent of the vote. He didn’t launch a pre-emptive war against the South, even though some states had seceded. And he fought a bloody Civil War without demonizing the enemy as evildoers, challenging the politics of hate with the politics of hope. His Second Inaugural Address is one of the best expressions ever of the intersection of politics and religion.
In 1933, in the midst of the Depression, a 36-year old divorced woman got tired of waiting for people to get welfare, and decided to provide it herself, establishing the Catholic Worker movement. A fool for God, as she called herself, she opposed World War II, the atomic bomb, and the Cold War. In 1982, this woman’s hopeful witness was honored by the US Catholic bishops in their pastoral letter on “The Challenge of Peace.”
In 1954, a well-educated Boston University graduate was trying to get established in his new ministry in Montgomery, Alabama when he got a phone call. The call was from Ed Nixon, an officer of the local NAACP. But we might imagine it as a call from God in the person of Ed Nixon. Ten years later, an American President signed a sweeping Civil Rights Act, and the next year a Voting Rights Act, completing Abraham Lincoln’s legacy.
The faithfulness of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King is worth remembering as we approach All Saints Day. It is the mainstream of the American tradition. People who take up their legacy are the true conservatives of our time. Each of us is being called. It may not be Ed Nixon on the phone, but it often is God, and we, too, need to respond faithfully.
We need to remember also that Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King were just ordinary people who did extraordinary things. And this sort of thing happens all the time. We all have our own local histories of hope. Two years ago at St. Olaf, for example, a student of mine decided to create an independent major called “Wild and Precious Life: Educating for an Ethic of Sustainability.” For her senior project, she designed a course called Campus Ecology to study the culture of nature on the St. Olaf campus. She and I team-taught that course last spring, and it’s now in the official college catalogue. I’ll team-teach it again this spring with another talented student. / Last year, students in our Environmental Coalition weighed garbage for a week and found that we produced 700 pounds of food waste a day, which isn’t bad when you’re serving about 9000 meals. Their work allowed the college to buy a composter, which will convert all our food waste to mulch and fertilizer in just 14 days. / Because of the hopefulness and hard work of our Director of Facilities, St. Olaf will install a 1.65 megawatt wind-turbine on our campus next year. It will generate about a third of the electricity we use, which means that the college will surpass the goals of the Kyoto Accords to reduce carbon emissions by 20 percent. / This year, a sophomore student who worked in Community Supported Agriculture last summer asked permission to start a CSA on some of the college’s farmland. The college told her no. Being a hopeful person, she wouldn’t take no for an answer. So she put together a new plan, getting the college food service to agree to purchase all the produce she produces. The college said yes, and she just got $6000 from student government to buy a roto-tiller and supplies for a farm that will be planted next spring. St. Olaf is a small college, but great hope often grows in small places. And the politics of hope often grows from seeds that don’t seem political at all.
All of these stories are part of the history of hope. But they’re also stories of the imagination of hope. Our stories of hope are often rooted in the past. But all of them point to the future. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, for example, looked to the scriptures—to the Bible and the Declaration of Independence—for their hope. But they also told stories of freedom from bondage that gave people a vision of the promised land. “I have a dream,” King said, and he told a story we all wanted to live in.
This imagination of opportunities is called “prefigurative thinking” and it’s essential to the realization of hope. In Daniel Quinn's novel Ishmael, a character contends that "you can't just stop being in a story, you have to have another story to be in." We organize our lives around stories, so we need to keep telling stories that connect us to a new future. We need to tell stories and sing songs that help us feel what it would be like to live in the kingdom of God, in the beloved community, in a modern garden of Eden.
One of my favorite novels is Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, which is all about hope and despair, activism and passivism, love and vocation. My favorite passage in the whole book is at a funeral, when Codi reads a letter from her sister Hallie, who has died in Nicaragua: "The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed."
So what are the hopes we want to live inside? What are the stories we want to live for? Have our hopes been articulated in the election campaign? I think not. I don’t know about you, but I wanted to hear more about the elementary kindness that would offer everybody in America enough. I wanted to hear more about the elementary justice that would reduce the gaping inequalities that divide our country. I wanted to hear less about wealth and selfishness and more about commonwealth and community. I wanted to hear less about short-term war plans and more about long-term plans for the peaceable kingdom. I wanted to hear less about outsourcing and oil prices more about a foreign policy of fair play and fair trade. I wanted to hear more about the creativity that would help us live harmoniously with Creation. Whatever the outcome Tuesday, I’ll still need to be telling those stories—and so will you.
The history of hope is not all cheerfulness. Millions of people lived and died in slavery before Americans decided that they couldn’t live with that institution. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were shot for their hopefulness. Sometimes, too, things get worse before they get better But history shows, I think, that even though you can kill people, you can’t kill hope.
Because I’m a faculty member, I get to make assignments, so here’s some reading for you. If you’re hunting for hope in a world that seems hopeless, take a look at Scott Russell Sanders’ book Hunting for Hope. Here’s one of my favorite passages from it, one that shows both the quality of his thinking and the quality of his language: "Whatever its source, Creation is a marvelous feat of generosity, an exuberant outpouring. I see that outpouring in Ruth's face, in the wren pecking for bugs on my windowsill, in the October rain bringing down yellow leaves from the tulip tree in our front yard, in the pumpkin glowing orange in our neighbor's porch. The outpouring never ceases, but only changes form. We honor this continuing gift by our own acts of charity and compassion. We honor the Creator by cherishing every parcel of Creation, especially those living things that share the planet with us, the beetles and bison, the black-footed ferrets and black-eyed Susans. . . . The price of hope, in other words, is responsibility."
And the second book I assign you to read is Hope’s Edge by Frances Moore Lappe and her daughter Anna. They traveled the world to find stories of hope in the most unlikely places, where powerless people are taking power by taking responsibility for their own lives and their own communities, both human and natural.
I’d like to conclude with a verse by a Welsh poet named Sheenagh Pugh. A friend of mine gave it to me when I needed some hope—and the generosity of friends, of course, is a story of hope too. The poem is called “Sometimes”:
The source of the William Kittredge quote at the beginning is http://www.wsu.edu/~hughesc/kittredge.htm.
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