Porter’s Weekly Reflection 4-26-17

In mid-June my son, Arthur, and I lead a workshop at Mepkin Abbey on Storytelling to Spread the Good News (also one in August at Montreat-http://www.theanchorage.org). These focus on telling stories around themes in our lives. One of the these I have been pondering is hope.

Among the many books I have reread are Joan Chittister’s Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope and Joanna Macy’s/Chris Johnstone’s Active Hope. Both insist that we don’t become hopeful by denying our pain or even despair, but by pushing through them to the other side. Unless we die young, sooner or later the world falls apart. It’s what it means to be human and exist on this side of heaven. Macy/Johnstone insist that there is a mix of gratitude, honoring our pain, and seeing with new eyes that enable us to go forth and be agents of hope. Sister Joan uses the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel as the image for our task. We have to wrestle to receive the blessing and we always walk away with a limp, but we get a new name and a new calling as a result.

Sister Joan writes: “The Spiritual task of life is to feed the hope that comes out of despair. Hope is not something found outside of us. It lies in the spiritual life we cultivate within. The whole purpose of wrestling with God is to be transformed into the self we are meant to become, to step out of the confines of our false securities and allow our creating God to go on creating in us.”

This is our task: “to feed the hope that comes out of despair” so that “our creating God” can “go on creating in us.”

We all have stories of being wounded or wrestling with angels all night or feeling betrayed. In addition, it’s easy to become fixated on what’s wrong with our world in this time of information deluge. But we are not born to be consumers nor are we born to wallow in despair. We are born to be agents of hope by honoring our pain and seeing with new eyes—by being honest about where we are and hopeful about where the living God wants all God’s children to be and then stepping out and walking in the dark.

We need to tell one another our stories of hope lest we relegate it to some sweet theological concept that’s confined to books. When we speak of our transformations, everyone gets transformed. This is the simple rule for AA which the world needs to adopt. I don’t want to talk about our politicians for awhile because that talk doesn’t feed my soul. I want to have real conversations about the transformative work of the Holy Spirit in real people’s lives so that I can claim my own story and witness that work in me now and here. Hope won’t come from our President and Congress changing. Hope comes from the transformation in us which in turn has a ripple effect that changes everything.

You don’t have to go to a conference to tell your story (although you are welcome to come to one of ours). You just find someone who is real and open and begin. The next thing you know, you are in the elevator on the ground floor where things are clear and real and you remember more of who you are and where you are called to be. The process empowers you to be an agent of transformation. It’s how the world gets changed.

+Porter