 Honesty and Hope
It’s March. We have a new president. The economy continues to tank. Israel and Palestine simmer. Planes crash – some do not end in a loss of life, others end in many deaths. Some days are warm and sunny. Others are cold. The trees are bare. Crocuses have broken through the hard ground to erupt in tiny testaments of spring’s grandeur.
In a sermon I shared about a month ago, I extolled the virtues of our Unitarian Universalist theological grounding. One blessing is our historical willingness to temper hope with honesty and honesty with hope.
But what exactly does this mean? Theologically it means a willingness to rationally entertain the truth that this existence can be strange, chaotic, difficult and painful while embracing the possibility that a spirit of life or a force of love is ever present to move us from pain to promise. This force of life or sprit of love may feel latent, even lost in moments, but it is ever present, and ever accessible.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, our Unitarian forbearers took this theology a bit too far, as I see it, and developed an over-the-top idealism. They suggested that our existence is progressive – ever advancing toward a state of grace simply by nature of our make-up (our rational and ethical capacity) or our relationship to God.
Personally and theologically I prefer poetic realism to idealism. By poetic I mean metaphoric or ‘tugging at a reality’ that purely factual language can miss. By realism I mean expressions of human experience. The writer George Robert Gissing uses poetic realism to honestly express his relationship to the dark winter months:
Honest winter, snow clad and with the frosted beard, I can welcome not uncordially; but that long deferment of the calendar's promise, that weeping loom of March and April, that bitter blast outraging the honor of May -- how often has it robbed me of heart and hope.
Gissing’s expression is honest – telling us, his readers, that cold springs have robbed him of heart and hope. He also begins by calling the winter itself ‘honest.’ There is a beauty to this interchange – for Gissing has claimed a relationship with nature – winter is honest (it is cold when it is supposed to be cold) in the way he is honest … they are playing by the same rules. And in this – the acknowledgement of a relationship, there is both heart and hope.
We are utterly connected to this universe – it nurtures and sustains us. From time to time it will test our capacity to find joy but it will never lie to us. The winter will come and bear down in cold blasts and tempests. The spring will follow the winter, but for our hope to sustain us, it can not be an empty wishing for a warmer season. As Ben Franklin wisely put it – “He that lives upon hope will die fasting.” Rather, a nourishing hope abides in our capacity to risk honesty and name our reality. If it is winter – call it winter. If it is dark in your soul – call it dark. If there is pain in your heart – call it pain. Meet your struggles and begin to know what they are. Welcome them, as Gissing says “not uncordially.” Know that they are a part of you as the winter is a part of the year. Then when you are able, look about you for hints of spring. Search the ground of your soul for the first birth of crocus buds.
Theologically, I believe we are called to see the universe as it is and know that we are in a relationship with life. We are called to recognize our interconnection while upholding our part of the bargain … which I see in part, as seeking honesty and trusting hope. Only with hope and honesty can we meet the spirit of life, the force of love … that which we call God or presence or simply possibility.
Yours in Faith,
Rev. Anya
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