My pastor Veronica said on Sunday, ‘Don’t let them
get you to hate them,’ and I received it as revelation—eventually—as a dispatch
from the land of hope, as if hope had slipped me a note in class. I want to
pass it on.
Sunday, eventually, I sat there with the first hope
I’ve felt since Charlottesville, since the speech in Arizona, since Arpaio—that
there is a path, a little light to see by, and most importantly, companionship.
Us! You and me, motley old us, singing and writing and picking up litter, marching
for peace, taking care of each other’s kids and elderly, ladling out food for
the poor, making each other laugh; together. And you know that, like in the old
folk tale about Stone Soup, some of us will bring Toll House cookies, or apple
slices, sun screen, a tattered poem, bottles of water, juice boxes for the
kids, and a few good dogs.
(This is what heaven will look like: warm Toll
House cookies, poems, juice, dogs, and our beloved. Oh, and You-Know-Who. I
heard someone say once, ‘It’s not that everyone you love will be in heaven—that
you will love everyone who is there is what will make it heaven.’)
I have felt so doomed, and helpless, as this
country struggles and despairs more desperately than any time in my memory
since the assassinations and Vietnam and Watergate.
I imagined writing a book called DOOMED: A Book of
Hope.
In church, Sunday, my first thought was, like Dana
Carvey’s Church Lady, ‘Well! Isn’t that special.’ Then I started thinking about
the cake and guacamole I’d seen in the fellowship hall before service, just
waiting for us to set upon like dogs when church was over. This gave me hope.
High fat foods give me hope. Also, sugar; especially icing.
‘Don’t let them get you to hate them.’ Well, I did
let them, let them get me whipped up into a vicious kind of superiority,
visions of revenge and perp-walks, where I’m channelling Sissy Spacek at the
end of Carrie. And it was good. Yes, there is beauty and meaning in resistance
to evil; and yes, there is a reasonable terror that we are closer to launching
nuclear weapons than any time since 1962. There is the deepest grief and shell
shock in memory. But for me, there is also plain old hate.
Hate is, on the one hand, comforting; and on the
other, malignant.
And right there in church, I realised I didn’t want
it anymore. What I wanted was the love, the organised resistance, the
guacamole. I wanted to continue to help fund the resistance, and to help people
keep their spirits up, to serve the poor, pick up litter, listen to the very
lonely.
And I wanted to get over the hate, to get on the
same old path of the Berrigans, of Gandhi and Dr King and Molly Ivins, peace
and truth telling and never giving up.
This gave me hope then, and a few days later, still
gives me hope, in a slightly more diluted form than I felt in church. Okay,
fine—it is a slightly victimised, self-righteous hope, but I can feel it. I can
switch channels, and move from hate and judgment, to the bigger picture, where
if events seem to have a bad ending, maybe it’s not the ending.
I don’t have a hope that this or that will happen, that
insanity will change to wisdom and a focus on the common good; I don’t have
hope that the plates of the earth will shift politically next month. But I have
hope in us, I really do; I have hope in goodness and goodwill, hope that I can
be healed of my obsessions and fixations; I hope that just for today, I can
stay sober, and make a difference in the lives of the poor, and keep my own
side of the street clean; I have hope that swords do turn to ploughshares, just
not maybe tomorrow afternoon, right after lunch.
I have hope because, as the prophet said, our old
will have dreams and our young will have visions. Dreams; visions!
I have hope because of my cat and dog, Lady Bird
and Gringo; hope is that thing with fur. I have huge hope because my friends
love me so out of proportion, and I love them, love that is Love, on beyond the
visible, on beyond zebra.
Hope is a conversation, in the now, with memories
of the times when there was no hope, and a pit crew of family, artists, sober
people, friends, even strangers, pulled me back up to my feet. They did not
study me with binoculars or microscopes. They saw my hurting shape. Like the
hymn goes, they looked beyond my faults, and saw my needs.
I believe in the grace of myopia.
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