Out beyond hope

Steps forward on a hard morning in America

Last month, Dougald Hine introduced me to these great lines from T.S. Eliot:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

When our politics reaches a dead end, we need to quiet ourselves, so we can hear where we need to go. If we don’t, we will react to moments like this by just amplifying the same instincts and habits that led us astray in the first place.

In the quiet, we can avail ourselves to the prophetic—to the voices out in the world and within ourselves that are more honest, to the richer visions that Roosevelt spoke of in his First Inaugural when he quoted Proverbs: “When there is no vision, the people perish.”

Such prophetic visions arise and are realized through the main medium of politics: communal life. It’s through association—through friendship—that the work is done.

So if you’re looking for next steps, I suspect that the national rejuvenation we seek begins with cultivating vision and community—a dance of dreaming and joining together.

But first, silence—so we can listen for what is calling to us. As Joe Pug sings: “If you shut up with what you’ve chosen, you’ll hear something choosing you.”

This process is of course not without pain. Eliot continues:

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

The best advice I’ve ever received: “Remember, life has many chapters.” It’s true on a personal and a collective level. The 1932 election, which launched the transformational New Deal coalition, came right after the 1928 election, when that same party lost 444 electoral votes to 87. Eight years after the Dred Scott decision, slavery was abolished in America. In 2008, Californians voted for Proposition 8, banning gay marriage. Seven years later, a Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice wrote the opinion that legalized marriage equality across the country. Life has many chapters.

My favorite image for how change tends to happen comes from Father Józef Tischner, the first chaplain of the Solidarity Movement in Poland. (Many thanks to the great Elias Crim, who first introduced me to his work.) Tischner liked to compare transformation to reforestation. “Someone plants a tree—one, a second, a third, many trees…[and] from those trees grows a forest.” The change doesn’t always look like a grand battle—often it looks like people joining up with one another, starting to embody a new way of being together, growing in numbers and in depth of feeling… and eventually finding that “the reality of the forest cannot be disregarded” by the powers that be. A forest fights its enemies, Tischner says, by “growing and becoming an even larger forest,” just as “solidarity of conscience fights its opponents by becoming more of a conscience and more of a solidarity.”

We live in a civic desert. Much of our social trust and the entities that once cultivated it have slowly died off over the past decades—and we are left with an often barren, inhospitable public life. And, for good and for ill, the politicians who speak to living in the civic desert are resonating more than the ones who speak as if we still live in last century’s civic forest. In the short term, we need to do better at speaking to life in the desert. But in the long term, we desperately need a reforestation project.

In his poem, “February 2, 1968,” the great farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry put well this feeling and this call:

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,

war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,

I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

☘️