Holding Hope

"The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them? Tell them at least what you say to yourself. "

What a powerful challenge Berry offers. He was only 73 when he wrote that poem, back in 2007.

"It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good"

And elders know deeply the reality that lives end, ours and those we love.

And if we’ve learned nothing else, we’ve learned that you can’t count on the future being how you imagined it.

When he wrote that poem, Berry was worried about a lot of the things that worry us- about war, about corruption, and especially about the earth:

“Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains overturned.”

Ugh. And it’s not better now, 16 years later.
It’s hard to hope, he says, but “young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?”

I want to just pause for a moment, and let that question linger in the air to see if any answers bubble up in you before I offer some thoughts.

I’ve been reading Why the World Doesn’t End by Michael Meade, (68 when he wrote it in 2012) who looks at the many times throughout history when it FELT like the world was ending -- apocalyptic times. Meade invites us return to the deep old wisdom that has always gotten us through times like these. “something ancient and enduring must be touched for things to be made anew and fashioned again. It is the ancient way of the world to make itself anew from the enduring threads that have been woven and rewoven many times before.” (p. 82)

I find this reassuring, to know that humans have been through times that shook our foundations before, but somehow here we are now, despite and because of the past. Hopeful that we are connected by ancient, enduring threads to those other times of resilience and survival. These ancient enduring threads are often hidden among the weaving of daily life, but when things fall apart, we can see they have been there the whole time.

Meade feels, like Berry, that we who are older have an important role to play here. He writes:

“This world has always been at risk, and at times the only safety comes when the right risks are taken for the benefit of everyone. The traditional role of elders included remembering what was most important about life and how to hold ends and beginnings together when times become hard. … Having survived the troubles of their own lives and having grown deeper and wiser, they knew both how to survive and how to find genuine vision where others could only see disaster. Being "old enough to know better" they would know that life renews itself in surprising ways and that the greatest dilemmas can serve to awaken the deepest resources of the human soul. [p. 24 -25]”

Like the grandmother in today’s story,
My Grandmother's Journey, all elders know that life can be hard, and how hard it can be, but they also have seen seasons come and go. They know what endures. Meade continues:

“There is a deep human instinct to turn to those who are older for guidance when faced with obstacles or danger. Yet part of the problem in modern cultures is that those who are older often feel as lost as young people just starting out on the roads of life. When a culture falls apart it happens in two places at once: where its youth are rejected and not fully invited into life and where its elders are forgotten and forget what is important about life. Modern cultures tend to produce a mass of "olders” who live longer and longer, but a lack of genuine elders who know what to live for. ... Everyone born grows older but elders are made, not born.”

Wow, I feel that too. A lack of guidance for becoming an elder, a lack of societal recognition that elders are critically important to the health and hopefulness of society. And I was looking! This rang so true to me, that we all have a choice as we transition into the later stages of our lives, we can allow our culture to show us we are becoming invisible and powerless, . Or we can claim, and grow into this important role. I have been asking myself ever since I turned 50, “what is the meaning and purpose of this next chapter of my life”? So Meade’s idea was heartening to me. Perhaps I could help with “remembering what was most important about life and how to hold ends and beginnings together when times become hard.”

Perhaps for ourselves we wouldn’t do it. But the other generations need us:

“The lack of meaningfu1 elders leaves youth less protected, more isolated, and more exposed to extreme conditions, tragic deaths and wasted lives than they would normally be. Youth are at greater risk when the "olders" fail to act as elders and neglect to risk fulling living their own stories.”

And I have seen for myself the cynicism and lack of hope among Generation Z- my son’s generation. He tells me that it seems like the problems of our day only get worse: gun violence, climate change, racism, the growing wave of violence and restriction against our trans siblings.

The CDC report earlier this year said that 60% of female and non binary high school students report “persistent sadness and hopelessness” in 2021. 

The young ask the old to hope, and what will we tell them?

A superficial hope will not do; [Meade p. 57] “there are those who are overly hopeful even when tragedies occur and loss demands a deeper response. ..there is an insistence on “positivity” an avoidance of supposedly negative feelings, and a lack of the gravitas natural to the human soul and to life on earth. Some insist that “every cloud has a silver lining,” even when some clouds are lined with acid rain”

So where does real hope come from? The kind of hope that would help us get from one day to the next, the kind of hope that would help us do what had to be done? Berry suggest it comes from places, our places. And place to him means not a dot on the map, but the complex and sacred web of relationships that include the land, all the critters and beings who live on and with the land.

When I was a young minister, we often had visioning sessions that started with a blank sheet of paper, if the sky was the limit what would we wish for.

But in truth nothing starts with a blank sheet of paper -- every inch of our world is ancient and full of a unique community of life. We have so often damaged the web by imagining we can brush it aside to make space for our new vision.

So Berry suggests a grounded hope, one that literally emerges from our relationship with the land, with our ecosystem and our web of relationships. From our direct, embodied knowledge of our neighborhood and our neighbors in it. This is a solid grounding for hope, a future made by the intimate collaboration of this soil, these plants, trees, rivers, birds neighbors.

“Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.”

Greta Thunberg writes in No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

“Adults keep saying: "We owe it to the young people to give them hope."
But I don't want your hope. …I want you to act as you would in a crisis.
I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

Ouch!

The hope we need for our times is grounded in action. Showing up, walking our talk, so it isn’t just pie in the sky. Perhaps we worry that we aren’t as strong as we used to be, can’t march or lift or push as we used to. But I remember how heartening it is to just have someone at your side, willing to roll up their sleeves and do what they can. It reminds us that we are not alone. To me, this is a great source of hope. The youngers need to know the olders haven’t abandoned them, are still showing up, still lending a hand however they can, and this is what our olders need too- to know that their lives have fresh meaning, are important in building our future together,

Part of our work in learning to be Elders, the path to becoming elders is to listen. We must Listen to “the voices that rise up …from your own heart” We have to tend our own light, shine our own light, because “When the people make dark the light within them, the world darkens.” Then we must “…Be still and listen to the voices that belong / to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.” When we listen deeply ourselves and to our places, we see how people in other places are like us in our place. And it shows us “invariably the need for care / toward other people, other creatures, in other places / as you would ask them for care toward your place and you.”

The young ask the old to hope, and what will we tell them?

Berry suggests we cultivate a local, practical hope, that if we listen, if we pay attention, if we share our own inner light, it will matter to this place, and this place matters.

Meade holds out the ancient and enduring threads “that have been woven and rewoven many times before”, We who are older have a long view- we have seen things fall apart and come together, beginnings and endings. Our own stories have hope to offer, and the stories and wisdom of the ancestors. Generation after Generation, the teaching is the same -- we who are here in this time of great tension and change, must call forth in ourselves, we must grow the new thing that we are becoming, that our world is becoming, that our place is becoming, even this very moment, in this very place, in our hearts and minds and bodies. This is what gives me hope.