Advent reflection #2 – Hope in 4 dimensions

The group of friends, 5 adults and a toddler, sat around the kitchen table, looking at a large photocopied map. The map was a plan of the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, the place that designs, manufactures and maintains Britain’s multi-billion-pound weapons of mass destruction.

Around the kichen table, armed with felt tips and crayons, the 5 adults and a toddler began re-designing the site. A micro-brewery went in here, a deer sanctuary there, a hot tub with a bar, a church and a mosque, and some allotments, all found their places on the plans.

When the re-designing was done, mum and toddler stayed behind to do prayer and emailing, and the other 4 piled into the car and headed off to Aldermaston. Two of the friends waited by the car with cameras at the ready, the other two climbed over the fence, and began wandering the site, placing labels, attached to big glow-sticks, where their imagined new developments would go.

It was 45 minutes later that the MoD Police turned up, seven officers, with dogs and guns. The two friends explained what they were doing – surveying the site for these exciting new developments – and invited the police to join in. As they were taken off to Newbury police station, some of the officers chipped in some bright ideas of their own.

For the few hours they were in custody, the two friends prayed and sang. In their interviews, they told the Police Officers of their vision for a transformed world. They were released on bail, and a few months later the charges were dropped, without explanation

What do we mean when we talk about hope?

Because it’s not remotely the same thing as optimism. It’s not a fuzzy ‘things can only get better’, ‘always look on the bright side of life’ feeling, or a carefully-evidenced prediction based on the best available data, like a weather forecast, say.

Hope is a choice. A choice in 4 dimensions:

1. Hope is a choice to imagine the world differently – not ‘what’s the most likely future?’, but ‘what could the future look like?’

2. Hope is a choice to desire, to passionately long for that imagined future to become reality

3. Hope is a choice to believe that it can & will come true... As one radical Christian activist, Jim Wallis, puts it, “Hope means believing in spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change”

4. And hope is a choice to act – to start living as if the hoped-for future has already become reality

Take Isaiah’s vision (Isa.35:1-10), for example:

• a dry, dead desert bursting into life;
• springs and streams and pools of water bubbling up from parched ground;
• plants and flowers springing up and blossoming abundantly;
• places of fear and danger made safe and happy;
• a fearful, exiled, grieving people getting to their feet and coming home, singing for joy as they walk, their weak hands made strong, their feeble knees made firm.

Or take John the Baptist (Matthew 11:2-6) for another: the great ‘ground-clearer’, road-builder, sending messengers from his prison cell to find out if Jesus is the one he’s been preparing the way for. And what does Jesus say? “Go and tell John what you hear and see... recognise the kingdom of God when you see it – people’s bodies are being made well, life is coming where there was death, the poor are for the first time waking up to good news...” Does it look like the kingdom of God is springing up around you? Then that’ll be exactly what’s happening!

And what about Mary? The church invites us, on the 3^rd Sunday of Advent, to the Magnificat, Mary’s song of the powerful brought down and the rich emptied out, of the hungry filled with good things and the humble lifted high. One Yes to an angel, and Mary – an unmarried girl with a tiny child growing in her womb – has become a revolutionary. She sings of a world turned upside-down – and she sings of these outrageous, impossible, world-changing things as if they have already happened. Mary has chosen hope – she has chosen to live as if the world has changed into the world of God’s promises

So here’s the deal:

God invites us to imagine a different world

• a world where the places of death and danger and dereliction blossom with streams of water and beautiful flowers
• a world where people live in safety, and peace, and delight with their neighbours
• a world where bodies are made well, the hungry are full, and the poor wake up to good news for a change

God invites us to imagine this different world, and to long for it with all that we are

And God invites us to believe it is possible, in spite of the evidence, and to live and act and talk and sing as if it has already happened – and to watch the world change around us. That’s the deal – that’s what Christian hope means.

But what does it mean for us in our neighbourhoods? Here on the Firs & Bromford estates? Or wherever you, reading this, find yourself? What would Isaiah, and John, and Mary see, and sing of, right here?

Here in Hodge Hill, at the beginning of November, in our first ‘Big Conversation’ as a church here, we identified 5 signs of the kingdom of God in our neighbourhoods, 5 ‘markers’, by which we might recognise God’s new world springing up around us, and which we will seek to nurture and encourage where we find them, and plant them where they are not. Those 5 things are: compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope. It’s the beginning of our own work of ‘imagining’ our neighbourhoods as they can be – as God longs for them to be – as truly ‘flourishing’. Our next task is to be equipped to go out and look and listen for these things, in the lives and relationships of the people of our parish, and in the work of volunteers and organisations around the place. And to celebrate those things where we find them. And to long for, and believe in, and begin to incarnate those things where they are not.

But for each and every one of us, the work of hope begins right now.

Let’s put our faith in Isaiah’s promise, that God will strengthen our hearts (however fearful), our hands (however weak), our knees (however fearful).

Let’s start looking and listening around us, like John the Baptist’s messengers, to signs and whispers of the kingdom of God, that new, transformed world, coming in our midst.

And let us, like Mary, say our ‘Yes’s to God, and live and act and talk and sing as if that new, transformed world has already come.

And we will begin to see the world change around us.

Advent reflection #1 – ‘Why are we waiting?’

“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.”

(T.S. Eliot, East Coker)

In the heady ‘80s, adverts for Access credit cards had the slogan, ‘take the waiting out of wanting’. Three decades on, ‘waiting’ is, for many people, almost an alien concept, ‘credit’ seems, unbelievably, to have survived the tumultuous events of the last couple of years as a currency in its own right, and ‘wanting’ is what economies like ours are still apparently relying on to give them ‘health’. Our society needs us and values us, still, by our ability to want, and buy, and consume – and instils in us both a ‘need’ for instant satisfaction, but also a rapid dis-satisfaction and a need for ‘more, more, more…’.

So T.S. Eliot is on to something: “wait without hope / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing”. Our desires need a health check – or even a revolution. And for that to happen, we need to learn to wait.

I say ‘we’. Those who have least money already know what it means to wait. Waiting for the bus, when the service is infrequent, unreliable – an ‘out-of-control-ness’ that those of us with cars can avoid, if we choose. Waiting for pay-day, in those last few days when the meter’s on ‘emergency’ and there’s no food left in the cupboard and there are bills that need paying. And others too – waiting for that operation that will make life more liveable; waiting for the death that is around the corner, but God knows when; waiting for the birth, the due date circled in red on the calendar. Some of us are schooled in waiting, in some places, at some times. But many of us are captive to that need – to ‘take the waiting out of wanting’…

So the questions that ‘Advent waiting’ asks us… What are the things we “can’t wait” for? Where does impatience run our lives? What are the ‘wants’ (we might often call them ‘needs’, even) that we need to painstakingly strip away, distance ourselves from, begin to say ‘No’ to? And how might we do so, as individuals, as households, as churches?

The clamouring voices and images around us, says poet Jan Richardson, “will never tell us what we really want, what we really long for, what we desire with heart and soul. Those who have sat in the darkness know how the shadows give way to desire. Without sight, without our heads swimming with the images of what others tell us we want, we can turn our gaze inward and search our souls.”

And Richardson invites us to ‘plumb the depths of our waiting… “What speaks to us? What calls to us? What dreams have we buried? What wounds cry out for healing? What longs to be born in us this season? What is the yearning which we have not dared to name? Our desires reveal to us what we think about God, about ourselves, and about the world.

“In her remarkable book of prayers entitled All Desires Known, Janet Morley writes, ‘I understand the Christian life to be about the integration of desire: our personal desires, our political vision, and our longing for God. So far from being separate or in competition with one another, I believe that our deepest desires ultimately spring from the same source.’ Advent offers the opportunity to explore that source, to discern our desires and to find their common ground.”

As we learn to wait, what are the things we discover, deep down, that we really long for? And how, practically, might we begin to ‘inhabit’ those desires, dwell in them, and live out of them?

Or, as another poet, Carola Moosbach, puts it…

What
are we really waiting for
and what are the things
we need more
than ever
and how
should there be a beginning
of what
and who
still hopes at all
for what
and when
will it break
this day
of light
and who
still believes in it?

(Carola Moosbach)