working on a world we may never see
Working on a world I may never see
March 2023 newsletter
In this time of great challenges coming at us each news cycle, I offer this wonderfully insightful poem by the Brazilian theologian Rubem Alves:
What is hope?
It is a presentiment that imagination is more real
and reality less real
than it looks.
It is a hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts
that oppress and repress
is not the last word.
It is a suspicion that reality is more complex
than realism wants us to believe
and that the frontiers of the possible are not determined
by the limits of the actual
and that in a miraculous and unexpected way
life is preparing the creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection . . .
The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair,
hope without suffering creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness . . .
Let us plant dates
even though those who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
This is the secret discipline.
It is a refusal to let the creative act be dissolved
in immediate sense experience
and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined love is what has given
prophets, revolutionaries and saints
the courage to die for the future they envisaged.
They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.
We take our bodhisattva vow, delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them and get out our paint brushes, pencils, check books, regardless of outcome, just because we know in our bones that it is the right thing to do. “Let us plant dates even though those who plant them will never eat them.” Or, as Iris Dement says, “I’m working on a world I may never see.”
Let our response to authoritarianism be art and joy and freedom. We are the party you want to be at!