Just Beyond Despair
Despair. It can grab you by the heart and squeeze you until all feels lost. Lately, you may be feeling it more than usual. Look in any direction today and there is despair — more than we can take in and make sense of. But our hearts still beat, and there is still life in us, and thus there is still hope.
Despair is the feeling that tomorrow will be worse than today. That life has become so hard and so difficult that the future is not worth looking forward to. You may even wish it did not come at all.
While there is so much to despair these days, there are also signs of hope resting just beyond it. We must be willing to open our hearts to our collective despair, grab hold of it, and turn it and us into something better.
We see such signs of hope in the protests that have only kept growing. And let’s be clear: they are in the main peaceful, made up of diverse people, and increasingly filled with families.
We see signs of hope when different community groups and residents come together in response to the pandemic to support children who have to learn from home, and to ensure that seniors and others have meals and prescriptions and a friendly voice to hear each day.
Just beyond despair is hope. And yet, what kind of hope will this be?
As I notice that news coverage and concern about the pandemic seems to be on the wane, I worry that the very same may happen to issues of systemic racism and injustice after yet another new concern inundates our lives. For instance, a contentious, ugly, dispiriting November presidential election is now heating up. Will it, too, distract vital attention from the issues that desperately call out our names?
No, I do not wish to indulge in a silliness of hope — a kind of pernicious false hope that asks people to believe in something possible only for it all to be dashed, simply leading to more despair.
So many of us have experience with false hope. It thrusts us back, it pulls us down, it rips our dignity from us. Now is not the time for more false hope. Please, not now — not at this time.
There is hope just beyond despair. But for that hope to be real, we must step forward to make it real. We must come together to create it. We must give birth to it. We must not just talk; we must take action. We must be courageous enough to condemn mere lip service to the concerns we must confront, and we must have the humility to realize that we need each other to do so.
The Institute has over 30 years of road-tested, time-tested approaches for supporting communities to get beyond despair and make hope real. This Sunday Letter is not the time or place for me to describe these efforts.
Instead, I simply wish to say to you today that hope lives just beyond our despair. But we must be protectors of this hope, stewards of it, producers of it. Only then can it be made real — for everyone.
