Janet Parsons

Ministerial Fellowship Committee

December 6, 2014
At the Gates of Hope
The elderly woman sat in a wheelchair in her room on the rehab. unit. Both lower
legs and feet were bandaged, and her joints appeared swollen and misshapen
from arthritis. She told me that she had fallen and broken her kneecap. She
was anxious and upset: her insurance was only going to allow her to stay here
for a short time, but she was unable to stand. Her husband had recently died,
and now she was alone. Where was she going to go? She wept, and I, the new
chaplain intern, wondered what to do about all of this. It was tempting to leap
up and say, "I'll be right back - I'm going to go find a social worker or somebody
who can really help you!" Her needs seemed so clear and so immediate - and
all she had right then was - me.
Chaplaincy training, or CPE, is challenging in ways that we cannot always
anticipate. I did not know how hard it is to sit with someone in pain, and to not
try to fix the problem. Doing CPE in a continuing care community offered a
window into the slow, inexorable diminishing of lives, and the human response to
this truth. One resident, with moderate dementia, snapped at me one day, "I
know what's happening to me! Don't try to tell me that this isn't happening!"
I learned quickly that I couldnt fix any of this. And so, day after day, I sought
ways to offer people something to hold on to. Sometimes it was a newspaper, a
favorite poem, or my presence; a brief visit. I looked for ways to let them know
that I cared, and that it mattered that they were among us. I realized that I was
trying to foster hope.
Poet Emily Dickinson wrote:
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all
During that time I was thinking a lot about hope. My husband and I had
decided to separate a few months before. Our marriage had been difficult for
a long time and so I was surprised at the depth of my grief. There were many
losses, surely of the relationship, of love, of identity and role. But I realized that
one of the greatest losses was the loss of hope. When my husband told me one
evening that no matter how hard we tried, it wasnt going to be good enough, I
knew he was right. But as my hope for a future together died, I knew despair.
That thing with feathers seemed to have left me.
Sometimes life can destroy our hopes: hope for a cure, perhaps, or hope for
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love to be reborn, or as we are seeing in Ferguson and New York City, hope for
justice. It can seem that the fluttering in the soul, the tune without the words,
does stop for a time. Perhaps it becomes so faint that we cant feel or hear it. It
can feel as though hope is gone.
But the fascinating thing about hope, the miracle of it, really, is how it can return.
We humans are inherently hopeful creatures. In time, we begin to feel the thing
with feathers again, as hope evolves into something new. I found after awhile
that I was no longer hoping to save my marriage, but that I had new, different
hopes, centered around my sons and my ministry: dreaming new dreams,
imagining new possibilities. I felt that fluttering in my soul, faintly at first, but
stronger and steadier all the time.
These days I picture hope as a stream. It moves along in its course, singing to
itself the tune without the words. Sometimes it gets blocked. And then, like a
stream, it changes course just a bit, moving around the obstacle, finding a new
way downhill. When a friend was diagnosed with ALS, I watched as he went
from hoping for a cure, to hoping, as his wife told me, to make every single day
matter. Hope was ever-changing, but always present.
In his first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul wrote that faith, hope, and love
abide, these three... Why these three? They are the life-sustaining emotions;
the strongest forces of life; truly the spirit of life itself, pulsing, coursing through us
and through all of creation.
Throughout seminary I wondered what my ministry would be about. Before CPE I
would have told you that a ministers role is to help people find meaning in life.
And that is true, certainly. I would have mentioned that a ministers role is also
to walk alongside people to accompany them on their journeys. And that is
certainly true as well. But now I see my role, more than anything else, is to offer
ways to keep hope alive. In keeping hope alive, we sustain and nurture life
itself.
UU minister Victoria Safford tells a story of a friend, a psychiatrist in a health clinic
at a womans college. This doctor had provided counseling to a student who
committed suicide in a dormitory room, and she was grieving this loss and
searching for a way forward. Safford writes, (My friend) looked up in defiance
and spoke explicitly of her vocation, as if out of the ashes of that day she were
renewing a vow or making a new covenant She said, You know I cannot
save them. I am not here to save anybody or to save the world. All I can do
what I am called to do is to plant myself at the gates of Hope. Sometimes they
come in; sometimes they walk by. But I stand there every day and I call out till

my lungs are sore with calling, and beckon and urge them in toward beautiful
life and love. 1
Safford calls this the small work within the Great Work of creation. We religious
people, each of us, are co-creators of this world, this life, and we have been
called to foster it, to help the stream of hope flow around whatever blocks it
and begin to find its way downhill to the sea again. No one, wrote Walter
Brueggerman, can fully hope alone.22 Hope is made manifest through our
relationships, our communities; people to share the pain or the fear, people to
march for justice. Those of us at the candlelight vigil at Tent City in Phoenix in
2012 chanted, We are with you! And this past week, thousands across the
nation are taking to the streets to protest the grand jury decisions in the killings in
Ferguson and in New York City. They are doing the small work of Creation:
witnessing, lending their voices and presence, accompanying those who
despair until hope can emerge again.
In my frequent visits I watched the woman with the broken knee slowly begin to
hope again. The last time I saw her, she was being wheeled to the main
entrance by a nephew, off to stay with family friends until she could return to her
own apartment. They raced by me in such a hurry to be gone that I laughed,
thinking that if she had held a riders crop she would have been striking the
wheelchair like a race horse. I waved and called out to her, and watched her
go.
Sometimes the very best we can do is to stay with others and help them to hold
this wobbly mixture of joy and sorrow, of gain and loss, of darkness and light that
comprises our human lives; to wait with them until they can breathe, to stand at
the gates of Hope until they can hear their own song of hope again. May we all
find companions to stand with us, and may we all find opportunities to stand
with others, so that together we may nourish and sustain hope, and do the work
of Creation.
Blessed be.
Amen.

In Paul Rogat Loeb, ed., The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizens Guide to Hope in
a Time of Fear, (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 187-8.
2 In John A. Buehrens and Rebecca Ann Parker, A House for Hope, (Boston: Beacon Press,
2010), 89.
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