Category Archives: Charlotte’s Intersections Blog

Holding on to Hope in Such a World

December 13, 2014Charlotte's Intersections BlogDr. Andy Lester, HolocaustCharlotte Vaughan Coyle

A friend of mine visited Auschwitz a few years ago; they showed us their pictures and shared some of the stories from that evil time. The realities of the Holocaust are chilling, horrific, gut wrenching.

How did people hold on to hope in such a world?

Some of history’s calamities have been conceived and spawned by humanity’s twisted malevolence: massacres and pogroms and persecutions. Sometimes it is the devastations of nature that roar and rage or slowly strangle the life out of entire regions of the earth. Whether natural or man-made, the people who endure such tragedy are changed forever.

How do people hold on to hope in such a world?

Lately I have felt so disheartened by the current events of our own world; I feel powerless and hopeless. I can hardly bear to read the news: horrible stories of war, torture and inhumanity across the globe; depressing stories about the immoral and unethical antics of our elected public “servants;” heart breaking stories about police brutality and America’s entrenched racism; alarming stories about the misuse and neglect of our land and air and water; painful stories about too many of my friends who, every single day of their life, walk an economic tightrope between security and disaster.

How do any of us hold on to hope when everything around us seems completely hopeless?

A few years ago, one of my pastoral counseling professors from seminary wrote an important book about hope. Every now and again, I open this book from Dr. Andrew Lester and re-read it so that I can find my center again. Dr. Lester teaches that lived hope is grounded in reality, is oriented toward possibility and is made possible within community.

Hope is deeply connected to

Reality,

Possibility,

Community.

When hope is grounded in reality, our eyes are wide open. Reality allows us to name our situation honestly and to recognize the challenges unambiguously. Hope doesn’t see the world through rose-colored-glasses; it is not wishful thinking; it knows how hard this is. But hope also sees a larger reality, a bigger picture than that which is available to our human eyes. Hope counts on this other invisible reality that exists simply because God exists. Even when everything we see and experience appears to be hopeless, hope taps into the other reality of God’s presence in the world, the Creator’s movement in and with creation.

When we learn to see both the visible and the invisible realities, we can look at the facts of our situation and say: “yes – but.” We can look at all the evidence and say: “nevertheless” – something else is true besides our obvious circumstances. We are enabled to see the bigger picture of what God has done and what God is doing in the possibilities of the future.

People who live life from faith have always been oriented toward the future. The very definition of “faith” is movement toward something that cannot be seen; stepping out on a path even when we don’t know where it will lead; heading in a direction that may be completely irrational and unreasonable. People of faith can live with this kind of confidence because they are deeply and irrevocably people of hope. The goal, the future, the hope, the impossible possibility: God is forever bringing all things together in wholeness and shalom in spite of what we humans keep doing to ourselves and each other.

There is one final leg in this three-legged stool of hope that Andy Lester talks about:

lived hope is grounded in reality,

is oriented toward future possibility

and is made possible within community.

As a matter of fact, hope cannot be lived in isolation; it is community that creates and nurtures hope.

Madeline L’Engle tells of a time when she held onto life by a thread and could not pray; her community of faith held on to hope for her, she says. Jean Estes experienced the death of her newborn grandson and gives thanks for a community that “held her hope for her” in the days when she could not hold onto hope for herself.

That’s a powerful image: holding on to hope for one another. We are woven together, knit together, connected together in a fabric of humanity, each of us individually a significant part of the whole. All of us together bound up in the mystery of mutuality and community.

Andy Lester says because of this deep connection there can be a kind of “contagious hope” that wells up within a community; seeds of hope can take root and grow into a lush, fruitful garden of hopeful expectation.

But there is a flip side: there also is an “infectious hopelessness” that can take hold within a community. Sometimes a people will despair over their current circumstances, cannot imagine an alternative, become so fixated by their past that they become closed off to the future. In these dark days, even a few persistent people who keep themselves grounded in the reality of God’s past and present work of faithfulness and who keep themselves oriented to a future with hope can spark a contagious optimism within an entire community.

There is much to be discouraged about in today’s world; I don’t know what will come of our current social, ecological and political situations. Sometimes I feel hopeless and powerless; sometimes the anger wells up and the tears flow; I’m afraid it will get worse before it gets better.

But then again, as I write this during this season of Christmas, I remember that today’s world is really not so different from the world into which the Christ Child was born. We tend to romanticize the baby in the manger and downplay the poverty, oppression, prejudice and danger that permeated the lives of so many people in the 1^st century C.E. of the Roman Empire. But the point of the Christmas story is that God-in-Christ chose to enter into the hopelessness of humanity by becoming the incarnation of hope. Ultimately, the love-peace-joy-hope we celebrate during Christmas is the startling and undeserved action of the Divine moving constantly in a dark and broken world.

I love Mary, the mother of Jesus; I love what she symbolizes for me, for us.

When Mary recognized the movement of the Holy, she risked everything to become a part of the world-changing events that were gestating all around her. She allowed hope to grow within her until she was able to birth infant possibilities, impossible possibilities. In the midst of her own disadvantages – a poor minority woman living in a police state – Mary did what she was able to do, did what she was given to do and opened herself up to a future with hope.

So now, in our own evil time, let the work of Christmas be ours to do every day of the year:

live gracefully in love,

grow boldly into peace,

discover repeatedly this joy,

hold on stubbornly to this hope …

each of us individually and all of us together embodying and midwifing God’s impossible possibilities.

Charlotte Vaughan Coyle

December 2014

Andrew D. Lester, Hope in Pastoral Care and Counseling (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995).

I am grateful for the grassroots efforts of Coffee Party USA – opening eyes and helping to do the hard work of bringing people together. I’m proud to be a part.

Madeleine L’Engle writes about her brush with death and long recovery because of a 1991 automobile accident in her book The Rock That is Higher (2002).

Find Jean Estes’ powerful interview in The Work of the People.

http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/finding-god-in-the-grief

Apache Virgin with Child courtesy of freshworship.org

Rachel Weeping for Her Children

August 20, 2014Charlotte's Intersections BlogCharlotte Vaughan Coyle

Already – a horrendous year of violence. Just seven weeks into 2018 and there have already been eight school shootings in the US.

Violence begets violence. Our center is not holding and the world implodes around us with the sickening weight of hatred, anger and fear.

How can this keep happening? I ask myself. How far can this spiral take us down into the darkness?

Then I look at the story of the human family over the ages and I remember that cycles of violence have taken us into this abyss over and over again.

Instead of recognizing that we are one human family, we imagine each other as “other.” Instead of acknowledging our deep human connection, we see our differences as divides so we create and perpetuate the fragmentation of our human community.

This is madness.

Sometimes I wonder if some people actually fear a future where everyone is equally accepted and equally valued. It seems incomprehensible to me that such a vision might be motivating humanity’s violence. But I can’t help but wonder.

In the ancient biblical story, the Pharaoh of Egypt proclaimed that all the male children of the Israelite people should be murdered at the moment they were born; Pharaoh didn’t want anymore of “those kinds” of people in his kingdom. The Gospel of Matthew tells another story about King Herod sending soldiers to Bethlehem to kill all the male children of the Israelite villagers; Herod feared a competitor.

Throughout the human story, this violence is repeated again and again. Within the American story, once again it is our young people, our children who bear the consequences of our national sins. They die on foreign battlefields. They die on neighborhood streets. They die in school classrooms. They die while dancing.

When reflecting on some of these horrors, the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah and the New Testament theologian Matthew both borrowed the image of their ancestor Rachel: “wailing with loud lamentation, weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are no more.”

How can this keep happening? I ask myself.

Losing our children is much worse than even the heart breaking, gut wrenching loss of any one of these unique and precious individuals; it is also the loss of a future. For most of us, our children give us hope for the future. But for others – I wonder – is their vision of the future so clouded with fear that they may see the Michael Browns and the Tamir Rices and the Philando Castiles and the dancers at the Pulse as some sort of threat?

In the collective consciousness of our society, do these conjure fear because they represent too many of those kind of people in this American “kingdom”? In the collective consciousness of too many angry young white men, does the emerging empowerment of others feel like dis-empowerment for themselves?

As a Christian minister, I see both fear and hope everywhere I turn and I recognize this as nothing new. Herod sent the soldiers to Bethlehem because he feared the child Jesus was a threat to his power. And he was right: his power was at risk. The “kingdom” God is bringing into being does threaten the power of all the kings and pharoahs among us.

When the reign of peace, justice and respect gains more ground in the attitudes and actions of more and more people, then the status quo of oppression, intimidation and inequity must lose ground.

The status quo IS changing. And I say “Thank God.”

I firmly believe that God is birthing into our midst a new multivalent rainbow community that will finally end the power of white, male, straight privilege. I believe God’s upside down power of grace and love will finally bring about a future of hope where every life matters, where each one is valued for who they are, where all our children are able to grow up to become the people God created them to be. This kind of vision for the future gives many of us great hope.

But for others this vision of equity and inclusion fosters fear.

When fear and prejudice have easy access to a gun, it’s not just our children who are in danger; it’s all of us. When fear and prejudice are given both a gun and a badge then – yes – it is high time for prophetic challenge and peaceful protest. Each of us individually and all of us together must raise our voice and stand with our hands in the air – open, vulnerable and powerful in the upside down way of God’s life-changing power.

And so in the meantime, while we watch and wait for the vision to become reality, things continue to be painful, messy and chaotic. Maybe one reason why is because the oil and water of fear and hope continue to keep us fragmented – both within our society and within each of us. Maybe because we are all at the same time good and bad, light and dark, hopeful and fearful.

We are Rachel, weeping for our children.

And let us remember that all these children are all our children.

We are Rachel in labor, yearning in travail for a future with hope.

Maybe as we seek Rachel’s comfort even in the midst of this chaos, we can find ways to let go of the fear, lean into the vision, and help our nation hold onto the hope.

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“I’ll Vote for Jesus”

August 16, 2014Charlotte's Intersections BlogCharlotte Vaughan Coyle

I’ve been doing voter registration in my small East Texas county and it has been fascinating to meet so many different people and to hear just a snatch of their stories. A few people would vote for Texas to secede from the United States; several wouldn’t dare vote for any of the “puppets” running for any kind of office; quite a few women lean forward to listen more closely when I tell them that some strong smart women are running for Texas’ top positions. My favorites are the people who look down at their feet and tell me they can’t vote because they have a felony conviction in their past. I get to ask them: “Are you off paper? Have you finished your parole and probation? Then you ARE eligible to vote!” You should see the expressions on their faces. Sometimes it’s the people who have lost their right to vote who most appreciate its privilege and are willing to once again step up to its responsibility.

But I have to admit I was taken back a bit when one woman looked me in the eye and said: “I’ll vote for Jesus.” In her mind, Jesus is the only one who can fix the mess we humans have made. In her thinking, it is only when Jesus comes again that the world will be set right. Continue reading “I’ll Vote for Jesus” →

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