2002 - If only hope could lead the way

Dec. 27, 2001

Dear Julie,

Here at the tail of 2001, mourning and smarting at the unimagined outrages against humanity recently inflicted upon the world, what of hope?

What of the thing that at least once and probably more often has lifted anyone who has done a little living out of the black hole that existence can sometimes seem?

Hope is a belief in the future despite evidence that hopelessness is more logical. Hope is not logical.

Years ago in Big Sur, a few months after I'd found myself staring into one of those dark pits, a man who called himself South challenged me to prove God exists. He was a scientist who was willing to consider the existence of a Creator in theory but required experimental evidence for anything before he would believe it was true.

Sitting in a hottub perched on a cliff over the Pacific Ocean, I could not offer the scientific proof he wanted. I could tell he felt both vindicated and disappointed. I wish I had been prepared to point South in a different direction.

All I needed to do was tell him to look down from these green cliffs. God was in each wave, each flight of pelicans swooping over them. These brains are marvelous tools, but they invent tests and make up religions -- the most doctrinaire of them science.

Hoping to experience God through the use of logic is a futile exercise. God doesn't work with the logical part of the brain. God connects with the part of the brain engaged in meditation and prayer. Prayer is not a logical act. It is an act based on hope. Hope is not logical but is no less real.

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,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

and sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm."

Did anyone imagine we'd evolve as a civilization to the point that people would be required to remove their shoes before entering an airplane to make sure their loafers aren't packed with plastique explosives. Paranoia is rampant, and not without reason.

"Even a paranoid can have enemies," said Henry Kissinger, most Machiavellian of political strategists.

In the aftermath of the day the towers fell, the security offered by a police state sounds tempting. There are people in government who would love to limit our rights in the name of safety. Our duty is to make sure they don't patriotically rifle the Constitution. The means always count, always will.

After so many died, we didn't think we'd laugh again, but here we are chuckling late at night at Osama bin Laden jokes. It's a bleak and black kind of humor fueled by hope that the name someday will be remembered for the date in history when the world turned away from intolerance and violence and close-mindedness.

Ultimately, bombs won't lead the way.

Hope will.

"I've heard it in the chillest land,

and on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me."

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.