Ever hopeful!
Our co-chaplain, Andrew Norman, pens his first Chaplain’s Blog.
Our hopes had been pinned on the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill. It simply focusses in a very practical way on what we need for a more hopeful future. But like most Private Members Bills it is making only slow progress through Parliament. True, at least 100 MP’s have now expressed support for it. But can we realistically hope that it will ever gain enough backing to be passed?
Perhaps we should be transferring our hopes now to the forthcoming Cop26 to be held in Glasgow in November? But joining a pre-Cop26 webinar recently we shared anxiety about what would happen if Covid-19 transferred the event online.
‘Active Hope’ author, Joanna Macy said: “I’m not insisting that we be brimming with hope — it’s OK not to be optimistic.” “The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world — because it will not be healed without that.”
Over the last few weeks I have been aware of many more Cop26 webinars offered by various organizations that I could have attended if I’d had unlimited time available. But how hopeful it is that so many people are showing up with an active concern, who are showing our capacity truly to love this world.
Eastertide, with spring moving into early summer, is a season of that hope which is so much more than optimism. It offers instead an awareness of the divine force of life itself, personified in the risen Christ vanquishing death, of “the dearest freshness deep down things.” (Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Next: Would I have been a Shell protester?
Comments on "Ever hopeful!"
Iain Climie:
If we clutch at enough straws, we can build a raft! Hang in there.
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