The work changed me. When I decided to volunteer with my church's homeless shelter committee, I was only hoping to be of use. What I got was an opportunity to open my heart. I joined the team that covered the last Sunday of every month. For three years, each winter, I served food, provided hospitality and socialized with homeless people in my community. It was a rich and satisfying experience. I felt that I was making a tangible difference. I felt needed. When I met shelter guests on the streets of downtown Northampton, chances were good we'd recognize each other from a shared scrabble game. Before I began volunteering, I mostly tried to avoid interacting with homeless people. The immediacy of their need always left me with uncomfortable feelings - shame, sadness, anger . . . But as a result of the education I got from volunteering, as a result of the relationships, I could connect with homeless people first as people rather than as homeless. The work changed me, opened me and gave me new tools to help build community.
When I relocated to Chicago, I was dismayed to find that my tools didn't transfer. Things are very different in that enormous city. The system is just not capable of supporting all the people in need. One city block can host two or three panhandlers. The busses and trains are excellent venues for frequent and impassioned speeches for help. Homeless folks compete with each other in their efforts to sell Streetwise, the weekly newspaper by and about homeless people. A typical journey across the city can involve at least a dozen solicitations. I was overwhelmed.
I watched to see how other, more seasoned city dwellers responded. Some give loose change. A few give no money but always offer a verbal blessing of sorts. Most do their best to ignore the solicitations. I eventually developed a strategy. I would buy one paper a week, try to say hello to the people I met regularly in my neighborhood and try to meet the gaze of everyone I said no to. Even with this intention, some days left me feeling heavy with despair. It seemed all of us, the homeless panhandler, the ones who avert their eyes and those who offer some minimal response - all of us were degraded by the encounter.
I want to talk today about cynicism and despair. I have not been among you long, but I know that you are people who act. You have a long history of giving yourselves to innovative and life enhancing social service and justice projects. You give your money and your time. You donate and organize, serve and write letters, tutor and cook food. Many of you, maybe even most of you, volunteer your time and resources to help build a world more whole. And still, none of us is immune to the heart numbing plagues of cynicism and despair.
Paul Rogat Loeb argues in his book, Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time, that we live in a culture that "demeans idealism and enshrines cynicism."[1] Loeb draws on the psychological and social theories called "learned helplessness" and "surplus powerlessness" to explain our temptation to despair. We are led to believe that the social and ecological crisis facing the world are so enormous and complex that we can't even really understand them, never mind make much of a difference in solving them.[2] On top of that, we come to believe that the only places we can really exercise power are in our personal and maybe our professional lives. We allow that any real power to eradicate social problems lies in the hands of someone else and therefore restrict our "search for meaning and integrity to [our] personal lives."[3] As a result we are tempted to cynicism and despair, a problem that is at once psychological, political and spiritual.
It's not that I think we are all doomed by a feeling of helplessness and powerlessness. But I know that there are ways and moments in my life when I have to wrestle with these demons. And so I wonder about you. Are there particular world crises that overwhelm you, particular problems you feel powerless to help solve? If so, it may be that you have been lulled by a touch of cynicism. If this rings true for you, it is important to remember that cynicism is a coping strategy. "Cynicism salves the pain of unrealized hope," writes Loeb. "If we convince ourselves that nothing can change," he continues, "we don't have to risk acting on our dreams. But the more we accept this, the more we deny core parts of ourselves."[4]
I think this is what happened to me in Chicago. Overwhelmed by the epidemic of homelessness and familiar only with strategies that work in a much smaller town, I gave in to my sense of helplessness. I thought, "there are already lots of dedicated, smart people working to solve homelessness here. What difference can I make?" I reasoned that the only people who can really change things are the ones with access to power I can't hope to have. And so I tried to hush the part of me that wanted to rant or cry after another afternoon of politely interrupting the tale of another homeless woman who just needs $5.00. I tried to push my sorrow inside.
It need not be this way. We can embrace it all, we can live and love with conviction and passion. We can make a difference in our communities and enrich our own lives in the process. We already know that. The challenge is to remember and to live ever more deeply into the promise of community, the power of engaged citizenship. "There is no greater antidote to powerlessness," writes Loeb, "than joining with others in common cause."[5] And there is no greater cost than silence, he continues, for silence "requires the ultimate sacrifice - the erosion of our spirit."[6]
And so I ask you, are you living with a silence you might turn to speech? Is there some wrong that continues to tug at your spirit? If there is, I encourage you to act. Or maybe you are already acting, but don't feel quite satisfied. Maybe your heart calls to you, asking you to open just a little more. If that's true for you, I encourage you to consider how you might grow your soul a little more. I don't presume to know what you need to do. None of us is in a position to discern that for another. We all have important responsibilities and commitments competing for our finite time and energy. We have limits and so we must choose. And sometimes the struggles of our own lives leave us with nothing to give. There are moments in every life when we need every ounce of energy, every last dime for our own survival.
But there are also moments when we are blessed with enough and even a little more. In those moments, if we risk giving ourselves to our longing, we position ourselves to be agents of transformation. Consider Carol and Bill McNulty. They were moved to join a peace group at their Long Island Church. During one of their meetings they watched a documentary depicting the deplorable conditions of sweatshops in Central America contracting with US companies. Carol was haunted by the desperation and fatigue she saw in a 15-year-old girl's eyes. She felt she had no choice but to join the weekly vigil their parish sponsored at a nearby Gap store.
Once a week for two months, in all kinds of weather, the McNulty's protested and tried to educate Gap shoppers. They found it hard to be so visible. I imagine there were days they wondered what they were doing. Some of their neighbors began to think them a nuisance. When the town government attempted to pass an ordinance banning them from the sidewalk in front of the store, I imagine they were tempted to cynicism. They were able to resist those demons because they had each other to remind them of their purpose. They stayed the course and as a result of their effort, as a result of small groups protesting in front of Gap stores all over the country, they won the fight. The Gap agreed to allow unionizing, to improve work conditions and to allow independent monitoring by churches and human rights groups.[7]
I wonder how that story strikes you. Do you say, yes, but . . . Does it seem a small drop of hope, a small success story in the grand scheme of global crises? If it does you are not alone. I admit I too can be tempted to despair. So can the author Barbara Kingsolver and she concedes that this is not new. "Scholars of history," she writes in her book Small Wonder, "are fond of pulling up statements of dismay from time immemorial to prove to us there is nothing new under the sun." And they are right, she continues, "it isn't new, this feeling of despair over a world gone mad with heartless and punitive desires . . . What is new is that we now know so very much about the world, or at least the part of it that is most picturesquely exploding on any given day, that we're left with a desperate sense that all of it is exploding, all the time. . . We see so much, understand so little, and are simultaneously told so much about What We Think, as a populace polled minute by minute, that it begins to feel like an extraneous effort to listen to our own hearts."[8]
And that is precisely why we must protect the time to listen. That is exactly why we must protect the time to sit with the reflection of the maple on the lake. We despair because we love the world. And so we must return again and again to those sources that nourish our spirits and kindle our love. We long both to savor and save the world because we know that it is all Life. "I want the losing it all when it rains," says the poet Jane Hirschfield, "and I want the returning transparence. I want the place by the edge-flowers where the shallow sand is deceptive, where whatever steps in must plunge, and I want that plunging. There is a lake, Lalla Ded sang, that all things return to. O heart, if you will not, cannot, give me the lake, then give me the song."[9]
In the lake we see the whole world reflected and know that we are one body. In the lake we see that we are intimately and inextricably bound up in the web of life. There we know that the joy and sorrow of our brothers and sisters touches us, even when we close our eyes. It is hard to dwell there. Most of us catch only glimpses. But if we cannot dwell there in every moment, then let us have the song. Let us have the song that dismantles our walls and helps us join hands. Let us sing the song that encourages us to do the things we must do, hearts wide open, in the places we are planted.
In listening to my heart, I've realized I need to join a community organization that works to respond to and eradicate homelessness when I return to Chicago this fall. It does not matter that the goal may not be achieved in my lifetime. What matters is that I give myself to the call of my heart, that I join my small effort to the efforts of others. What matters is that I risk hope, that I allow myself to be moved by the hope of others who can encourage me when mine falters.
Whatever change we might create in the communities where we live is likely to be small, "but it is a fair enough vocation," writes Kingsolver, "to strike one match after another against the dark isolation."[10] Small change. That is what transformation is built on. Small and sacred wonders. Let us give ourselves to their creation. Let them dismantle the walls of cynicism and despair. Let those wonders open our hearts. With hearts wide open, that is how we were meant to live and love this precious life.
May it be so. Amen.
Closing Words by David A. JohnsonWho could do better than to be a singer on the high wind-swept hills of life, bringing songs to the soul, songs full of loveliness and hope for all people. Go now in peace, go making peace. Amen.
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