Trusting Hope ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 23, 2025

Well. What a year this past week has been.

One thing has become clear over the past two months, and that is: we’ve been strapped into a roller coaster for a very long ride. Now, roller coasters can be fun and exciting, for some people, for those who know what they are getting themselves into, and who enjoy the adrenaline rush. But then there’s everyone else.

This month, as we’ve endured the abrupt twists and turns, the long, slow, climbs and the terrifying plunges, the daily desire to stop the ride and get off, our theme here at church has been Trust. My plan for the month was to work toward a service today exploring our loss of trust as a country, the loss of trust in our institutions, in science, in one another. I planned to talk about how it’s been five years since the initial Covid lockdown, in March of 2020, and how the pandemic exposed this absolute lack of trust, in scientists, in medicine, in the government, and how we simply can no longer agree on much of anything at all. But in the past few weeks I’ve watched, as have many of you, as there are more and more brazen attempts to undermine our most trusted institutions: the judicial branch of our government, and our constitution. And I decided that dissecting this today would just weigh us down even further, as we rocket around a roller coaster track, unable to stop.

A better question for this moment is: what can we trust? I worked my way through the usual answers, for me anyway: that we can trust in the shared strength of community, in the creation of caring networks that form based on human altruism. I trust in the human drive of so many to achieve, to make life better through innovation and invention. I trust in the very long arc of the universe that we bend, slowly, over many years, toward justice.

But there is something else that serves as a foundation for all of those elements of a trustworthy society – the foundations of community, and the drive for human flourishing through justice and well-being.

Underneath all those worthy goals lies hope. Can we trust in hope?

Let’s begin by talking a bit about what hope is. For starters, hope is an active emotion, and not passive. It’s not sitting at home wishing that all this would just go away. Even though we all do plenty of that. Hope spurs us to action. Hope gets us up and moving. It says, “Well, maybe we could just try this one thing.” And then another, and another.

The author of our reading earlier, Rebecca Solnit, wrote, “It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that demand that we act…Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act…”. (Hope in the Dark, Kindle edition, Location 165)

We don’t know what will happen when we dare to hope, and begin to act. But hope is present along with us on the roller coaster. If not for hope, with the moments hope offers of climbing upward, we would be strapped in on one long continuous drop down into despair.

This past week there was plenty of frightening news; of people being treated with contempt, of power grabs. But at the same time, we hoped as judges intervened to restore important jobs and to try to protect immigrants. Our spirits rose. We understand better now Charles Dickens, when he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

On Friday, our social hall was filled with people coming together to act on their hopes – figuring out together what actions to take. Two months ago, this group didn’t exist. Who would have believed, two months ago, that the actions of groups of protestors standing outside of car dealerships could cause sales and stock prices of that car brand to plummet? But one action at a time, one location at a time, has snowballed into a powerful impact. What will come next?

We don’t know, but these actions are giving us hope that something new will emerge. And maybe we’ll take part in it.

Hope is contagious. And it can keep us from despair, which is isolating, and draining.

Can we trust hope? Well, one thing we can trust is that it never goes away. Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.”

When Rebecca Solnit set out to write her book on hope, she found herself turning to many instances throughout history when hope emerged in crisis. Sometimes it showed itself as a political movement: the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, or the student protests in Tiananmen Square. Or the Arab Spring. Sometimes it appears suddenly in the face of a natural disaster. Rebecca told the story of the Cajun Navy; the individual boat owners who loaded their small craft onto trailers and drove toward the unfolding disaster of flooded New Orleans back in 2005. There was no plan, no coordination, beyond a request on a local TV broadcast. The boat owners didn’t know whether they would be able to get to the city, or once there, if they would be able to save anyone. But they showed up, fueled by hope, and one by one managed to pluck desperate people out of trees and off of rooftops.

Did it make a difference?

This story always reminds me of the old tale about the little girl walking on the beach. The tide had gone out, and the sand was littered with stranded starfish. As she walked along, she would pick them up one by one and toss them into the water. Her grandfather told her not to bother. “There are so many starfish,” he said. “You can’t make that much of a difference.” The girl threw another starfish into the water and replied, “Well, it made a difference to that one.”

And so the Cajun Navy arrived, circumvented roadblocks and orders to stay out of the city, and eventually, one by one, managed to rescue 10,000 people. It would have been so easy to think, ‘well, is it worth it for me to drive all the way there? Can I make a difference?’ But hope tells us that we can make a difference. Hope tells us, just show up and see what you can do. Hope stirs in us, beats its wings, and urges us into action. And when we decide to see what might happen, we can, as our African American friends and neighbors say, ‘make a way out of no way.’

In times such as this, hope is a form of resistance. Those who are determined to take away our civil rights want us to lose hope, to despair, to keep the roller coaster plunging down to a place where there is no energy to fight back.

This week, the US government targeted a library that was deliberately built across the US – Canadian border, in Derby Line, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec. The library and upstairs auditorium were built in 1904 as a symbol of international cooperation and harmony. The main entrance is in Vermont, but Canadians were always allowed to walk around and enter. This week, access for Canadians was abruptly limited and beginning in the fall, Canadians will have to enter a border control station.

Almost immediately, the president of the library board, Sylvie Boudreau, announced that they were setting up a GoFundMe to crowdsource the expense of creating a new door on the Quebec side of the building. Boudreau was near tears making this announcement and said that she was “sad, disappointed, even angry, but we will rise above all this.”

“We will rise above all this.”

Hope fosters action, and very quickly a plan for a new door. And action in turn creates more hope.

We ask, “How do we trust in hope?” As we heard in our story earlier, we don’t want to blindly trust anything, even something as resilient as hope. We don’t need to trust it without question. There is such a thing as false hope, often offered to us by those who would try to push us into complacency or despair. For months, the current president has said repeatedly that no one will cut Social Security payments. He is offering false hope. We must not blindly trust this.

So we should question our hopeful feelings, ask ourselves where they come from, and if they can be trusted. And to help us decide, all we have to do is to look backward, and remember stories from our history, all the times that the arc of justice bent, when we were least expecting it.

What we are trusting in this moment is that history, and resilience, which leads us to believe that hope really is present in us and between us as a fundamental part of our humanity. This helps us to take risks, to stand up, and act.

We need hope. We need hope, and joy, and humor to help us remember our humanity, and our agency, to bolster our resilience, and brace us for the next plunge along the track.

There will be those who will try to take hope away from us, always. The road is a winding one, never straight. It is full of uphill climbs and precipitous plunges. There are surprises and unpredictable outcomes. Hope urges us to remember what we have accomplished, against all odds, and urges us to do it again.

I will let Rebecca Solnit offer these words in closing:

“We write history with our feet and with our presence, and our collective voice and vision…Together, we are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that yes, we can change the world because we have many times before. You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future…The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we carry into the night that is the future.” (Hope in the Dark, Kindle ed., Loc 352)

‘You row forward, looking back.’ May you find hope, and clarity of vision, and resilience in the days ahead.

Amen.