Space for hope

Love tried to stop her, to silence her. Hope freed her.

In today’s New York Times, Amanda Gorman wrote about how she almost didn’t read her poem at the Inauguration last year. Fear was trying to capture her soul. Hope freed her.

“I was terrified.”

She writes about a fear of failing her people and her vocation. Then there was safety. Covid when you’re not vaccinated. Domestic terrorists who had controlled that space just weeks before. High visibility when you are “Black and outspoken.” Friends joking, sort of, about getting a bulletproof vest. Friends and family who love you and want to keep you safe.

Amanda Gorman doesn’t say it as bluntly as I will now. Love can silence us. Love can attack our identity and vocation. Love demands that we stay safe. Love wants us to be in spaces that are safe. With people who are safe. Love wants us to be comfortable. 

She writes, that as she moved toward the dais, “I felt warm, like the words waiting in my mouth were aflame.”  

I hear her and think she was set free by the Holy Spirit’s relentless call to be who you are. In John Macquarrie’s words to be among those who are “free, responsible beings united in love.” Notice how love, real love reenters the picture. It’s the love of a commonwealth and people who are free and responsible.

I hear her poem from that day and hear her hope.  (the text). In a nation being called to find safety in the authoritarian worlds of left or right she “witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.” She invited us to be “a country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.”

Our parish churches, those wonderful and sacred mysteries, exist within the context of a society in which most people are afraid to say what they think. It’s the proclamation of false love. Love that would have us be safe. Peter’s fear speaks to us – “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” (Matthew 16:22) Peter had yet to learn what it was to be the rock. Jesus then shares the awful good news “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matt 16:25)

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