This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic is by Lancia E. Smith
Many years ago, I was homeless. Not figuratively, literally. I had lost everything I ever owned, not once but twice. The first time I was alone; the second time, I was an alcoholic married to a practicing addict. This time, my family and I were evicted from our apartment, and we ended up in an emergency family shelter for the weekend. I was a 26 year old mother of four children. Landing here was my greatest fear, worse than when I had been homeless in the streets by myself. This was worse because it was in front of my children, as witnesses and victims. We were displaced, powerless, ashamed, and hopeless. As it sometimes happens, I was met at the bottom of the well of fear and shame with a great grace. Right there in the terrifying pit, I was given a gift.
Some kind soul knew our plight and had left a box of food and necessities for us in our room. Decades later, I remember that box, not so much for its contents as for the rush of mercy I felt opening it, and for its accompanying note—a single piece of unlined typing paper folded into thirds addressed to our family. I opened it up to find only these words handwritten inside.
“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” — Jeremiah 29:11, ESV
Even now, I cannot explain how, but when I read those words, they sounded like they were being spoken aloud, alive, and in person to me specifically and intimately. They reverberated in my mind, bypassing the cloud of shame and fear. I remember something happened within me as I read them. I believed them.
All these years later, I still believe them. The idea of “a future and a hope” isn’t something we manufacture out of a state of wishful thinking; it isn’t a mental night-light in denial of the darkness. It is a promise given by someone outside of time—someone who knows the end of it. Someone who knows the future in its full bloom as the present.
For me, the future is often shrouded in risk, harboring impending loss and potential ruin. It is starkly at odds with the word “hope” as a synonym for “future” in the English language. My base instinct is to fear, but my God-given nature is to hope. These two impulses wage an invisible conflict within me every day, and every day I must choose which one I listen to, feed, and act on.
Our current state of world affairs can make it difficult to believe there is any future on earth really worth hoping for. Not just for my husband Peter and me, but for our children and grandchildren, and on the really hard days, even for our species. Why plant a garden when it will be wiped out by hail some summer afternoon? Or the country may be at war in the next six months? Why plant a tree when I won’t live long enough to see it reach maturity? Why love a child or an animal when they may die before I do? Why make art if civilization, as we know it, may not have another hundred years left?
Yes indeed, why bother? This question wrestles with me persistently. In my low points, a passage from C.S. Lewis’s, Learning in War-Time, comes to mind.
“The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself…
Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never come. …They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffold, discuss, the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.”
Lewis wrote Learning in War-Time under the shadow of World War II. And even though the geopolitical realities are somewhat more subdued at our current point in history, we still live in a world at war in one form or another, waged in arenas both seen and unseen. Every day we must choose where we will place our alliance, how we will serve, and whom we will defend. Our battle tactics seem counter-intuitive: do good, defend truth, and make beauty. Our swords of defense are pens and keyboards, trowels and spades, camera lenses, paint brushes, potting wheels, musical instruments, dance shoes, even kitchen pots and garden plots.
Thirty some years ago, Vedran Smailovic, known as the cellist of Sarajevo, offered an embodied example of what Lewis describes in Learning in War-Time. On May 26, 1992, Smailovic witnessed 22 people killed by a bomb while standing in line for bread. The day after, he returned to the site of the massacre and began to play his cello. For 22 days—one day for every life taken—Smailovic continued to play the same piece of music, Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor, even amidst the continued rifle fire and bombings. His actions were not planned for a media campaign or to bring attention to himself, they were his response to the anguish of his city and the horror that he witnessed. It was not self-serving, vain panache.
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