Not Feeling Hope, Feeling Possibility

Prepared message given as part of Three Rivers worship on Zoom, 23 January 2025.

Good morning, Friends. I'm Lisa. I use she/her pronouns. I come to you today with love, grief, rage, and fire this morning. I'm going to speak to you about where we are in the U. S. at this time. If what I am bringing is not what you want or need, remember you can mute the sound on your computer or ask the tech host to move you to a breakout room.

Please have care for yourself. We love you. The practical things I'm going to share, I'm also going to put links in so you can just listen and not worry about getting or holding onto. When I was invited to bring a message this morning, the word hope was used. I am not in a place today where I can access much hope.

I can access grief, grief that slowed me yesterday and made doing almost anything impossible. I can access fear, fear that limits my imagination and sense of possibility and makes me want to hold my child so very close. I can access sorrow and tears, tears that if I start shedding, I'm afraid I will never stop.

And I can access rage. A burning, screaming, molten fire within me. There are many more feelings, but those are the easiest for me to access at the moment. I understand how feelings move through me as water moves, that it can be a raging torrent. It can be a gentle spring rain. It can be a nourishing stream.

It can be the longing for a trace of dew in a parched land, and it can be the depths of an ocean. I'm going to invite us to be with our feelings as water this morning, to notice what quality they have. I'm going to pause for a moment and invite you to breathe deeply and put a hand on a place in your body where you are feeling deeply.

My hand is on my heart space. I am moving with my breath and my blood. I am moving in that space. I'm not moving my feelings, nor am I feeling all of them to their fullest, but I am feeling and moving. I invite you to feel and move. Just for a moment to notice the quality of water in that space.

Thank you. Please keep feeling and moving. Please keep grounding in your breath, in your blood, in the preciousness of your own body. So I can't speak to you today of hope, but I can speak to you of possibility. We are at the end game of empire here in the United States. All the violence our nation was founded on and has been fueled by is being given free reign and renewed energy right now.

All the horrors that have been lied about and pushed to the side that have always been core to our nation are being re energized and fed. It is not sustainable. I do not feel much hope. I do feel possibility. I feel the possibility that all of us who have lived in that murky place of speaking faith and justice while also colluding with oppression, as I have done and still do, that we move more stridently to the place where the divine calls us.

I feel possibility that friends live our faith and not simply discuss and minute it. I feel possibility that we make use of all the wisdom of resistance. Of transformation of liberation that the generations of those before us have left us and invited us into over and over again. I feel the possibility that it only takes a small percentage of the population, like 4%, to overthrow authoritarian leaders and governments.

I feel the possibility that exists here in our community now. Of us. None of us has to do it all. Each of us has to do something and has to do our part together. Me with you, us with others. We can change this moment of endgame from annihilation to transformation. It is possible. Daniel Hunter, a friend in Philadelphia, offers us four critical pathways and I'll share more about this in the chat.

But they are protecting people, defending civic institutions, disrupting and disobeying authoritarianism and building alternatives.

I invite you in worship today to go inward, to ground in faith, to ground in God, to ground in us. Or to ground in your own body, whatever you can access in this moment and search for what your being can move more into protecting, defending, disrupting, or building, start where you can touch: yourself, your home, your neighborhood, your community. Part of my Quaker upbringing and acculturation involved Quakers regularly invoking the friend who, when asked in the 1700s about participating in violence and wearing a sword, said: "Wear it as long as thou canst" meaning, to be with violence until you couldn't anymore. This friend, famous and revered among us, was also an enslaver. He wore violence, intimately, in his home, on his body, on the bodies of others, for his whole life.

I grew up in our yearly meeting in this culture of duplicitous passivity that supported the talking and acting about faithfulness and justice while staying fully embedded in the violence of privilege, power, and denial. I live in this space. Three Rivers, we felt this space in becoming a monthly meeting.

And the time for living in this space is so past done. We need to, together, move past and through this. There is the possibility now to do this. I'm not calling us to purity or selecting who among us is better. I'm calling us to mass movement, to moving together, to deeper faithfulness, to move to direct action, to move to offering what we have to protect, to defend, to disrupt and to build.

Here now, you and me, us together, all of us with so many others, another future is possible. We get to feel, but we don't stay stuck in our feelings. We get to have low moments and we carry each other in those moments, but we don't stop moving. God's invitation is always one of possibility. It is always one of widening the circle, and it is always one that requires us to move past comfort to action.