Practicing Hope as a Verb ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
December 7, 2025
“Imagine the world as a theater,” wrote author Rebecca Solnit. “Imagine the world as a theater. The acts of the powerful and the official occupy center stage. The traditional versions of history, the conventional sources of news encourage us to fix our gaze on the stage. The limelights there are so bright they blind you to the shadowy spaces around you, make it hard to meet the gaze of the other people in the seats, to see the way out of the audience, into the aisles, backstage, outside, in the dark, where other powers are at work. A lot of the fate of the world is decided onstage, in the limelight, and the actors there will tell you that no other place matters.” (Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark)
In the last few years, especially this last year, life in the United States has felt somewhat like living in the middle of a good old-fashioned pinball game. The little ball ricochets around and lands in very unpredictable places. A struggle for the soul of the country is taking place. Some days it feels as though the ethical, moral side scores on behalf of the rule of law, and then the next day the side attempting to impose their vision of a white, “Christian” oligarchy gets control of the little ball again. There are judicial wins, and upsetting losses. It’s frankly exhausting. And that side, those who would foster hate, commit war crimes, create scapegoats, and strip away our democratic norms, like to assure everyone that indeed, they are on the stage, in fact, they own the stage, with the bright lights blinding the rest of us while we try to watch and pay attention. We are trained to focus on the leaders, to turn in their direction, to listen to what they say, to allow ourselves to be blinded.
But then Rebecca Solnit continued: “The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet whether they will have any effect, in the people you have not yet heard of who will be the next (emergent leaders), or become something you cannot yet imagine. In this epic struggle between light and dark, it’s the dark side — that of the anonymous, the unseen, the officially powerless, the visionaries and subversives in the shadows — that we must hope for.” (Ibid.)
Our theme for this month of December is Choosing Hope. At this time of year we often turn our thoughts toward hope: hope during a time of long nights and winter cold, hope as we race toward Christmas and the New Year. We offer our hope for the promise of new life, and for the love that grows with each new arrival. This year, perhaps more than ever, we find ourselves hoping for that shadow side, the anonymous, the unseen, the powerless to emerge.
I’ve often told you that hoping is very different than wishing. We wish the sun would come out on a cold, cloudy day. There’s nothing we can actively do to make that happen; it’s just an expression of what we would like.
Hope, however, is very different. Think about the name of the theme for December: Choosing Hope. This means that we are actively searching for hope where we can find it; often in the shadows. This means that we must practice hoping, and must treat it like a spiritual discipline. Choosing hope means an active turning away from despair, from pessimism, from cynicism. Truly hope is an orientation of the heart, like gratitude, like generosity, that we can cultivate and encourage to grow within us. Hope is resilient. It’s gritty. I came across an anonymous quote that I thought captures what hope can mean to us, if we choose to nurture it, to develop it: “People speak of hope as if it is this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s webs. It’s not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.” (attributed to Matthew@crowsfault)
That language is in sharp contrast to the famous Emily Dickinson characterization of ‘hope as the thing with feathers’, but the point is the same – hope is resilient. It evolves, it changes with circumstances, but it never completely disappears. Our job is to keep listening for hope, watching for it within ourselves, and acknowledging it when we sense it. Maybe sometimes it is simply the quiet little flutter of wings, beating away within, in darkness, in the shadows. Our work, then, is to remember that by practicing hope, we give the wings a little space so that they can beat stronger and harder.
When we think of hope as a practice, as a discipline, as a verb, we remember that hope isn’t something we have: it’s something we do. It’s our work to help hope to not only survive, but also to evolve, to shift in new directions, to never stop ‘rising for another go’, to keep going until we churn the cream into butter and can climb up toward the light.
This chaotic year has shown us is that we never know what is going to happen next. We are caught up in this pinball game, but throughout this time we have had some very welcome surprises that have shown us at our best. I’m thinking about the willingness of millions of us to take to the streets and protest, and to go to ICE detention facilities and bear witness. The protest signs alone, the wit and creativity, is a joyful surprise. Then there’s the willingness to create networks and mutual aid groups to protect immigrants. On a larger scale, there was the rejection of Elon Musk, who discovered that money can’t buy everything, and of his signature product, the Tesla. There was the silencing of comedians, and the boycott that got Jimmy Kimmel back on the air within days. And remember the Vermonters driving the Vance family away, and then the citizens of Greenland doing the same? Who saw that coming? And all this was organized in the shadows, in homes, in church basements, by all the people who woke up one morning and asked themselves, “If not me, then who?”
What we are seeing is hope in action, creating these surprises, creating uncertainty which offers space and time to shift the narrative of those standing on the dazzling stage. Hope in action is operating away from those bright lights and creating new ways forward, creating speed bumps to slow the rise of fascism and oligarchy. It’s a choice, every single day, to watch and listen for the movement of beating wings, to see where the energy is emerging, to show up and lend our own energy to that of others, to create even more uncertainty and thus more space and energy.
“The grounds for hope are in the shadows.” When we turn away from the bright lights blinding us, we can better see who is emerging, and hear their voices. May we continue to turn away from what is blinding us, from what is keeping us from moving forward, and orient ourselves to the energy of hope waiting for us in the quiet, dim shadows, where we can sense the beating of wings.
May it be so.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
