Tag: despair

Hope

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

dessertBy Joyce Hollyday

Once again…still…our eyes and hearts are riveted on tragedies afar and close at hand: terrorized families in flimsy boats on the other side of the globe fleeing desperately toward what they hope is safety; a tide of killings at home brought into sharp focus by young people demanding that black lives matter. We hunger and thirst for a world in which peace, dignity, and justice prevail.

When I’m tempted to despair, I remember the spring of 1991. It was a time that seemed hopeless to me. Three teenagers I knew were senselessly killed—one stabbed, two shot—on the deadly streets of the Washington, DC neighborhood where I lived. Hundreds of women and children died when U.S. forces bombed the Amariya shelter in Iraq on Ash Wednesday. Continue reading “Hope” →

Wendell Berry on Despair and Freedom

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Subverting EmpireLeave a comment

stars
“When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be- I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”