OK, the Election's Over. Now What?

 

a service at First Parish in Billerica
, Massachusetts

November 29, 2020

Reading

From “Who Will We Be Without Trump?” by New York Times columnist Frank Bruni.

A friend was all worked up about the possibility of Trump 2024.

“I can’t go through this again!” she cried. But what I heard was that she couldn’t stop going through this. Her contempt for Donald Trump is too finely honed at this point, too essential a part of her psyche. Who would she be — conversationally, politically — without it?

Another friend sent me an email in which he’d worked out the economics of a web-only Trump news channel of the kind that Trump may — or may not — start. With minimal investment, Trump could rake in millions and millions!

We were supposed to be breathing a huge sigh of relief about Joe Biden’s victory. But instead he was finding a fresh source of outrage about Trump.

And here I am writing about Trump — again. It’s a tic, not one I’m proud of. But I’m surrendering to it now to acknowledge that I can’t continue doing so. None of us can. …

On Jan. 20 — praise be! — his presidency will be over. But his hold on us may not end as quickly and cleanly. And his departure from the White House will be more disorienting than some of us realize, posing its own challenges: for Democrats, for news organizations, for anyone who has grown accustomed over these past four years to an apocalyptic churn of events and emotions. …

I … worry that in the wake of Trump’s presidency, which both reflected and intensified the furious pitch of American politics, melodrama may be the new normal. I worry that while Americans are exhausted by it, we’re also habituated to it; that we’ll manufacture it where it doesn’t exist … [and] I worry that my worry is part of the problem.

Sermon

Back in the 90s, my wife Deb was battling breast cancer. I think I’ve told that story here before, so I won’t go into a lot of detail. But for months at a time, I was worried that she might die.

It never got to the point where I expected her to die in the next few days, but she was also never entirely in the clear. Surgery is always risky. And when high-dose chemotherapy had wiped out her immune system, I knew that any infection could proceed pretty quickly. And of course there were constant tests, any one of which might tell us that things had taken a bad turn. Treatment went on for a very intense nine months.

And then it was over. Microscopic cancer colonies might still be in there somewhere, the doctors told us, but maybe not. Come back in six months.

So she was home. She went back to work. We saw our friends, went to restaurants, took vacations. We could make plans now and not worry so much about needing to cancel them. Life could be more or less normal. Though we continued to be nervous, we were relieved, and happy that things were working out so well.

But we also didn’t know what to do with ourselves. For most of a year, we had lived with a sense of desperate intensity, constantly afraid that terrible news was coming, constantly worried that we might make some wrong decision and only later discover its horrible consequences.

And then that intensity was gone, and we had to recalibrate all our standards. Now, “bad news” meant that the movie we wanted to see was sold out. A “bad decision” meant buying the wrong pair of shoes, or misjudging rush hour traffic and being late. That comparative triviality took some getting used to.

Soldiers back from war often report something similar. Suddenly, “screwing up” doesn’t mean somebody is going to die. It just means that you’ve burned dinner, or that the project due Friday won’t get done until Monday. It can be hard to adjust, hard to take seriously the drastically smaller ups and downs of your new life.

In 2011, a New York Times reporter interviewed soldiers returning from Afghanistan and noted the difficulty of “dialing back the hypervigilance that served them well in combat.” A sergeant told the reporter: “The hardest part for me, I guess, is not being on edge.”

People who escape dysfunctional social relationships are often drawn back in. Abused spouses go back to their abusers, ex-members of cults return to the fold, and so on. Bad as they can be, those relationships are intense. Everything that happens in them feels terribly important. Healthier relationships -- where conflict still happens, but shouting and crying are rare, and no one ever winds up in the emergency room -- can seem flat by comparison.

You may wonder where I’m going with this.

Almost a month ago, we had an election. By a margin of more than six million votes, we told Donald Trump to pack his bags. It’s over. At noon on January 20th, he’ll be gone from the White House. There’s a counter on the internet that will tell you to the second just how much longer we have to wait.

When I signed up to do this service, I didn’t know how the election would come out. So I had several possible sermon topics in mind.

If Trump had gotten re-elected, I was planning to do a keep-the-faith talk, about how to maintain hope and endure four more years of a government so hostile to Unitarian Universalist values.

Another possibility was the Great Blue Wave — not just a new president, but a new Congress open to the kind of structural change American democracy needs. That outcome called for a visionary talk. Instead of tinkering around the edges of the status quo, let’s sit down with a blank sheet of paper and think about what we really want for this country.

What actually happened was somewhere in between. In some sense, the Great Blue Wave did roll in. Turnout was enormous, and Joe Biden got more votes than any presidential candidate in American history, over 80 million.

And yet, the turnout on the other side was also impressive. Trump’s losing campaign netted 74 million votes, which is millions more than Barack Obama got in his 2008 landslide, and 11 million more than Trump himself got in 2016. Unless Democrats sweep the runoffs in Georgia, Mitch McConnell will retain control of the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi’s majority in the House will be smaller, not larger. So if there was a Blue Wave, a lot of the red power structure survived it.

To me, the shock of this election was those 74 million Trump voters. I could almost understand people who voted for him the first time: Maybe they didn’t like Hillary Clinton. Maybe they believed that a businessman could run the government more efficiently. Maybe they were just generally frustrated and thought, “What the hell? He’ll shake things up. How bad can he be?”

But by now we’ve had four years to answer that question. We’ve seen Covid kill a quarter million of our fellow Americans. We’ve seen our nation inflict pointless cruelty on helpless people who come to our border looking for asylum — including separating families and then deporting the parents without giving their children back. In hundreds of cases, we’ve even lost the connection between them. We could find Osama bin Laden, but somehow we can’t find these kids’ parents.  

We’ve seen the Justice Department protect allies of the President who commit crimes, and heard him demand that the attorney general arrest his rivals based on conspiracy theories rather than evidence. We’ve seen unprecedented levels of corruption, including millions of dollars of government money flowing into the President’s businesses. We’ve heard no apologies from him when mass shooters repeat his rhetoric to justify slaughtering Hispanics or Jews.

And after all that, 74 million Americans got their ballots and said, “That’s good. I want four years more.” I found that not just surprising, but unsettling. And for a week or so I thought this talk would focus on that issue: How can I come to terms with what the election has demonstrated about my fellow citizens? Because for UUs this is more than just a political challenge. It goes to the heart of our religion.

Our Unitarian principles commit us to democratic process. But democracy has to mean more than just majority rule. Real democracy involves forming a common vision of ourselves as a people, respecting one another, and developing some common core of facts on which to base our national conversation. When either party  says to the other “We outnumber you, so we’re just going to vote you down” that isn’t the kind of democracy we’re looking for. So when President-elect Biden talks about healing America by reaching across the partisan divide, he’s speaking our language.

At a more personal level, our Universalist values tell us that no one is irredeemable. No one should be written off as unworthy of consideration. No matter how many times a person refuses to see the light as we see it, or to recognize what seem to us to be undeniable facts, we can’t stop trying to communicate or trying to understand.

And that’s a challenge right now, because our efforts to understand or communicate meet with so little reciprocity. Monday, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson suggested a reading list for conservatives who want to understand “the opaque and inscrutable Joe Biden voter”. He was, of course, making fun of the mainstream media’s four-year long effort to understand white working-class Trump voters.    

After 2016, he writes, “Reporters and researchers swarmed what seemed like every bereft factory town in the industrial Midwest, every hill and hollow of Appalachia, every windswept farming community throughout the Great Plains. I’m pretty sure television crews did, in fact, bring us reports from every single diner in the contiguous United States — at least, those where at least one regular patron wears overalls.”

“Logically, then, we should put aside those dog-eared copies of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and subject ‘the Biden voter’ to the same kind of microscopic scrutiny. Venture out of your bubble, Trump supporters, and try to understand how most of America thinks.”

Robinson was writing tongue-in-cheek, of course, because he knows that project will never be undertaken. Fox News reporters are not going to hang out at black barber shops in Detroit, or interview white suburban UUs to find out why so many church-going professionals voted against what regular Fox viewers must see as our self-interest.

The situation is quite the opposite, in fact. A popular slogan on Trump campaign merchandise, one repeated at rallies by Don Jr. himself, was “Make Liberals Cry Again”. For many on that side, our distress and disappointment is not an unfortunate byproduct of achieving their positive vision for America. It’s a goal in itself. Making us cry is something to celebrate. How should we respond to that?

I thought that theme might make a good talk, one that I probably need to write even more than you need to hear. I still think so, and maybe it will happen someday. But try as I might to assemble that talk, the voice of inspiration just wouldn’t speak to me; I couldn’t make it come together. And that was my first clue that maybe I was skipping over an important step in the process. Maybe the healing of America needs to start somewhere else.

My second clue came from the post-election media coverage. Ordinarily, when an opposition party wins the White House, the president-elect and the new administration instantly become the center of all attention. Who’s going to be the chief of staff? Who’s going to be in the cabinet? What's the first issue on their new agenda?

Usually, it’s like the Eagles sang: “There’s a new kid in town. Everybody’s talking about the new kid in town.”

But not this time. And like Frank Bruni, I find that I am part of that phenomenon. I write a weekly politics blog, and week after week, even after it became clear that Trump had lost, it’s been hard to talk about anybody else: Why won’t he concede? Would he ever let the Biden transition begin? What’s going on with all those absurd lawsuits? And with his calls to local election officials and Republican legislators in states Biden won? Why is he replacing the leadership in the Pentagon? Is he staging a coup? Can it possibly work? Who’s he going to pardon? Will he try to pardon himself? Will he resign so that Pence can pardon him? On and on and on.

But wait. Isn’t there a new kid in town? Of course there is. And he’s doing the kinds of things presidents-elect typically do. For example, he quickly rolled out his team to deal with our most pressing problem: the pandemic.

But by the standards of the last four years, that event was missing a certain pizzazz. His team was all doctors and public health experts. Not a quack or a charlatan in the bunch. Not even somebody from Biden’s family.

And what did those well-qualified experts tell us to do? Stuff we’d already heard: wear a mask, wash your hands, stay out of crowds. There’s a vaccine coming, and it’s going to work, but it’s not going to be a miracle. Distributing it will be an enormous logistical problem that takes months. They’re going to do the best they can.

Then Biden got up there and repeated the same things. He didn’t promise the virus was going to go away by magic. He didn’t offer us a miracle cure or suggest that we inject bleach. He didn’t yield the podium to the My Pillow guy or some other campaign donor with something crazy to say.

That’s news, I guess. But what can I write about that will grab my readers’ attention? And more important: What am I supposed to feel? If government becomes sane and sensible, where’s my next jolt of adrenaline going to come from?

Eventually it dawned on me: For five years now, pretty much since he came down the escalator in 2015, I’ve been in an abusive relationship with Donald Trump.

Day after day, I have approached my news sources by armoring myself against attack. I have expected that each day I will somehow be insulted or threatened by my President. Or he will do or say something that will make me feel ashamed of the country I love and want to take pride in. In my name, he will attack the environment or harm innocent people or involve me in some other sin that I can never make right.

I came to expect that again and again, he would abuse his power in some way I didn’t see coming, because I had taken the norms of American democracy for granted. I had imagined that somehow the laws and the Constitution would enforce themselves, without any human process that could be disrupted or ignored.

Day after day I would think, “He can’t do that” only to realize that yes, he can. He can set up concentration camps on our border. He can create a masked federal police force and unleash it on the streets of cities where the mayor and the governor don’t want it. He can slow down the Post Office to keep mail-in ballots from arriving in time to be counted. He can threaten to take federal emergency money away from states whose governors aren’t nice enough to him, and foreign aid away from countries that refuse to do him political favors. He can trade pardons for the silence of his co-conspirators. He can shrug off responsibility when his supporters mail pipe bombs to his critics or plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan.

Yes he can.

And because I have so often failed to anticipate what he can do, I have lived for years with a constant sense of dread. What else haven’t I thought of?

That’s what has made his attempts to overturn the election results so riveting. I didn’t see how it could possibly work. But what if I was missing something? What if I was taking for granted some boundary that he could just step over, as he has stepped over so many others?

So for years, I have lived with unrelenting feelings of fear and outrage and shame. An alarm bell has been constantly ringing in my head, telling me that I need to do something, but I don’t know what.

It has been a difficult, terrible four years. But at the same time, it has also been very, very intense.

So after all this, can I really just go back to normal? Or have I gotten, in Frank Bruni’s words, habituated to melodrama. Do I need that regular jolt of adrenaline? If there is no daily outrage, where will my sense of mission come from? What happens to the dragonslayers after the dragon is gone?

On a more mundane level: What’s going to happen to my blog when my readers realize that they don’t need to watch politics as closely as they’ve been doing? When they realize that they can let down their guard for weeks at a time, trusting that the administration will do more-or-less the right thing most of the time? What am I going to write about when the drama of the rise of fascism is replaced by the day-to-day slog of good government?

What we’ve been seeing from the Biden transition these last few weeks is what normal governance is supposed to look like: Presidents choose qualified people, who then say and do sensible things. But watching a well-run government closely is an acquired taste. It’s not the kind of circus we’ve gotten used to.

So it’s a real question: What am I going to do after January 20th, when my emotions are my own again? When my buttons are not repeatedly being pushed? When I am not constantly being trolled? When I can approach the news every morning without already knowing how it’s going to make me feel?

On the one hand, that sounds wonderful. And I believe that eventually it will be wonderful, in more ways than I currently appreciate. That ongoing abuse has probably done me more damage than I realize. And defending myself against it probably has been weighing me down more than I knew.

But on the other hand, experience tells me that this adjustment is going to be a harder than it looks. The psychological wear and tear of the last four years isn’t going to repair itself instantly on Inauguration Day.

President-elect Biden is totally right when he says that America needs to heal its partisan divide. And as a UU, I hope that someday soon I’ll be ready to pitch in and work on that project. But I’m not there yet, and I’m not going to pretend that I am. Before there can be healing between people, I think there needs to be some healing within people.

People like me.

At least that’s where I intend to start.

Hope and Realism in Difficult Times

This talk was delivered on June 21 over Zoom to a combined service of Quincy Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of La Crosse, Wisconsin. The video above is the dress rehearsal I did earlier that morning.

A couple months ago, at the height of the lockdown, someone I follow on Twitter wondered how doctors can diagnose depression these days.

Think about it: Ordinarily, if you went to your doctor and said, “I hardly ever leave the house. Some days I don't even bother to get dressed. When I do go out, I stay as far away from other people as I can.  I wash my hands obsessively, and I worry constantly about getting sick.” in no time, you’d have a prescription for Prozac or Zoloft or some other anti-depressant. But now the doctor would probably say, "That's normal. That's how we all live."

And that's one way to look at it. Normal life is just different now. But another way is to recognize that normal life has started to resemble depression.

In his memoir Darkness Visible, William Styron describes the inner experience of depression as a constant sense of loss. And that too seems familiar, because we are all suffering losses day after day. Even if you haven’t had the virus yourself, you may have lost a parent, a spouse, a child, or some friend you had imagined growing old with. Maybe you’ve lost a job or a business; many people have.
Nearly of us have missed events that we had been looking forward to: maybe the birth of a grandchild, or a semester studying abroad, or a big June wedding with all the trappings.

On a smaller scale, think about church services. This talk was originally supposed to happen last month in Quincy, as part of my annual spring road trip from New England back to my hometown. That trip usually kicks off with lunch at my favorite diner in Connecticut. There's a museum I like in Columbus, a brew pub in Indianapolis, and a bookstore in Champaign. In Quincy, I see old friends, wander through old haunts, and maybe spend a lazy afternoon on a boat in Mark Twain Lake.

But not this spring. And probably not in the fall. And beyond that, who can say?

Stryon says that the most damaging losses are the ones that we never adequately mourn. But opportunities to mourn are another part of what we’ve lost. Often we can’t be there when our loved ones die. We can’t gather our community together for a funeral where we hold each other’s hands 
or dry each other’s tears.

Some of our losses have gone unmourned because they snuck up on us. Many high school seniors were happy, at first, to get a couple unexpected weeks off school. They were less certain how to feel when they got a few more weeks. And then there was no prom, no graduation, no real chance to say goodbye to people who might be passing out of their lives now.

And the virus, the lockdown, and the ensuing economic troubles are not the only challenges we’ve had to face. We’re in a period of major social unrest that calls attention to our persistent lack of progress against racism. The checks and balances of our government are under unprecedented stress, and I am probably not the only person here who wonders whether this fall's election might be America’s last chance to avoid the kind of authoritarianism that has already replaced democracy in countries like Russia and Hungary and Turkey.

For a lot of reasons, then, it’s been difficult to stay hopeful.

At Valley Forge, General Washington read his troops the Thomas Paine pamphlet that begins, "These are the times that try men's souls." Paine was using "try" in the old sense of “test”, the way an assayer might test a nugget of ore by dropping it in acid. Hard times, Paine was saying, tell you what you're made of.

Hard times also test our religions. Just about any belief system is good enough when things are going well. But in hard times we have to ask: These principles, these beliefs and ideas that we've built our lives around, do they work? Do they stand up to the challenge?

These particular hard times motivated me to revisit what I’ve said and written about hope. I was surprised to discover just how much there is and how far back it goes. I wouldn’t have said that hope is a major theme of my work, but apparently it is.

Satchell Paige advised, “Never look back. Something might be gaining on you.” It’s always risky to review your past writings. You may discover that you were just dead wrong, or that the various things you said here or there don’t assemble into any coherent view at all. It happens.

But fortunately, not this time. I think my various discussions of hope do assemble into a single message, and I find I still believe it. So today I thought I would try to pull it all together.

As so often happens, the way to start is to get the definition right, and in this case that means not confusing hope with optimism. Hope is a way of approaching the present moment, a belief that here and now striving for better things is worthwhile. Optimism, on the other hand, is a claim to know something about the future: that it's going to be OK.

The opposite of optimism is pessimism, which claims to know that the future will go badly. But the opposite of hope is despair, a belief that, in this moment, striving for better things is pointless.

Despair is often a reaction to defeat, and so in December of 2016, a lot of UUs were despairing about the political situation. So I spoke about hope at the UU Church of Palo Alto. I don't think I can improve on this example, so I'll just quote it.

"Pessimism is going to the plate in the ninth inning when your team is behind, assessing the situation, and concluding that you’re probably going to lose. Despair, on the other hand, would tell you not to bother taking your turn at bat, or if you do step into the batter’s box, to let the pitches go by without swinging. Because what’s the point? What difference could it possibly make?”

Being a hopeful batter, on the other hand, doesn’t imply that you know anything one way or the other about how it’s all going to come out. You just go up there and swing, and whatever happens will happen.

It’s true that despair is often associated with excessive pessimism. Whatever you propose doing, a person in despair can explain to you why it won’t work. And so, faced with someone in despair, you may find yourself arguing for optimism. But those arguments usually miss the point, because a depressed person's pessimism is an effect, not a cause. The cause is despair, their intense conviction that striving can't possibly make things better.

Responding to despair by committing yourself to optimism can lead to self-delusion and denial. For example, what if you had believed all the happy things the president has told us about the virus? It won’t come here. Or it will go away, like magic. Soon the economy will recover, and before long, we’ll be back to normal, as if the pandemic never happened.

You would have been disappointed again and again. Each new denial may provide a small jolt of energy, but it's a sugar high that fades as the world refuses to cooperate.

The human condition is that we can never really know what’s going to happen, or whether the future will be good or bad.

So in my view, the path away from despair is not to claim to know things we don't actually know. Instead, we should acknowledge, humbly and courageously, our uncertainty. Whether the subject is the pandemic, the economy, the election, racism, or something in our personal lives, we don't know what's going to happen, and that is precisely why we strive.

Two of my Quincy talks have delved into my personal sources of hope. As you may have read in the newsletter, I write a weekly political blog. And as you probably have noticed for yourself, politics these last few years has not been a source of joy for people with UU values. So friends are always saying to me, "I couldn't immerse myself in the news the way you do, because it's just too depressing."

Both times, trying to address that comment eventually led me to talk about faith, which is a controversial topic to raise among Unitarian Universalists, because many of us do not hear the word “faith” gladly. (So if mentioning “faith” has already made you tense up a little, I’m going to ask you to bear with me for a minute or two, because this discussion of faith may not wind up where you expect.)

One of the things I observe when I examine my own hope, is that it has an irrational aspect to it. And I think that irrationality needs to be there. Because any really resilient hope has to keep you going 
even when it looks like you’re failing.

Like it says in the song “You Gotta Have Heart” from Damn Yankees.

When the odds are saying you’ll never win,

that’s when the grin should start.

First you gotta have heart.

It’s not an entirely rational thing.

If you look closely at just about great development in human history, I think at some point you'll find a person who by all logic should have quit, and just didn't. You may observe the same pattern in your own life. I know I can see it in mine. If I look back at any accomplishment I'm particularly proud of, there was almost always a moment when I was sure it wasn't going to work. And if I had quit then, it wouldn't have.

So we don’t just need rational hope. We need a certain amount of irrational hope. And irrational hope, I believe, needs to have roots in some kind of faith.

But there’s a common mistake here that explains why this whole line of thought has developed such a bad reputation among UUs. Usually what you’ll hear is: “My hope is rooted in my faith. So if you want to have hope too, you need to adopt my faith.” For example, a traditional Christian might say: “I live in hope, because I have faith in a loving God who will not let bad things happen to His people. So that’s what you need to believe.”

Now, I grew up in a religion like that, and trust me, I’ve looked everywhere inside myself to find that kind of faith. And I just don’t have it.

It turns out, you can’t choose to have faith in something just because it would be convenient. St. Paul said, "Faith is a gift of God." And when the Unitarian King John Sigismund of Transylvania proclaimed the Edict of Torda, the first guarantee of religious freedom in post-Reformation Europe, that was his justification: Faith is a gift of God. If God gave your neighbor a different faith than God gave you, you just need to accept that, because nothing can be done about it. If we’re talking about real conviction rather than pretending, other people can't just decide to believe what you believe. You can't force them and they can’t force you.

So rather than suggest that you take up somebody else’s faith and try to fake it until you make it, I recommend that you look deep inside yourself until you find the faith you actually have. Then you can plant your hope there.

The way I think you'll recognize that faith is that you didn't choose it. You can't; you're just stuck with it. "Here I stand," Martin Luther is supposed to have said. "I cannot do otherwise." That's what it feels like when you really find your faith: You're helpless. You can't not believe it.

So those two talks consisted largely of me rummaging through the discard pile of faith and trying things on until I found something that fit me. In that spirit, let me suggest a couple of hope-nurturing faiths you may already have, even if you don't usually call it "faith".

One classically Unitarian faith is a social version of that traditional Christian faith I just mentioned. In other words, maybe you can't believe in a God who is going to make your personal story come out the way you want. But you do believe in something larger, in the progress of humanity, or in what Theodore Parker called “the moral arc of the universe” bending towards justice. To the extent that you can make your story part of that larger story, you can believe in your eventual triumph.

That's what's going on in Martin Luther King's Mountaintop speech, the one he gave the night before he died. He envisions his people arriving in the promised land of freedom, and says, "I may not get there with you. … But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.”
His personal story was going to end the next day. But even anticipating that possibility, he does not view his striving as pointless, because it has been part of a larger effort that he is sure will not fail.

At the 1980 Democratic convention, Ted Kennedy gave a speech that acknowledged the end of his personal presidential ambitions. That could have been a sad moment, but instead it was inspiring, because Kennedy invoked a vision larger than himself: “The work goes on, the cause endures, 
the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

Maybe you have that faith. And if you do, that's a ground you can plant your hope in.

There's also a classically Universalist kind of faith, which rests not so much on God or progress, 
but on people. Universalists believe that no one is beyond redemption, that there is in everyone, somewhere, at least some tiny spark of goodness that could be nurtured and grow.

In times that are dominated by fear, the goodness in people can be hard to see. That little flame of goodness inside you may become something that you hold closely and even hide away, for fear the winds of the world will blow it out. And if everyone gives in to that fear, then none of us can see each other’s goodness, and the world looks very dark.

But even in that darkness, miraculous things still happen. Because, as Michelle Obama put it, "History has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own."

And so, in certain wonderful moments, one person decides not to be afraid any more, and stands there in front of a tank. And another person says, "I can't let her die by herself" and stands with her. And then there are ten people, and then twenty. And then somebody inside the tank says, "I can't just run over all those people." And now you have a revolution.

An oppressive ruler who seemed to have all the power in the world on his side, can fall, just like that, when the contagion of courage and hope gets rolling, and we all discover that the people around us have far more inside them than we had ever imagined.

Maybe you have that faith.

When I introspect, I find that I have both of those faiths, most of the time. And most of the time, that’s enough to keep me doing what I do.

My tiny blog is just a small part of the larger movement of people looking for truth and sharing the kind of reliable information that allows a democratic society to govern itself. And whether I succeed or fail, that movement will continue and will ultimately triumph.

I believe that, most of the time.

Also most of the time, I believe in the goodness of my readers. I believe they want to understand.
They want to be more involved. They want to be more idealistic, have more courage, and take more effective action.

So helping them do that is not just me shining my light into the world, it's uncovering their light, which will shine further and brighter than mine ever could.

And I believe that too, most of the time. But now and then, my skepticism overwhelms those faiths. And I think, "I don't really know which way the moral arc of the universe bends. And while I do believe in the hidden goodness of people, it’s kind of like dark matter. I'm not really sure there's enough of it to keep the Universe from flying apart."

I hate to admit that, because those are beautiful faiths. I miss them when they're gone. But I find I can't hang onto them, at least not all the time. And that's a problem, because a faith that you only hold most of the time will fail you at precisely the moments when you need it most.
So I had to look deeper. And when I did, I eventually found something that is maybe not as grand, 
but is much simpler: I believe that knowing is better than not knowing, that understanding is better than not understanding, and that if you can pass your understanding on to someone else, you've done a good thing.

In an objective sense, I don't know that those statements are any more convincing than the other faiths I've talked about. But they turn out to be the faith I have. Knowing, understanding, explaining -- those are good things. My skepticism can't touch that, because I can't not believe it.

I don't know where that came from. I understand why St. Paul described faith as a gift of God, because I don't remember anybody instilling that faith in me, and don't believe I ever chose it. I'm just stuck with it. Here I stand.

And it keeps me going, no matter what happens.

So what point do I want you to take home from this? It's not that you should share my faith or share my hope or do what I do. But I do strongly recommend that you take your own journey of introspection, until you find the unique faith that you happen to be stuck with. That is a place where your hope can take root.

And one more thing: Hope doesn't just need roots, it needs branches. There needs to be something in your life, something you devote effort to, that expresses your unique faith and your unique hope.

Now, once you have that thriving hope with roots and branches, I wish could promise you that everything will turn out OK, that you'll necessarily succeed in what you do. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. You could still fail. All your efforts could come to nothing. You may swing hard at that last pitch, and not hit it.

But here's what I can promise. If you nurture a hope that's rooted in your own faith, whatever it turns out to be, and that expresses itself in your life, however you manage to do that, despair will have a hard time claiming you. And whether your efforts succeed or fail, I doubt you will ever be sorry that you tried.