Dear Friend,

There is a teaching from the Mishnah that stopped me when I read it in the article below: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are not free to desist from it either.”

I find both halves of that sentence necessary right now, and I find both halves hard. The first half is permission—genuine, rabbinically-sanctioned permission to put down the weight of outcomes we cannot control. We are not going to fix everything. We may not fix anything, at least not in ways we can see or measure. That is not failure; it is the human condition. The second half is the catch, and it is an unsparing one: knowing that doesn’t get us off the hook. We don’t get to stop.

What holds those two halves together is hope—not the optimistic kind that requires a clear pathway and a reasonable chance of success, but the older, stranger kind that the world’s spiritual traditions have always known about. The kind that is less a feeling than a practice. Less something you have than something you do.

That’s what this week’s newsletter is about. So may the work you cannot finish be enough reason to begin.

In hope,
Pastor Sarah

There’s a Better Way to Be Hopeful

by David DeSteno

We tend to think of hope as something we earn by believing change is possible. Psychologist David DeSteno, writing in the New York Times, argues that the spiritual traditions had it right all along:

“Most of the world’s religions agree with modern science that it’s unwise to base hope on the belief that if we just work hard enough, we can reach any goal. The Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas cautioned that a feeling of hope that rests on trust in our own power is often misguided. The view in Buddhism is the same: Much of the world is beyond our ability to control; thinking otherwise is an illusion that can lead to despair.

“However, for spiritual traditions, the recognition of our inadequacy isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. It doesn’t reduce hope; it redefines hope … “

Read the full article here.

American Obituary

U2

U2 released this song just days ago as an act of grief for Renee Good, the Minneapolis mother killed in January. Whatever you make of the circumstances of her death, the song’s center—”I love you more than hate loves war”—captures something essential about how our faith insists on hope.

We Need To Talk About An Injustice

Bryan Stevenson | TED Talk

Many of you already know about Bryan Stevenson and have read his book, Just Mercy. This is a Ted Talk he gave over a decade ago. Despite being old and a little long (just over 20 minutes), it is worth watching or rewatching because Stevenson has a way of grounding hope not in optimism but in proximity — getting close enough to suffering to understand what’s actually at stake — and that argument feels more urgent now than it did when he first made it.

Blessing of Rest
by Jan Richardson

Curl this blessing
beneath your head
for a pillow.
Wrap it about yourself
for a blanket.
Lay it across your eyes
and for this moment,
cease thinking about
what comes next,
what you will do
when you rise.

Let this blessing
gather itself to you
like the stillness
that descends
between your heartbeats,
the silence that comes
so briefly
but with a constancy
on which
your life depends.

Settle yourself
into the quiet
this blessing brings,
the hand it lays
upon your brow,
the whispered word
it breathes into
your ear,
telling you
all shall be well,
and all shall be well,
and you can rest now.