Dangerous, Contagious, and Sustaining Hope

Beloved in Christ,

Fannie Lou Hamer was an important community organizer, women’s rights activist, and leader in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. One night in 1963, she and several others were arrested in Winona, Mississippi for eating at a whites-only bus station restaurant. While in jail, she and the women with her were brutally beaten by the officers guarding them. At the end of such a horrific night, the women, all alone in their separate cells, began singing hymns, and eventually all the prisoners were singing together. It was a small, brave way of defying the forces of cruelty around them with the power of God’s love. The scholar Charles Marsh recently described that hymn sing as a way of “borrowing hope” from their spiritual ancestors.

As followers of Jesus, we never walk the path before us alone. There is nothing we will face in our own day that the people of God have not faced in the past. When hope feels hard to come by, we don’t have to manufacture it on our own. We can borrow it from spiritual ancestors like Fannie Lou Hamer and so many others across the centuries who have faced the same forces of cruelty, evil, and despair that are ever before us. 

One often forgotten part of the Civil Rights movement is that, during its most important period, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders met every day for prayer, Bible study, and strategizing. Every day. Their courage, their clarity, and their ability to act came from a rigorous and disciplined life of prayer and scripture study, together. 

We simply cannot face this or any moment of our own power. What our nation and our world needs most is not for us to be stronger, louder, or angrier. What our nation and our world need most is for us to be so deeply grounded in the promises of God that we show up in every moment as signs that the promises of God are true. What our nation and our world need most is for our lives to share that dangerous, contagious, and sustaining hope borrowed from our ancestors. 

The world can only be healed by God’s love, and the whole point of our lives is to do every small, brave thing we can to light the way to its power. 

Grace and Peace, 

The Right Rev. Craig Loya