As it turns out, the Rev. MaryAnn McKibben Dana was the perfect choice to speak to Synod School-goers about hope in times of chaos.
The author of the acclaimed “Hope: A User’s Manual” will be coming out with a new book next year. “I’ll be giving it to you first,” said McKibben Dana, a pastor, coach and author who’s the associate pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Herndon, Virginia. She was also the adult convocation speaker at the popular annual Synod School, put on annually by the Synod of Lakes and Prairies.
Hoping in something — rather than hoping for something — is “the kind of hope I want to encourage us to drill more deeply into,” she said during her talk, held in Schaller Chapel at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. “We’ll detangle hope from optimism, which is not easy to do.”
She started her work around hope during the Covid pandemic. “I needed a hope that would get me through times when it wasn’t clear it was going to be OK,” she said. “Part of the work is cultivating hope that goes beyond optimism. We can get into toxic positivity that can be shallow. How do we find our way forward right now when things seem difficult?”
She also wondered: How do we move past sentimental, simplistic hope? “It’s not the kind of hope we experience in Scripture,” she said. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it, “The Hebrew Bible is not an optimistic book. It is, however, one of the great literatures of hope.”
As leaders in our congregations and faith communities, we ought to be expecting anxiety, metabolizing it “as best we can” to become “grounded, well-differentiated leaders,” she said.
Well-differentiated leaders focus on strengths rather than pathologies. Strong systems “can absorb and react in a healthy way,” she said, “and move forward in the midst of flareups of anxiety.”
Such leaders provide enduring change, not symptomatic relief. “A coping mechanism for me in [this current climate] is trying to let go of ‘it never being chaotic,’” she said.
Those leaders focus on maturing the system, not making the condition better. “Comfort can be anesthetizing,” she said. “Let’s level up our ability to bring alternative voices together to say, ‘It’s going to be messy, but we can do this.’”
Such leaders also realize that “reactivity and sabotage may be evidence of growth.”
“If we are doing our work as leaders who want to help people level up in their ability, we’re going to get resistance,” she said. “With all of this anxiety, upheaval and chaos swirling in the system, what led me to explore hope was, what do we provide as an alternative? When you are in the midst of hell, hope can help you feel like you have the strength to go on, but it can also be a burden.” She told the story of a serious mental health challenge her family has helped to meet.
In our political life, “everything is not OK right now,” she said. “We are more angry and more siloed. We have competing versions of the truth.” We are more anxious, more medicated, more overworked, more despairing, “and more in need of healing than some of us have ever experienced.”
Normal “can be a useful category,” she said. “But deep down it speaks to an oppressiveness to people who do not fit that mold.”
Instead of working on “a comfort and an optimism over getting everybody into the fold, let’s expand and maybe explode the idea of what normal is,” she said. “It will be freeing for all of us. Those rigid categories do not serve us anymore.”
She quoted the author Rebecca Solnit: “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on a sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.”
McKibben Dana’s prayer following her talk included these words: “May God bless you with discomfort with anger at injustice, with tears to shed for those who mourn, and with just enough foolishness to believe you can make a difference in this world.”
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
Cheri Harper, Program Manager, Presbyterian Women
Ginger Harris, Data Operations Manager, Presbyterian Investment & Loan Program
Let us pray:
O God, we offer our small gifts to you. We are grateful for all you have given us, and we want to entrust our futures to you as well. May new life grow, giving us the assurance that you are faithful and will lead us into a future filled with promise. In the name of Jesus, our Lord and example, we pray. Amen.
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