Mission Yearbook: Active hope begins with curiosity, care and a calm mind, MaryAnn McKibben Dana says

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The Rev. MaryAnn McKibben Dana speaks during a Synod School convocation. (Photo by Kim Coulter)

During a recent Synod School convocation, the adult convocation speaker, the Rev. MaryAnn McKibben Dana, told attendees she would “do some psychological work with you.”

Did she ever.

McKibben Dana, the author of “Hope: A User’s Manual” and a book that’s due out next year, drew on such authors as Dr. Charles Richard Snyder, who wrote about goal thinking, pathway thinking and agency thinking. In order, that’s having the ability to imagine a destination for yourself, seeing the possible avenues you might take, and believing in yourself enough to follow those pathways.

We need all three, of course, churches and worshiping communities can get locked into ideals that are anything but: the idea that the pathway to flourish as a church is to add young families to the membership or hire just the right pastor.

Joanna Macy, who died July 19 at age 96, worked with environmental activists to help them work through difficulties and grief “that come through the work of trying to save the planet,” McKibben Dana said. Macy taught that “grief is not a detour to the work; it is the center of the work.”

“Going through those emotions,” McKibben Dana said, “is our way forward.”

Active hope is a practice, taught Macy along with Chris Johnstone, like tai chi or gardening. It’s a three-step process:

• Take a clear view of reality.
• Identify what we hope for in terms of the direction we’d like to move in or the values we’d like to see expressed.
• Take steps to move ourselves or our situation in that direction.

“We can focus on our intention,” the two authors taught, according to McKibben Dana, “and let it be our guide.”

McKibben Dana held up a hand to help teach Dr. Dan Siegel’s Hand Model of the Brain. The model involves putting your thumb inside your fist, so your hand resembles a brain.

At the top is the higher-level brain, the upstairs brain, as Siegel calls it. The thumb is the limbic system, the downstairs brain, which is responsible for emotions and instincts, such as fight or flight.

When things are working well, the two talk to each other. Empathy, which resides in the upstairs brain, modulates our fear.

But if a fight or flight reaction gets activated, the two “don’t talk so well to each other,” McKibben Dana said, an event that Siegel phrases as “flip your lid.”

“You can’t be talked into the two talking again,” she said. “It has to be a bodily process,” such as taking deep breaths or applying an ice pack, to come back to a state of regulation.

When we’ve flipped our lid, we cannot be curious, she said. In her own seminary training, McKibben Dana was fortunate to have Dr. Shirley Guthrie come out of retirement to teach his Introduction to Theology class.

Guthrie taught that heretics deserve a hearing. “They are lifting something up that orthodoxy is rejecting,” he would say. “They may take it to a further level than we want to go,” McKibben Dana said, “but they are teaching us something if we want to go.”

A NEXT Church conference explored the notion of positive deviance, people who are exceptional in some way and have found a way to thrive. Mister Rogers had that quality, according to McKibben Dana. “He did things so differently,” she said. “It’s not as common as we might suppose.”

To get Synod School-goers to be in the moment, McKibben Dana brought four people forward for a game of props. She’d hand them a prop, and they’d use it in an unconventional way. A pool noodle, for example, can be used to knight someone or serve as an oversized straw.

“It’s a way to build curiosity in a low-threatening way,” McKibben Dana said. “You might try a few props with your session.”

The words “curiosity” and “care” have similar roots, she noted. “My invitation to you is, what would it look like to go through the day with a spirit of curiosity, which means a spirit of care.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Steve Hoehn, Manager, Hubbard Press, Administrative Services Group
Cathy Holland, HR Generalist, Human Resources, Administrative Services Group       

Let us pray:

Father, thank you for the joy of being shared by you, in all diversity and brokenness, with those you love. Grant us grace to embrace your blessings as we   journey with others in this amazing adventure of life. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Pastor urges faithful to cultivate resilient hope amid uncertainty

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.

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The Rev. MaryAnn McKibben Dana (photo by Kim Coulter)

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.