Words of encouragement and support for those ministering "in the fields."

There’s this thing that child development professionals refer to as “inherent optimism.” Now that I’m a grandmother I pay attention when terms like that waft over the KQED airwaves during morning talk shows. Inherent optimism. Nobody knows why a 2-year-old believes that, despite his current frustrations, someday the sounds he emits will constitute communication. Nobody knows how it occurs to a 6-month-old to persist in the pursuit of mobility, what motivates her to crawl. Nobody knows. “So we refer to this as inherent optimism,” said the authorities being interviewed.

They went on to connect inherent optimism to our human ways of learning. They noted that, as children, we really don’t need to be placed into competition with one another or be judged as passing or failing in order to be educated. That we will persevere in our inherent optimism, and be instructed by the laws of gravity, tutored by the conversations around us, and challenged by Jill of the Jungle to walk, talk, and use computers.

Hope, I deduced, is reserved for those of us who have reached an age where some portion of our inherent optimism has been tainted, where we have been sufficiently thwarted so as to no longer be willing to assume that we will achieve what we envision. I can testify that inherent optimism had fled my soul by the age of 14, when I confronted the assignment of rope climbing to the ceiling of the high school gymnasium. It wasn’t only that I could not attain that for which I strove, I was incapable of imagining it.

If the birth of Jesus was the Almighty’s act to restore inherent optimism to humankind… if Jesus’ indignant declaration that if you can’t receive the realm of God as a child does, you’re never gonna get there” is a reference to the wholesomeness of the childhood state of inherent optimism where we are continually and unstoppably learning and growing; where our very nature is to trust and our survival depends upon it; and where, given a speck of a chance, we will love whole-heartedly…then the Resurrection is all about establishing hope for those of us who have been too injured by betrayal, too bruised by loss, too constricted by the bonds of prejudice, intolerance, meanness, or callousness, to be able to breathe deeply of the heavenly atmosphere of blessed assurance.

Hope is all too aware of human anguish and sinfulness. Hope stings our eyes with tears as it coaxes us to look beyond the horizon of our own knowledge and imagination and snag a glimpse of something wondrous that The Creator has in mind for us. Hope takes root when those who are grieving keep living because love is stronger than death. Hope takes root when angels of life refuse to give up on the hungry, the homeless, the imprisoned and the institutionalized. Hope makes music and poetry and gives thanks all along the resurrection highway.

“Are you the Messiah?” the disciples asked Jesus after the Resurrection.

“Look around,” Jesus said, “see what I have done.” The sick are healed, the needy are made whole, the rejected are loved. the guilty are unburdened. People crushed by guilt are not let off the hook for their evil deeds, but are granted return to life. Creation testifies to strength in weakness, wisdom in foolishness, victory in defeat, life in the barren caverns of death, the triumph of powerless love over loveless power.

                                                                                                        ~ Mary Susan

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