"Our Hopes For The New Year."

Northern Hills Fellowship.
December 31, 2000.

A Message of Hope
by Rev. Dr. Morris Hudgins

The days are shorter now. The nights are longer. The snow clouds linger. It is still December and winter seems like it has been here forever. I have come to tell you there is hope. Herman Melville wrote:

If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her moldy soil; but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance halfway to cheer." My desire is to celebrate human potential, to lift the dark vale of life, to meet the glance of the bright sun and to cheer.

The challenge for you realists is to find some meaning in a concept of hope. I suggest you ground this hope in your experiences of the past and your knowledge about the possibilities of the future. "Hope, says Sydney Smith, is the "belief . . .that joy will come; desire is the wish it may come." Ambrose Bierce combines these two. He says,

"Hope is desire and expectation rolled into one." Emil Brunner expressed it another way: "Hope . . .is one of the ways in which what is merely future and potential is made vividly present and actual to us. Hope is the positive, as anxiety is the negative, mode of awaiting the future."

My favorite quote of all on hope is by Norman Cousin who wrote:

"The question is not whether human beings are prepared to (create a better world). . . The question is whether you, the individual, are prepared to do it."

We can have hope because of our human potential to create the future even in dire circumstances. Rabindranath Tagore says:

"Within us we have a hope which always walks in front of our present narrow experience; it is the undying faith in the infinite in us."

I, Morris Hudgins, would put it this way: "Hope exists for me because I can know, I can choose, I can act." I suggest this view especially to those whose life is getting shorter and shorter. John Denver said it this way:

The days they pass so quickly now,
The nights are seldom long,
Time around me whispers when it's cold.
The changes somehow frighten me.
Still I have to smile.
It turns me on to think of growing old,
For tho my life's been good to me,
There's still so much to do,
So many things my mind has never known.

So hope comes with the human potential to know, to choose, and to act. It also comes in community. Religion for me is the concept that the world is larger than myself, that others help make me, and together we can create a better world, express our political views, help others in need, and not sit idly by as the world goes down hill.

I have hope because I have people who love me, like to be with me, and together we can find answers. Hope comes through joint effort, not just individuals alone.

On this cold winter day I think of one of my former parishoners: Katherine Olin. I knew Katherine when she was in her 70's. She died a few years ago in her 90's. Katherine was a wealthy women. She didn't need anything. She drove a volkswagon beatle, because she said it was an economical car. "American needs to be more economical with its resources" she would say.

Katherine preached this to her Unitarian Universalist brothers and sisters. She also practiced what she preached. Everyday she would take a basket and walk the beach, picking up trash along the way. The city of Boca Raton had an ordinance against people parking on the beach. They ignored the ordinance for Katherine because she was picking up trash.

When Katherine could no longer drive, she would encourage others in the Fellowship to pick up the trash. She would take the youth group to the beach and they would pick up the trash with her.

When Katherine died, she gave her Volkswagon to the church. I hope the person who bought her car at the church auction, continued her practice of picking up trash. Katherine was a person who was a model of hope, expectation, desire and action.

Yes, we should have hope because we have the ability to know, to choose, and to act, alone and together. Thank you.