Weekly Message from T. J.

Where There Is Hope

For many years, I had a saying. “Where there is breath, there is hope.” This meant that if someone is still breathing, there is a chance—a chance at redemption, a chance at healing, a chance a reconciliation, a chance of some kind. And in some ways that is true, but in other important ways, it’s not. Like anything that sounds pithy or resolute, there are gray areas that fill in between the polar positions of statements like this.

Recently I watched an episode of Mars produced by the National Geographic channel. I like movies and other books about Mars, and a friend was pretty sure I’d like this, so I started watching it. The series is a mix between a documentary filmed in 2016 and 2017 (so far) and dramatizations that take place in 2033 when a manned mission to Mars is underway. It is fun to hear the hope in the hearts of the explorers around us here on Earth transmuted into the action that might take place decades from now.

A lot of a recent episode was about the effects of space travel on the human body. A line one of the contemporary contributors says was something like this, “The human body is marvelously well adapted to living at sea level on Earth, but the body is very fragile and is not well suited for living anywhere else.” The line in the series is spoken under images of a person in a space suit watching the electric lights of an Earth in the dark night recede into the rearview on a flight to our neighbor planet, Mars. And in that moment I sensed the foreboding the filmmakers likely planned for the fragile frame encased in a protective suit hurtling into the expanse between two worlds.

And in the eyes of the astronaut a recollection in my own mind flickered. It was the look of so many of the faces in the Frontline special “Facing Death” that many of us watched on Saturday during Joel Merchant’s and the Legacy Team’s presentation about that very subject, facing death. Of course, many of time’s great teachers will tell us that facing death goes by a more simple name: life. But like my little aphorism about breath and hope, statements like that miss the gray realities between the binary facts of physical life.

Yes, yes, yes. We are all hurtling the expanse between the worlds of life and death. And yes, the fragile frame that moves, that senses, that intricately weaves reality for us is a loaner. And on the faces of these beautiful bodies bound for brave things, in this world or another, moments of fear, of bewilderment, of despair may pass fleetingly or linger long. But where the spirit of adventure, the spirit of our elemental humanness, the spirit of life springs up to meet the morning, there we will find hope.

“Roots hold me close, wings set me free, Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me.” – Carolyn McDade

And may it always be so.

Rev. T. J.
minister@unitariansofhi.org