AMA response: How do you do advocacy from a place of hope rather than anger?

I was asked this question by multiple people during my Ask Me Anything invitation last month. Yet each of the people who asked, asked for different reasons.

Climate Change. Covid vaccinations for all. Raising refugee intakes. 

It seems that every time we open a screen, we see more bad news and it can be overwhelming - why even bother trying to make a difference.  What can one person do? How do we act when the sheer weight of the injustices of the world seems too much? 

Here are 3 things that I have found helps me.

1. Lean into the rage.

Brene Brown reminds us that Anger is not a primary emotion - despite what the movie Inside Out shows us, Anger is not one of our core emotions. Anger is a mask that we use to hide our deeper emotions - fear, pain, insecurities. One of the healthiest things we can do when we feel rage is to lean into it - to dig into it and discover what fears and pain are actually driving it. Why are things making us angry? What is it we are scared of? What pain are we experiencing in response to the broken things of this world.

It seems a bit ironic to say the first thing you need to do to move from rage to hope is to sit with the rage, but one of the biggest skills we have lost, as both members of western societies and as Christians, is our ability to accept and sit with our anger. 

The Bible has entire books on working through our anger. The Psalms and Lamentations were a place for the writers to work out their anger. They take us through the rage “burn my enemies”, to the despair “why O Lord.” It is only once we have acknowledged and felt those emotions that we are able to say “but”.  Lament involves weeping, crying and questioning, but in our Christian traditions, it also is about bringing those things to God. It’s about not doing it alone but bringing it to the one who perhaps you are most angry with. It takes guts and humility to sit with the hard stuff - that’s one of the reasons why this project is called The Walk Humbly Initiative. Because not only do we need to walk humbly, we need to take the initiative to do so and continue to do so. 

I was recently at a workshop about how churches could engage with climate justice. One of the speakers said that the most important thing we can do before taking any action on climate justice is to do our own grief work.  An old Hillsong worship song blithely states “break my heart for what breaks yours.”  If our hearts are going to be broken, we need to grieve and we need to give ourselves space to grieve - individually and communally - before we act. In counselling training we are taught to speak from our scars not our wounds. When things are open and bleeding, things gets messy. Hurt people hurt people. We need to acknowledge and grieve our hurt before we can build healing.

“Theologian and scholar Walter Brueggemann writes beautifully in 'The Prophetic Imagination' that real hope comes only after despair. Only if we have tasted despair, only if we have known the deep sadness of unfulfilled dreams and promises, only if we can dare to look reality in the face and name it for what it is, can we dare to begin to imagine a better way.

Hope is subversive precisely because it dares to admit that all is not as it should be.

And so we are holding out for, working for, creating, prophesying, and living into something better---for the kingdom to come, for oaks of righteousness to tower, for leaves to blossom for the healing of the nations, for swords to be beaten into plowshares, for joy to come in the morning, and for redemption and justice.” 

- Saray Bessey, Out of Sorts

For me that has meant embracing contemplative prayer practices - spiritual retreats, days of solitude and turning off devices, centering prayer, embracing artwork as a form of prayer. I have learnt that if I really want to not do advocacy from a position of rage, the louder I get publicly, the quieter I have to get privately.  The more I speak out, the more I have to spend time listening.

My silence is helped by having this as the view from my window!

2. Celebrate: Remember the big picture. 

Martin Luther King famously said “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” History is full of mess and broken relationships but when we see the social and economic systems, medical advances and awareness of issues that we have  in place to protect the vulnerable that we didn’t have 200 years ago, it’s hard to dispute this idea. As Christians, we believe that this is a sign of the Kingdom of God in the world and God’s desire to be restoring all relationships with God, each other and creation. 

Innerchange, a Christian organisation that works with the poor, puts it this way in their common commitments: “I will listen for the echo of rejoicing in heaven when those I minister among step into the light or even take a small step forward, and will remind myself that persistent celebration rolls back the power of the enemy.” They summarise that idea in a poem which I keep near my bed: 

I will celebrate the light of Christ

in a world of darkness

the life of Christ

in a culture of death

the liberty of Christ

in a kingdom of captivity

and the hope of Christ

in an age of despair

I will rejoice always and in everything give thanks.

So celebrating means celebrating - eating good food with good friends, stopping to watch the flights of bees on the flowers, watching water flow in streams, feeling the warmth of beach sand between my toes. It’s celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, celebrating the small wins of jobs well done, addictions overcome or the creativity of a child’s painting.  It’s watching the moonrise and being wrapped in a warm blanket under the stars. I used to say it was actively looking for the good stuff - but I think the truth is, it’s just slowing down enough to notice. 

3. Define what you are For not just what you are against 

This is another pearl of wisdom from the author Sarah Bessey. It is not enough to rage against policies and politics. It is not enough to rage against injustice. As her summary of the quote by Walter Bruggeman shows, Hope is about knowing that things are not as they could be, and inviting others into a greater narrative. 

I am not just against offshore processing of refugees, I am for a community that welcomes all who have experienced pain and trauma and joins with them to bring healing. 

I am not just against racism, I am for a community that recognises the image of God in all others and learns from each others’ experiences and giftings. 

I am not just against our response to our climate crisis being dominated by economic fears, I am for a future where my children can live on a planet where humanity and the environment work together instead of against each other. 

Advocacy at its heart is not a rage against what is. It’s a process of acknowledging pain and grief and then inviting others to be part of bringing about healing. And that is what lets me do it with hope.

What are some things that help you hold onto hope?