So, before I owned a coffee shop, and certainly before I became a priest, I ran the largest HIV/AIDS clinic in East Tennessee. In some ways I stumbled into it. My predecessor had moved to Texas, and I was looking for a new job, having done about all I could do in my previous nonprofit.
The cause was important to me as I had lost and buried many people because of this disease. I had helped organize marches and protests in Tennessee. I had been part of the AIDS Quilt project in Washington, D.C. I had worked as part of a group that made meals for men who were dying. I had been the involuntary guest of several municipalities who detained us for exercising our constitutional rights. I had been photographed and interviewed and eventually sought after when the clinic needed someone. And for three years, I oversaw the completion of a new one-stop shop for those living with...and, at the time, dying with...AIDS.
And after three years, I hung up my hat. I had done what I could. As a kid I had marched for civil rights with my grandfather. As a college student, I had protested for women's rights and LGBTQ+ rights (though they weren't using as many letters in the alphabet back then). Then as someone leaving the first third and entering the second third of my life, I struggled alongside those with HIV.
And finally, I decided I was done. It was time for others to step up and take my place in the long march. And when I moved up here as a priest, I figured I could sorta kinda relax and deal with more mundane problems of baptisms and funerals, weddings and confirmation, leaving the bigger world behind. Yeah. Funny how that worked out.
The other day, I was surfing the web, just browsing through old book reviews in the Atlantic Online (the successor to the Atlantic Monthly), and I came on the original review of Senator Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope (spoiler...the reviewer did not like it). And what was mentioned was that Obama got the title from a painting by G. F. Watts, called Hope. It shows a blindfolded woman in a tattered dress sitting upon a globe, with a lute in her arms that has lost all of its strings except one.
There’s not a lot of action in the painting, but you can sit and stare at it for hours, wondering about this woman and her single-stringed lute. What had she gone through? Why was she hanging on to this seemingly broken instrument? I have been looking at that painting off and on for the last few days, thinking.
On the globe we sit on today, it seems like all we hear is negative and hate-filled, lies in the service of power and wealth for others while leaving so many behind. It's hard to think about hope when all most people see is what is missing right now, the strings that are broken.
And if you look at that painting with this framework in mind, it's too easy to notice those broken strings first, that that lute can't be played, that, like our globe, our current situation, it can't work anymore. That's all you see at first.
But if you sit with it for a while, you begin to pick up on what Watts is giving us. Whatever this woman, sitting on the globe of the world, had gone through, whatever pain and sorrow, she still had this...this one, single string. This one string could still be played, and it's one note could be heard. All was not lost. There is still hope.
The woman is playing that one string. One string is enough for that broken lute to make music, enough for that woman to make music. That one string gives hope that there was still the promise of a different future for her and her instrument. Because there is room for more strings. And the blindfold can be removed.
Paul writes to the people of Rome, reminding them that faith, true faith in God, begins and ends in hope: “hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
This is important to these Romans. They have been going through some tough times. They are hated and discriminated against, hunted, disappeared, tortured, all because of their beliefs. He is reminding them that all that they may have seen, all that they had gone through, the hardships and the bigotry that they have endured, that all of that is because of something and someone greater than themselves. He even gives permission to brag about what they had to deal with so that they can share this hope that they have despite the challenges and trials that they had to overcome and will have to overcome in the future!
I have had the pleasure of meeting people like this, people who have suffered for a worthy cause. That tell stories with almost a glee that what happened to them happened to them, and they beat the odds. Because progress comes when folks refuse to let themselves be distracted from the goal, refuse to let personal suffering and brokenness stop them, actually let that all of that drive them forward in the service of others who can't stand for themselves or who can't do it all alone.
Think about all the movements that have taken place in our society, things that have challenged all forms of discrimination: struggles for rights and respect for all races, all genders, people with disabilities, women, marital status, sexual orientation. This is a short list. Add to it migrant workers and their families, people speaking out against genocide, people standing up for transgender friends and family members. People standing for people that can't stand on their own. Each movement has had its triumphs because in each we see the goal, but each has come with setbacks. And each setback creates the energy to carry on. And champions and heroes are created.
Because as Paul teaches the Romans, to be able to withstand all that's happening in our world, we have to have faith that God sending us out of this building and into the world for a purpose, to do something that only each of us can do; and that if we do not do it, life will be worse off because it was not done. Like the woman in the painting we may each of us have a single string to play, but together, our strings can bring music to this sad world that needs our song.
The woman in the painting could have stopped and put down her instrument, saying, "I only have one string; what else can I do?" But she continued to play. In fact, maybe God had preserved that one string so the woman could play that one needed note at this one needed time.
Over breakfast in Oriskany Falls the other day, I told Brooks that I had hoped my work was done long ago, that my marching and organizing and standing up with others was a thing of the past, and that it was time for others with more youth and energy to take up the struggle.
And yet I look around me, and I see the age in so many faces here today. And I think maybe I was wrong. I think that maybe each of our instruments still has one string left. And maybe that one string is telling us that we have one unique thing to do in this world today, one unique thing to do in a way that nobody else is able to do. For, like Paul says, we have been called to do something important, even now. Called to come back into the orchestra of life, the symphony of caring, the quartet of loving God, loving our neighbor, standing up to the oppressors, and fighting the good fight. Called back into the fray to witness the glory of God in the face and dignity of every human being.
So, maybe God has given us each one string. And with that one string we have to go on and keep on playing, putting our single notes together, bringing hope to a world that needs to hear the music that God has given us to play.