The things which matter

It is said that a change is as good as a rest, a proverbial truism which provides us with something to tell ourselves when the change has not been all that restful. But as I look back on the full-bodied living which has been our recent family holiday, I find that rest is not always what is needed. Noise, good food (and the cooking of it), laughter, children screaming (not always joyfully), parties, the comings and goings of old friends, and some new ones, have made this year’s summer holiday a vivid reminder of what rest is meant to be, and of what life is really about. Change, in any case, obliges rest because there is no way we can do the things we normally do in circumstances which take us away from our customary day to day patterning, or which simply oblige us to switch off our normal thought processes.

Patterns and processes define us to ourselves and shape our lives. They both contain and enable our goals and ambitions, the things that matter to us. But these things are no more than objectives which are often shaped by our own persona, or false self-image, and hence driven by anxiety. Rest alone will not necessarily help us to see this.

What really matters in life happens in the company of people we love. It can even happen in the context of rambunctious family holidays in which we experience the kind of good stress which comes with change, stress which keeps us alert to one another, so that everything else takes second place. Good stress keeps things taut. It re-sets priorities and stops relationships slackening into indifference. Good stress comes with noise, with a chaotic living room and with watching out for children near water. It is relieved by such moments as gardening with a small boy who insists on managing the wheelbarrow, who observes me freeing yet another bird trapped in the strawberry nets, and who is quietly fascinated by plants. All of these moments amount to happiness which, like stress, is a variegated multi-layered thing.

We are so pre-occupied with trying to mitigate the effects of stress these days, often with the help of various meditation techniques, or with drugs of one kind or another. Holidays can help us to begin to see what we call ‘stress’ in a different light, as energising and life giving, rather than something which leads automatically to exhaustion.

The root of the word ‘holiday’ is ‘holy’. Holiness is not a matter of introspective detachment from life, or from other people. It is about being fully in the world, with all its confusion and its physical and emotional needs, but not of the world. Holiness is not of any system or oppressive set of private dictats which tell us that we need to be something other than what we are, that we should achieve at all costs and, in order to do this, control others by suppressing their gift and their true personhood. Holiness is about freeing and enabling others. Good family times help us to become more fully who we are, not by limiting ourselves or others, but by giving others ‘permission’ to become more who God created them to be and so discover his constantly changing and renewing image in their faces, their voices and their presence at any given moment – even when siblings fight and toddlers scream.

For this to be possible, we need grace. Grace is not God using human beings in order to achieve certain goals, or to demonstrate his power. The grace given to us in the context of a family holiday is the patience which allows for a more tempered response to the demands of young children. It is not God controlling us, or the situation. Rather, it is the experience of God’s love for us and, of course, for the children. His creation is the stage on which that love is set.

All of this makes it possible for us to see what we call stress in a wider context, and as part of a greater whole. The bird caught in the net holds still while I disentangle it. Perhaps it also senses God’s love in the observing presence of the boy, who only a little while ago was fighting with his sister. These moments acquire coherence because they are held together in God’s greater love and it is this coherence which holds our lives together. It works through the variegated happiness of family life, through the noise, the mess and the knowing love which flows, like a clear underground spring between parent and child and between grandparent and grandchild.

It will reveal what is of true worth in that supreme last moment of remembering, when we shall know what has made life truly worth living and, in that moment of knowing, see God face to face.  

God of small moments

www.mirror.co.uk

You are on a beach, deep in your novel, absorbing the sun, when a bullet hits you. You kneel to pray in a familiar place of worship. A bullet hits you. You open your bible in the company of friends. A bullet hits you.

On the beach, as you slip in and out of consciousness, you are aware of the presence of a particular hotel employee kneeling beside you. He is telling you not to be afraid and that help is coming. He is not one of the people shouting for help or telling others to run. He is not running either. He is simply there. He may get shot. But he does not want you to be afraid and he wants you to stay alive.

Salvation is not a matter of individual religions having the right answers to questions pertaining to God and the human condition, or of belonging to the right religious affiliation group or Church. Salvation begins with recognising and encountering the Saviour through the voice and the face of another person, irrespective of who that other person may be, or of their religion. This is the mystery of faith, something which is inextricably bound to love and which embodies truth.

Truth manifests itself in the most ordinary of encounters, as well as in extraordinary ones. This happened to me on a recent visit to Birmingham. I have minimal orienteering skills in unfamiliar cities and I was having trouble finding the station. I turned to the nearest person in the street, a young veiled Muslim woman with a small child in a push chair. She pointed me in the right direction and we chatted briefly about nothing in particular, but in that brief exchange we understood and trusted one another in the most profound way. I do not think this was a specifically Christian or Muslim glimpse of salvation. It was a moment in which time stands still. Jesus might have called it a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven. I should be interested to know what Muslims would call it.

For Christians, such healing encounters are moments of truth. They take us to a different place when it comes to what we think and say about God, because it is in such moments that we know ourselves to have been touched by him and healed, through the voice or the smile of another person.

Such encounters heal whatever hatred, in its conscious or subconscious manifestations, lurks within us. They heal the fear which causes hatred. These encounters are times in which God sees the truth in us. The truth which God sees in us is the essential goodness, or innocence, which was there when we were ‘made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth’ (Psalm 139:15) and made in his image and likeness. He sees it and literally redeems it. He gives us back to ourselves, or heals us. 

Healing encounters often involve touch. One of the Christian gospels tells the story of a woman who is healed of a menstrual disorder which is not only physically debilitating but also makes her an outcast. Jesus heals her of the haemorrhage in the minute she touches his coat. He then asks to see her, not because he does not know who he has healed, but because he wants to take the encounter a step further, so that it can heal the rest of her pain, all the emotional as well as the physical pain she experiences as a result of this almost life-long illness. He wants her to understand that he knows her in the full truth of her predicament. Truth and healing are complementary. You cannot have the one without the other. Jesus also tells her that her faith has healed her. There is a commonality about faith and healing in whatever context they appear. Faith, or trust, is always part of a healing dialogue.

What then, does this story of Jesus have to say to us in an age when terrorism and acts of atrocity are becoming almost commonplace? I think that it points us back to the hotel employee on the beach and, incidentally, to a museum employee at a similar incident which took place in Tunisia in March. The museum employee hid the terrified visitors in a basement until the killing was over.

Both of these people were Christ-like figures. They embodied the grace of God and, in so doing, confronted the evil in which darkness masquerades as light. This is the evil which comes of twisting a good religion into the shape of hatred. But the message of hope comes with the grace which is at work even in the darkest of moments. Though the circumstances are evil, at the heart of them, and ultimately defeating them, we encounter the redemptive and healing love of God ministered through the humanity of strangers.

Not fade away

We have a person suffering from dementia staying with us at the moment. We have not known her long. In fact, we only met her shortly before her illness began to manifest itself. She is by no means old, especially by today’s standards, and until recently she led a full and successful life. Yesterday, she and I went for a walk in the woods near us and I began to get to know her and empathise a little with what she is going through. By empathise I mean experience a fraction of her suffering with her for a few minutes, rather than simply observing it from a safe distance without knowing what to do or say.

As we walked, communication was patchy. It was a case of being ready to grasp the opportunity for understanding without holding on to it too desperately, as that would have created more anxiety for both of us. So we had to make the most of her sporadic moments of lucidity and my very nominal powers of intuition.

I have no experience of people with dementia, and I sense from being with our friend that it is experience which matters most, rather than simply knowing what to do.  Nowadays, thanks to the internet, we can find out what to do in almost any situation we are likely to be faced with in life, along with a good many others which will probably never happen. Instructions are not difficult to come by. But even the best instructions are no more than generalised pointers to help us deal with various situations or ‘conditions’.

Instructions mean nothing until they are literally fleshed out in an encounter with another person who is in need of that deeper understanding we call empathy. Empathy is not something one can work at or develop. It is not a moral virtue. It is given to suit the need, our own and that of the person who in that particular moment is in need of unfading love.

On our walk in the woods my friend who has dementia reached for my hand as she tried to speak of what she was going through, to hold on to feelings, to stop them fading away. I was encouraging her to describe, in whatever way she could, what life is like for her now and what hurts most. I do not know if this was the correct thing to do, but she continued to hold my hand as she articulated ‘with sighs too deep for words’ (Rom. 8:26) her sense of loss and of powerlessness. Until relatively recently she had held a highly successful career. She had travelled all over the world. And now we were walking in the nearby woods which must have seemed to her like an alien universe in which she occasionally glimpsed a fading, but once familiar past through the larch and coppices around us.  

Perhaps because the woods were strange to her, I sensed that it was important that my friend not feel that she was alone or lost. I sensed that she needed to know that she was part of a wider fraternity, the fraternity of all of us who are getting older and having to come to terms with being bereaved of those years in which we have been productive, or in which we wish we had been more productive and hence more valuable.

In today’s world when a person’s value is measured according to their success and productivity, coming to terms with the sudden loss of a successful career means having to resist the inner voice that tells us that we are no longer of value. But given that we only understand the concept of value in material terms, it is almost impossible to re-configure it so that we can understand it for what it really is. Our real value consists in being loved for who we are, not for what we have been, or might yet become.

It might seem at first that ‘religious’ people have a ready made solution, a cure, for this modern malaise of believing that we are without value and, one might suppose, of all the depression which comes with it. But people who are assumed to be ‘religious’ (whatever that is supposed to mean in the minds of those who use the word ‘religious’ as a convenient category to place people they do not understand) also experience this loss of value, this sense of disconnectedness from a God who has until now ‘held them together’. Forgetting the words of the Lord’s Prayer when you are well on in your nineties leaves you momentarily, but completely, disorientated. You are completely lost.

Here, it is worth bearing in mind that depression is a syndrome which must be especially frightening and incomprehensible for people with Alzheimer’s. If you cannot make memory connections, you cannot always know what it is you regret and, in less lucid moments, why these feelings of loss and of powerlessness are so acute. So there is an overlay of depression which, for dementia sufferers, must literally defy description.

God speaks love into the ‘lostness’ and disconnectedness of dementia, and of depression itself. He speaks it through silence more than through words.  He speaks it through the gift, or ‘grace’, of empathy which is sometimes given in surprising ways to unlikely recipients, but always recognisable for what it is. 

What hope for the Church in Wales? (2) Minding the gap

Last week I wrote about alienation as symptomatic of a dysfunctional organisation. Alienation is probably best defined as the fear which generates distrust between individuals and groups, causing them to perceive one another as mutually threatening, even though they may not realise this or admit to it. To feel threatened by others is to feel diminished by them. We feel threatened when we are made to feel exposed and unworthy, or at times less than human, by another person’s attitude, or by another group’s politics.

What happens to the individual is mirrored in the life of the collective. Where one group feels threatened it will instinctively respond to the other in a defensive way. Such a defensive response can translate into aggressive language or behaviour, or into angry withdrawal, thereby creating another layer of fear and distrust. This whole fear syndrome constitutes a cyclic and repetitive pattern found in just about every human social situation, and it is endemic in the life of the Church in Wales, as we saw in last week’s Deanery conference meeting.

The challenge facing the Church lies in interrupting this cycle of fear so that it can be revealed as a deception. We create such a healthy interruption by looking at the unhealthy interruption, or gap, which exists between the way we pray and the way we live our lives. The unhealthy gap, or interruption, exists in both collective and individual contexts. These two sets of human interaction – how we relate to God spiritually and practically and the extent to which we do so as a Church or diocese, as well as in our own personal prayer lives, belong together, of course.  But this is something which we perhaps take for granted without looking at the nuances and overlaps which exist between prayer and getting on with life, including that of managing the life of the Church or diocese. We tend to assume that God is around without actually pausing to connect with him, or maintaining our connection in the difficulties and conflicts which we face as Church in all areas of our common life.

Maintaining the connection, or minding the gap between prayer and life, begins with recognising that we are much in need of love, of being counted as worthy not only by God, but by each other. If we can recognise how much we need each other in this way, we will also find that we are all very much alike, and therefore together.

As someone who has spent much of my life either directly or indirectly in a theatre environment, I have sensed this kind of commonality in the way an audience laughs together. This can happen in the context of preaching too. The preacher and the congregation laugh together at something which emerges in the sermon as absurd or funny, and in a single moment barriers fall. We all hear and understand something new together. Prayer that connects with life often makes itself felt when obstructions to human love are broken down, even if only momentarily, so that we can laugh, or ‘rejoice’ together in this way.

In the life of the Church in Wales, there are a number of fear areas which obstruct the growth of love and which could disappear if we would only let them. There is the fear which comes with years of unquestioning adherence to outdated rules and customs, the latter including the way some clergy dress. These rules and customs alienate us from one another and put many people off coming to church.

There is the fear, especially among clergy (irrespective of gender), of losing power or prestige. This contributes to a fear of change and to a preoccupation with status. There is the visceral fear which many people have of articulate women (and of women in general), and the fear of LGBT people, both of which continue to haunt the Church and compromise its credibility in the world. Both of these can be traced to misguided notions of ritual purity, a partial reading of scripture and, in the case of LGBT people, to lingering but unquestioned social taboos. Taken together, all of these fears have directly contributed to what has come to be known as decline.

All of this suggests that bridging the gap between prayer and life requires that we create new openings for the love of God to flow into our life together. This work begins with every person being prepared to be vulnerable before God with regard to their own particular fears. Only then will it be possible for us to encounter him together as his Church. 

What hope for the Church in Wales?

When meetings do not address the problem of alienation there is something wrong with the organisation they exist to serve. I attended one such meeting yesterday. It was a deanery conference. Its purpose, it seems, was to ‘up sell’ the idea of ministry areas but like all strategic decisions reached in the wrong way, those selling it failed to enthuse their audience. In fact many of those present went away feeling angry, betrayed and disillusioned. Most of them were over 50 and at a rough estimate, probably around 65% of them were women. The meeting was orchestrated and driven by four men, all of whom needed basic coaching in communication skills and, for one or two of them, time spent in the managerial equivalent of charm school.

The meeting was helpful only insofar as the tenor of the debate and some of the issues touched upon by an articulate audience showed us not only what is wrong with the Church in Wales, but what needs to happen to change it for the better. Changing the Church in Wales for the better, which must surely be the underlying purpose of ministry areas, is a matter of something happening to its people, rather than devising strategies which it is hoped will keep the organisation going.

Good strategy and planning exist to promote the life and happiness of an organisation, thereby making its work effective. But it is the Church’s life in God, and its happiness in being God’s people, which make it attractive in the way Jesus was attractive. The Church will not be effective if it does not first attract people to Jesus. Jesus was attractive because he gave people something which no organisation could take away from them, the knowledge that they mattered to God and permission to be happy in that knowledge. So life, which is knowing that we matter to God, and happiness, preclude strategy. In terms of the life of the Church in Wales, life and happiness issue forth in what Jesus describes as the bearing of fruit.

This deanery meeting was life suppressing. It also, in the way it was devised and driven, suppressed happiness. It was a dictatorial and thinly veiled underpinning of the same old order presented in the form of something new. But people are not so easily fooled. The new system, as one person commented from the floor, would in fact ensure the continuing subsidisation of middle management and top ranking clergy, even though much lip service was paid to those training for lay ministry. There was little acknowledgment of the faithfulness of unpaid priests whose services, I couldn’t help feeling, are deemed by some to be less desirable than those of a stipendiary. Some people felt that too much was spent on buildings and that part of these expenses should be borne by other bodies. Many of these concerns were glossed over in a patronising way which only made for more anger.

People felt both bullied and undervalued. There was much talk of being the body of Christ, but a singular lack of love and trust between those in the audience and those driving the proceedings. The tenor of the debate revealed how little we honour one another as Christians and as members of a single family. It also revealed how little we value those who faithfully support their church Sunday by Sunday.  This is especially true with regard to older people who are possibly the Church’s most important potential mission workers. Their life experience, wisdom, professional acumen and natural intelligence is seldom used to attract younger people. The church is full of under used ‘godparents’, ‘grandparents’ and life mentors. Younger people, and people of all ages, need to know where they can find wisdom and non-judgmental compassion when they need it. They should be looking to the Church and especially to its older members.

What then, is the hope for the Church in Wales of the future? Tinkering with the existing structure is not the answer. This is not to deny the need for structure itself. Structures are necessary as movements grow in size and influence, so structures need to be both strong and malleable, allowing for movement, change and growth. They are the context in which gift and talent are nurtured so that the organisation, or the Church, can bear fruit.

In the case of the Church in Wales, the structure needs to be leaner in a number of respects. There needs to be less in the way of petty legalism, individual professional advancement and cronyism. There needs to be a complete and unequivocal end to discrimination against women. In this and other contexts there also needs to be a genuine change of heart when it comes to empowering those who call for reconciliation, or who speak the truth about the Church’s life and who, in doing so, threaten the privileged power holding enclave. There needs to be more in the way of repentance for the waste of gift and talent sent to the Church by God in all those he calls to minister to his people. The Church needs to start looking around for imaginative, creative, risky people.

All of this suggests that the Church in Wales needs to re-think its priorities when it comes to how it roots its life in God, because its life in God is the only life which brings happiness and which will enable it to bear fruit. It is this life which also attracts those who tentatively come through its doors seeking to know Jesus Christ. Closing buildings which we cannot afford to maintain may or may not be part of this re-thinking process. We are neurotic about buildings, but whatever we feel about them, perhaps we all need to remember that it is not the buildings which put people off the Church. It is the remoteness of a clerical and increasingly management-driven ruling class who are stifling the joy promised to it in its Lord.

Despite all this, the love of God wins out in the end. When the visitor comes to one of our village churches he or she will find a small congregation of mostly older people, a genuinely loving and probably unpaid priest, all conveying in the warmth of their smiles how much the visitor matters to God and to them. It is in such moments that the Church becomes something greater than an organisation. 

How to be happy

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‘Happiness is a right, but you have to catch it yourself’ said Benjamin Franklin of the American Constitution. It was a very English thing for an 18^th century American to say. We English have traditionally held that pulling yourself up by your own boot straps is something of a moral imperative. This is why Pelagius, writing in the 5^th century, was a very English heretic. Pelagius argued that human beings did not need divine grace in order to fulfil God’s purpose for them because they could perfectly well fulfil that purpose through their own efforts and character. Part of his argument entailed the denial of original sin, as it was then understood. Original sin was seen to have been inherited from Adam’s wilful disobedience to God as a stain on a person’s soul, on their essential being. This stain could only be eradicated by the grace imparted through baptism.

Today, original sin translates as our natural propensity for the furthering of self interest at the expense of anyone or anything which gets in its way. It arguably has its origins in the instinct for survival which we have inherited from our earliest humanoid ancestors. So original sin, the result of being separated from God’s grace translates as original selfishness. In modern society unredeemed original selfishness leads to a state of collective and chronic loneliness.

In terms of the individual, those who have led selfish lives can find themselves alone and unvisited in their final years, a situation exacerbated, perhaps, by the selfishness they have passed on to others. In cosmic terms, the tendency to collective greed and individual selfishness suggests that its ultimate casualty will be the demise of our species within the next couple of centuries.  But our denial of this increasingly obvious fact does not seem to be making us less selfish, either in terms of how we think about the planet we are bequeathing to the next three or four generations, or how we conceive of our own happiness at this moment.

Perhaps the difficulty lies primarily in the question of ‘the moment’, in the way time itself has become a kind of currency. We are used to thinking about disposable assets, but we seldom think about disposable time. Disposable time, and how it is used, is central to the question of happiness and to that of loneliness. Too little disposable time forces us to compress our lives into a rapidly diminishing time framework, usually at the expense of our relationships and of our mental and physical health. Later in life, the sacrificing of relationships will lead to us having too much disposable time, too many hours to fill and too few people left with whom to share them.

 Do we simply write this scenario off as the inevitable price we pay for living in the times we live? Or can we change this scenario or, better still, is there a way for re-connecting with the source of true happiness from within it? Can we find ways of being present to a greater stillness from within any one transient moment in daily life?

There are two stories from the Gospels which hint at how we might re-think our happiness priorities and so arrive at such a mental vantage point. The first story is that of the encounter between Jesus and the rich young man who wants to know what he must do to inherit the kingdom of God. Like many religious people, he has led a good life but he is afraid of parting with his possessions. Material assets may not constitute happiness, but they do impart a feeling of safety, so to let go of them willingly is frightening. This was the young man’s problem. He found it hard to come to terms with the fact that his assets were in fact disposable. Like many of us today he felt that he was defined by what he owned, or by what he had achieved, so his happiness depended on maintaining his ‘profile’.

The other story concerns two sisters, Martha and Mary. Jesus is having supper at their house and Martha chides him for allowing her sister to sit listening to him instead of helping her with the meal. (Where is their brother, one can’t help wondering?) But Jesus replies that Mary has ‘the better part’. The story concerns the proper deployment of disposable time when it comes to what makes for real happiness.

This is not to say that spirituality (whatever that word signifies) is more important than practical action or rational thought, but that there are deep human needs which take precedence over everything else. The deepest of these is our need for God. Meeting our need for God requires time, rather than money. Neither is it a matter of effort or of personal strengths and attributes.

This alters the way we think about disposable time. Getting our priorities right helps to address the problem of how we use our time, and our priorities are intrinsically bound up with happiness.

If what we have, when it is significantly more than we need in order to lead a life which is physically and emotionally healthy, does not allow us to be at peace at least for a part of each day, what is it we lack?  

What does mercy look like?

Dzokhar Tsarnaev
dailystar.co.uk

Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston bomber, gets the death penalty. According to eye witness accounts of his trial, he expresses no remorse, anymore than he did after the crime itself. He smelt the blood and heard the screams but casually went off to purchase a bottle of milk at a nearby shop and then tweeted “there is no love in this country”.

Later, in court, he cried at the sight of his aunt, but his tears, it seemed, were for her and not for those who had lost children or friends in the bombing. But before then, as he remembered the event itself, he had told Sister Helen Prejean who visited him in prison that “No one deserves to suffer like they did”.

Dzokhar Tsarnaev is 21, officially an adult but still a juvenile, a person not fully formed whose emotions are still in a state of flux and able to be shaped by others. At the same time, he seems old before his time. His face is set in the defiance of old age, as it is seen in the faces of those who have lived selfishly and refuse either regret or remorse. Is he in his right mind? Is he as much himself as he was perhaps ten years ago? What kind of a human being could he yet become if he was healed of his hatred? If we kill him we will never know.

Neither will we know what the murdered child and student would have become if they had lived. In all this unknowing, those who were tasked with administering justice wanted Tsarnaev to give them a sign which would help them to be merciful, but he remained impassive. In a society for whom retributive justice is a moral imperative, public opinion would have gone against them had they decided on mercy in any case, and Tsarnaev himself did not seem to want his life to be spared.  So would it have been a harder punishment to allow him to live?  

This begs a further question about what punishment is for. Is it simply to hand out retribution measure for measure, an eye for an eye? If so, what purpose does it serve? Towards what end does it lead? Where something serves an ultimate end, it has a future, a time ahead in which change might be effected in a killer’s mind and heart. The question also turns on the fact that punishment is not handed out simply because it will deter future criminals but because justice demands that criminals should be punished on behalf of their victims.

A quid pro quo approach to justice denies any possibility of a punishment leading towards some better end. Furthermore, it constrains the idea of justice itself within the narrow confines of a problem which can only be solved through payback. But payback is not really a solution for the victim, or for the wider community or for the perpetrator of the crime. Payback justice can only lead to a life-denying outcome for everyone, in other words to more death. It deprives all parties concerned of their humanity, whether that humanity is understood as life to be cut off or spared, or, in the case of criminal justice, the quality and fruit of a lifespan which has run its natural course.

How many victims of terrorism, who have had someone they love taken from them arbitrarily and violently, feel that their own humanity has been restored, even enriched, in the longer term by the fact of a life being taken for a life in the moment of  the judgment handed down in court? Has this judgment healed the victim, or has it simply given them permission to carry on with their own retributive hating? In the case of the perpetrator, the death sentence will prevent further hate-driven activity, but it will not stem hatred. It will simply pass it on to someone else, or disseminate it in the wider group.

 If the death penalty were to be commuted to life imprisonment, would it not offer Dzokhar Tsarnaev the chance to convert his hatred into something life giving and all the more valuable because of the change of mind and heart needed for life to be born out of the ashes of hatred?  If we do not believe such a thing to be possible, have we not already forfeited something of our humanity?

The Christian message of salvation is one of mercy, the kind of mercy which pertains to God and which transforms minds and changes the way people live their lives. To deny mercy is to deny the possibility of the transformation of hatred and of another person changing as a result of this transformation. It also denies our own need for mercy, our need to be embraced by God.  To feel the effect of mercy we have to own our need of it, first to God and then to those we have wronged who are also in need of mercy, each in their separate ways.

Our world is much in need of mercy. Until we all recognise this need, whatever our perceptions of the other religion, the other  nation or the other person, we cannot begin to hope for a future.