Endurance with Hope (Commemorating Maya Angelou)
I believe All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, by Maya Angelou, best sums up the meaning of endurance in relation to hope. This book has a recollection of her last day in Ghana where she lived in the 1960’s. It describes how the women there were crying because they could see that she was a descendent of their stolen mothers and fathers.
She writes,
The Women wept and I wept. I too cried for the lost people, their ancestors and mine. But I was also weeping with a curious joy. Despite the murders, rapes and suicides, we had survived. The middle passage and the auction block had not erased us. Not humiliations nor lynchings, individual cruelties nor collective oppression had been able to eradicate us from the earth. We had come through despite our own ignorance and gullibility, and the ignorance and rapacious greed of our assailants. There was much to cry for, much to mourn, but in my heart I felt exalted knowing there was much to celebrate. Although separated from our languages, our families and customs, we had dared to continue to live. We had crossed the unknowable oceans in chains and had written its mystery into ‘Deep River, my home is over Jordan.’ Through the centuries of despair and dislocation, we had been creative, because we faced down death by daring to hope. 1
Maya Angelou’s words speak powerfully to what endurance means. Through so much unspeakable suffering, people survived and dared to hope in the face of death. She is the embodiment of this legacy of endurance and hope. This great suffering of slavery, endured for centuries, was brutal and relentless. Finding ways to live through it was a matter of survival. Endurance is not something one hopes for, but it can be the result of the will to live. Endurance is what happens as a resistance to death by life itself. It’s that stubborn hope to feel alive once again, to feel the vitality of life springing and giving colors to one’s existence, even when all seems lost.
When theologian Jürgen Moltmann was age 16 in Hamburg, Germany, he and his classmates were drafted and assigned to a local antiaircraft unit. It was the end of July 1943, and bombs from the Allies were destroying the city, killing fourteen thousand people, mostly children and women, since most men were away serving in the military. In this horrific bombing operation called “Sodom and Gomorrah,” Moltmann’s dear friend, a classmate standing next to him, was killed. He despaired and began to cry out for the first time for God, “Where are you God? Why did I survive and what gives my life meaning?”
With these questions, during those terrible years, he struggled and found himself in the abyss of despair. A year later as a prisoner of war in a Scottish camp, he experienced transforming moments that would alter his life and give him hope again. The initial transforming experience came to him when he was laboring outside the prison camp for the first time; as he walked out, he came upon a cherry tree in blossom. His knees trembled at the sight of such unexpected beauty. The spirit of life began to blow through his soul once again.
The second transforming moment came by the hospitality of a Scottish family who lived near the camp. Their unexpected kindness to him began to soften his heart. They fed him and treated him with respect. This touched him, in spite of his being a war prisoner. He began to sense his humanity slowly being restored. Finally, another life- changing event came when an army chaplain from the camp gave him a bible. He had been raised in a secular family and had never read the bible or any religious literature before. He began to read the bible and came upon Psalms of lament and the passion narratives of Jesus. The cry of the suffering Christ, “My God, my God why has thou forsaken me,” spoke to him as God’s solidarity with humanity. The Psalms of lament were his prayer. He discovered that this divine brother in distress on the cross never left him but was always with him in suffering. In his darkest hours Jesus was there. In the nights of death, God was there. He understood that whatever future may come God will always be there. This experience of God’s presence in the suffering Christ rekindled life for him and gave him hope to dare once again to live. God had unexpectedly opened a broad space for him to dwell and gave him life once again. 2
Last June, I traveled back to Korea, my birthplace. This travel led me to reflect on the meaning of endurance, not only as an individual but also as a part of people sharing a collective consciousness and historic memory arising from a particular time and place. After the independence of Korea in 1945 and from 35 years of brutal, cultural genocide by Japanese colonialism and a few years later, the geo-political divide by the Soviet Union and United States, war broke out in June 25, 1950. The Korean War, the “forgotten war” officially known as a “police action,” by the United Nations, caused tremendous suffering and the loss of millions of lives. Still technically at war, without any formal peace treaty, the tension in the Korean peninsula still continues as the most militarized place in the world. When I consider the complexity of historic oppression, post-colonialism, and the scale of human suffering that still continues today, in spite of the economic affluence in South Korea and poverty in North Korea, suffering seems to permeate both sides of their border. The pain and wounds are still raw after all these years, embodied by millions of families still separated and in the lives of those who lost their love ones. One particular story stands out for me as a reminder of this truth. The story of a thousand orphans rescued during the war by a Presbyterian Army Chaplain, The Rev. Russell Blaisedell. The rescue project “Kiddy Car Airlift,” was a Korean version of Schindler’s List. During the war, with the impending threat of Chinese armed forces joining force with North Korea, all military personnel and residents of Seoul were alerted to withdraw and evacuate. There were thousands of orphans in the streets, little children starving, without shelter, and dying in the streets. Chaplain Blaisedell started to pick them up one by one from the streets and with the help of others had more than a thousand orphans within a short time. What they accomplished was impossible given the situation. They found transport and eventually an airlift that rescued most of the children. As adults those children would tell their stories of survival from their early trauma of living in the streets and their rescue. Some were adopted by families in the United States and would have reunions with former orphans. The endurance of these children and the hope offered during times of war by a lone chaplain who initiated a mass exodus and airlift is a testament, a light in darkness.3
Endurance comes in many forms. Its vitality and power come from its relationship to authentic hope that comes from the pit of hopelessness and despair. Endurance is that broad space created by the divine presence, Spirit of Life. Maya Angelou, Jürgen Moltmann and stories of survival of orphans are all testimonies of survival and endurance that dare to hope and live. I want to end this reflection with the words by Jürgen Moltmann from his book, Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation:
Life in God’s Spirit is life against death; it is not life against the body, it is life that brings the body liberation and transfiguration. To say “yes” to life means saying “no” to war and it’s devastations, to say “yes” to life means saying “no” to poverty and its humiliations. There is no genuine affirmation of life in this world without the struggle against life’s negations.4
Notes
1. Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, (New York: Random House, Inc., 1986), 207.
2. Moltmann’s lecture at Garrett’s convocation: http://www.garrett.edu/news/161-September-2009/282-video-of-jrgen-moltmann-at-garrett-evangelical (Last viewed: June 2, 2014)
3. http://sites.duke.edu/warandorphans/russell-blaisedell-and-kiddy-car-airlifts/ documentary http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfuhCgPiqFI (Last viewed: June 26, 2014)
4. Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, Trans: Margaret Kohl, (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992), 97-98.
