“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” 1 Peter 1:3 (NRSVUE)
Rarely, if ever, do our dreams really come true. In part, yes. Indirectly, yes. But the long history of radical political imagination is one of freedom dreams deferred, or at least truths told slant. The abolitionists of the 19th century dreamed of a new economic system not based on the exploitation of Black bodies; what rose from the ashes of chattel slavery was sharecropping and apartheid (not to mention the continued expansion of the US empire). The movement against the Iraq War in 2003 failed to stop that invasion, but it did make the future invasion of Iran politically impossible.
History teaches us that we see only through a glass darkly. The dialectic never resolves as we expect it to. And yet, we are called to dream. God has given us “a new birth into a living hope,” “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.” The flame of faith we are called to tend lights our way forward, though the way twists and turns, though the road may be rough and uncertain. The mystic Thomas Merton once prayed by saying, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going…, Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You.”
We do not know what world we leave to our children and grandchildren. We can only move forward in faith, trusting that our dreaming and our acting contains a truth “more precious than gold” which will bring all people one step closer to the Kindom of God.
Rev. Jay Bergen is a pastor at Germantown Mennonite Church in Philadelphia, and a volunteer organizer with the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), a campaign fighting to end life sentences and heal communities across Pennsylvania.