Abstract
Luther E. Smith is an esteemed veteran of the civil rights movement and an emeritus professor at Candler School of Theology. He is well-placed to help fill the sizable gap in the literature that connects theology to the life of the church and the life of social activism. In the Preface to this volume, we find his foundational claim: That ‘efforts in personal and congregational spiritual growth are deficient if they fail to advocate for social justice and compassion’ (p. xi). In Hope is Here!, he explores some of the practices that faith communities should cultivate to steer clear of such deficiencies.
His opening chapter grounds his most important term—hope. He contrasts the idiomatic use of ‘hope’ to mean a kind of optimism with its theological force. Hope, for Smith, is the indiscriminatory force of God, something that sustains even when we are not ‘hopeful’ in the sense of optimism (p. 17). Hope is ever-present (the ‘here’ of the book’s title) but we must have eyes to see it. Smith teaches that it is made visible when we interpret our reality through the lens of faith. He uses the example of Archbishop Desmond Tutu who, ‘while living under the oppressive apartheid system of South Africa, declared, “Apartheid is already dead”’ (pp. 10–11).
In the second chapter, Smith probes the purpose of hope, drawing out its communal shape. Entitled ‘Pursuing Justice and the Beloved Community’, the chapter assumes that the pursuit of justice cannot be an individual endeavour. The different topics dealt with in each chapter of this book interlock to make a cohesive argument and the focus here on invitation resonates with hospitality as a recurring motif through the argument. Hope begins to come into focus through invitations which ‘take us to experiences of beloved community and personal transformation’ (p. 24). We are ushered into a sociality that bears witness to the existence of hope and then hope itself begins to act—inviting ‘us to be with the witnesses so that they enter our story’ (p. 30, emphasis original).
Each of the subsequent chapters lays out the relevance of a different practice that helps communities to sustain hope. The cornerstone of all these practices is ‘contemplative prayer’, which is detailed in chapter 3. There are, as Smith presents it, three stages of contemplative prayer which together serve as a ‘continuum’: listening, discerning, and engaging (p. 48). This chapter’s political salience is summarised with an apt quotation from Abraham Heschel who is quoted (through his daughter) as saying ‘For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was both protest and prayer. Legs are not lips, and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying’ (p. 68). Prayer, as Smith presents it, can definitively be political.
In the fourth chapter, he considers what it means to engage in ‘prophetic remembering’. This chapter begins with a powerful illustration based around his visit to a place called Stone Mountain Park which is a popular tourist attraction near Smith’s home that tells the story of the Confederacy and the American Civil War. Yet ‘the horrors of slavery and the significance of slavery in the rise of the Confederacy are absent’ (p. 79). This is just one of a series of powerful vignettes that allow him to make the case that remembering rightly is not just a question of diligence about the details of the truth, but is a prophetic act (p. 97).
The fifth chapter moves from memory to encounter, as Smith recommends the practice of crossing identity boundaries. Like so many of the terms he deploys, Smith refuses to reduce this down to a simple virtue that should be always enacted. He is alert to how boundaries are good and necessary and transgressing them without an appropriate context is reckless and damaging. ‘We are wise to approach and cross our own and others’ identity boundaries with awareness of their meaning’, he cautions (p. 105). Yet hope, which is revealed to us when we receive hospitality from witnesses to its force, ushers us out of our comfort zones and familiar bubbles, on a journey where the stark binaries of hard identities become much more porous.
‘Transforming Conflict’ is the heading for chapter 6 and Smith seeks to reframe conflict as inevitable and not necessarily destructive (p. 132). He suggests that the person who is formed by contemplative prayer, dedicated to prophetic remembering, and skilled in crossing boundaries, is the kind of the person who can resist the urge to avoid conflict and instead see it as an opportunity to build unity and renew community. Again, like in the previous chapter, the advice we receive here is pastorally nuanced and not simplistic. And the reader can come to see how it is possible that as we ‘place our bodies in caring relationships’, we put ourselves invariably in the path of conflict because what we care about is what we are willing to fight for (p. 132). The discussion in this chapter about how to actually forgive is theoretically and practically important for the case Smith makes and it may be useful in a number of classroom contexts to push a dogmatic conversation into a more practical discourse.
In the final chapter we find Smith reminding us that any sustained journey towards justice is a journey where those on the move stop to celebrate whenever they can. There is a nice fit between the advice we find here about the role of music in celebration—quoting ‘an African adage’, Smith tells us that ‘Before the spirit can descend a song must be sung’ (p. 165)—and a discussion from much earlier in the book when he engages with Howard Thurman’s reflection on how song functioned for those caught up in the horror of chattel slavery. Hymns and spirituals bonded them together but also bore witness to the hope they had, that the slaver would not ultimately have the last word. Singing ‘made a worthless life, the life of chattel property, a mere thing, a body, worth living!’ (p. 18, emphasis original). Celebration, we are told, ‘is a portal experience to the work and joy of beloved community’ (p. 181).
Smith presents the book as a recollection of stories which have helped him to hope. It is easy to read, features questions for reflection at the end of every chapter, and could be profitably used in pastoral theology and practical theology classes, especially with undergraduates. It is no real criticism of Smith to suggest that this very accessibility—built from ‘stories that reveal the work of hope’ (p. 32)—also testifies to the gaps that are left around this book. There is a great deal of work to be done that maintains the book’s practical attention to both church life and political activism but with a more rigorous engagement with contemporary theological discourse. My hope here is that such books might soon be written.