Following love through divisions, upheaval and uncertainty - PBS NewsHour

Michael Curry:

We have been through really tough times. And the reality is, that happens. That's just the nature of life. It's good and bad. It's the alchemy of all of it mixed in together.

I have been blessed in the course of my life to have been around people who have not given in to fate, if you will, who have been people of faith, who — people who have struggled against the odds.

And one of the patterns that I have seen in their lives has been that they were people who would not submit to selfishness or hatred or bigotry, but who really did live lives of love and believe in it.

I remember my aunt Lillian, when I was a kid, used to tell us — and she was quoting Booker T. Washington — I don't know if she knew it, but she was. She used to say, never let anybody drag you so low as to hate them.

I grew up with a father who worked in civil rights against the odds. Barack Obama wasn't even on the horizon in 1960. And yet hope goes beyond the moments and the exigencies of the moment, and dares to believe in something — something possible that we can't even see.

It's kind of like George Bernard Shaw. Some men see things as they are and ask why. We dream things that never were and ask, why not? That's hope. That's living by the power of love. And that is living in spite of a nightmare.

There are many people who have loved America, in spite of the fact that America often didn't love them, Native American folk, Black folk, Latinx folk, poor folk, who have not always benefited from this great country. But they have loved America.

You know, my grandmother had my two uncles, their pictures. I can remember their pictures in their Army Air Corps uniforms, having fought in World War II. She lost members of her family. The two of them came home during that war.

My wife's father — grandfather fought in the First World War. She's actually got his discharge papers from World War I. Black folk, they fought for this country and had to fight in order to fight for this country, not necessarily because of what the country was, but because of what the country, sometimes, in spite of its contradictions, stood for.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That's true even when our country failed to live up to that. That's what people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg stood for, in spite of the contradiction. That's what I mean by hope.

Hope doesn't just accept the way things are. It dares to hope and believe that something can be different, and then works to make that happen.

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January 02, 2021 at 06:25AM
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Following love through divisions, upheaval and uncertainty - PBS NewsHour
"love" - Google News
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