Communities of Resistance

Communities of Resistance
A church and community in Philadelphia offer sanctuary and a refuge to a migrant family, resisting the State and ICE policies seeking to separate this family using detention and deportation (2017)
"Beyond obedience there is resistance." – Dorothee Sölle (Creative Disobedience)

Hope in Focus this year intends to support story-telling and the building of communities of resistance. More specifically, I plan to visit and support local communities building resistance through their work of mutual aid. If you have followed our work for long enough you will know that we are finding the path of healing and liberation to always include a movement of deeper communion and connection to all that is sacred and at the same time a movement of resistance to all that seeks to alienate and destroy us.

Dorothee Sölle has long been a mentor of Hope In Focus. I highly recommend reading The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. In one of her much older writings, Creative Disobedience, she asks, "What does it mean to be a Christian in these times? Is it the tradition of obedience or the tradition of resistance we are choosing?" She wrestles here with her own history in Germany as well as her new lived reality in the U.S. with the emerging religious right. She sees the historical patterns of unquestioning obedience leading to oppression and reminds us that to follow the historical Jesus is much more about disobedience and resistance to the oppressive institutions of empire. Long before the current analysis of white Christian nationalism of our times, she called the collusion of Christianity and the state a kind of "Christofacism", which puts what we are facing in these times in perspective with a much longer history of the unholy alliance between Christianity and the powers of the age.

I'm finding hope with the growing number of communities I witness who are preparing to creatively disobey, growing love through the practice of resistance. We can see that the practice of resistance is much more than where we put our anger. Instead, resistance reveals much more what a community is cultivating as love and compassion as it confronts hate and fear. Thich Nhat Hanh calls for building these communities of resistance built akin to a church or temple as a place that that can remind of who we are, a place to heal and recover our wholeness.

“So perhaps, first of all, resistance means opposition to being invaded, occupied, assaulted, and destroyed by the system. The purpose of resistance, here, is to seek the healing of yourself in order to be able to see clearly. ……. I think that communities of resistance should be places where people can return to themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness." – Thich Nhat Hanh (1975, The Raft is Not the Shore: Towards a world where spirituality and politics meet)

If you would like to support the work of Hope in Focus this year in solidarity story-telling to support communities of resistance, you can either follow the Donate link above or simply sign-up below for this newsletter with a donation level.

Beyond obedience there is resistance.