Todd Deatherage had just finished moderating a panel discussion during which I was impressed with his insights. Several people in the audience had surrounded him and were asking follow up questions, but then I saw an opening to introduce myself. We chatted briefly and I ended up giving him a copy of my first book. And that, I thought, was the end of it.
The next morning D’Aun and I were leaving breakfast when I heard someone call my name. I turned and there was Todd, big smile on his face, walking quickly toward me. “I stayed up late last night reading your book. It’s great! Anyone who quotes John Chrysotom, Richard Foster, AND uses profanity is someone I want to get to know.”
And thus was born a friendship with Todd and his wife Judi. We have traveled to Belize with them, exchanged texts from different parts of the world, and schemed to find ways to help each others ministries.
Todd spent sixteen years in senior positions of the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government, including four years as Chief of Staff in the Secretary of State’s Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department. He also spent two years as Senior Advisor in the Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, where he specialized in religious freedom in the Middle East.
In 2009 Todd partnered with his friend Greg Khalil to start The Telos Group, which forms and equips communities of peacemakers to heal intractable conflict. They envision a future beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Since this is the season of hope, it seemed fitting to invite Todd to be my guest blogger this week. You’ll find his insights here just as impressive as I did the first time I met him. Enjoy.
Hope Is What You Do
Though Eden is lost, its loveliness remains in the heart and the imagination.” -Mary Oliver
When people find out I work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they often ask: are you optimistic? I am not. Anyone optimistic about the state of this long-running conflict is obviously not paying attention. But I choose not to peg myself on a scale of optimism versus pessimism. Frankly, the pessimists tend to have all the facts, and it seems like an unfair fight. So I do my best to operate from a different scale, one of hope versus despair, and on that scale I try to peg myself toward hope.
I’ve learned to do this from wise men and women who do the gritty work of peacemaking, people whose daily lives and very existence are shaped by decades of conflict and the kinds of circumstances that force to the surface both the worst of the human condition, but also the best and most charitable. My peacemaker friends are people for whom the question about whether the glass is half full or half empty is a bit ridiculous. They work to reshape the glass itself and fill it to the top.
For peacemakers, hope is not the same as optimism. It’s not an emotion or a feeling. Hope is what you do. You live and act in hopeful ways in order to open up the possibility for a different reality. Hope brings together being and doing. Anglican theologian N.T. Wright says it this way, “Hope…is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis.” He calls it a “dogged and deliberate choice” when the world seems dark.
My way of getting to the practice of hope was greatly influenced by a Palestinian pastor from Bethlehem named Mitri Raheb. Mitri is one of the most resolute and visionary leaders in the Holy Land today. As a young man, he left his homeland to study in Germany where he received his Doctor of Theology degree. He jokes that he returned to Bethlehem with all the answers to none of the questions anyone was asking. As the young pastor of the Lutheran church in Bethlehem, Mitri began challenge the Israeli occupation and the violence perpetrated by both sides, and at the same time to encourage and foster culture, art, and storytelling as a means of creative resistance, a way to act in hope in the midst of enormous challenge.
Mitri doesn’t convey a false sense that ‘everything is going to work out.’ But in his words and in his work, there is hope which expresses itself through determined and morally serious action. Mitri is a social entrepreneur who has launched and led several NGOs in Bethlehem, a widely published (and controversial) theologian, and the founder of a beautiful college of arts and music. He is not only acting in hope, but he is teaching and training a generation of young Palestinians to live that way.
Though Mitri is separated by physical barriers, ethnicity, nationality, and religion from my Israeli friend Roni Keidar, his approach is no different than hers. Living as she does for more than fifteen years under continual threat of rocket attack emanating from the Gaza Strip, to say she was optimistic would be grounds for her family to take her car keys away and hide the sharp knives. But in building and maintaining relationships with her Gazan neighbors, by driving those with medical permits to Israeli hospitals, by lobbying her government and speaking at peace conferences and mass rallies, she is acting in hope. She is spending her days providing us all a window into the way we were meant to live, offering a way out.
I had the privilege of working at the State Dept in Washington when Condoleezza Rice was our nation’s top diplomat. Many official receptions and gatherings took place under a portrait of Thomas Jefferson, the first Secretary of State. Rice’s ancestors were enslaved by men like Jefferson. Change is possible.
Dr Rice is herself a fascinating story in the power of transformation. She grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in a world rigidly governed by the separate and unequal system of Jim Crow. Her family fled their home in the South and moved to Denver in 1967 and she eventually learned to speak Russian and became an expert on the Soviet Union. These two powerful and destructive institutions that shaped her life—Jim Crow segregation and Soviet Communism— once looked unshakable, and yet today neither still exists. These lessons seemed to instill in her a sense of hope, a belief that change is possible even when the evidence suggests the contrary. I once heard her say that what looks impossible today can look inevitable tomorrow. Of course, the pessimists still have most of the facts, but not all of them.
Transformation happens when we act and live in hope. Peacemakers teach us this, and peacemakers do this because hope is what you do.