Hope is where your arse is

It's a quote from Phillip Berrigan, an American priest and activist, as conveyed by Ched Myers, a scholar-activist, at this year's Greenbelt - a Christian arts festival in Cheltenham. It doesn't work in an English accent - but it sounds great in an American one: "Hope is where your arse is." The point is that, rather than being found within a Christian holy huddle, or in our individual longings for heaven, Hope is where we put ourselves, in our daily lives, in God's messy world. Hope is what we do, through our lived realities. Hope is how we approach life, how we practice faith, how we get stuck in with addressing the challenges and struggles of those who are most vulnerable. Hope is false if it ignores or hides from or belittles the pain of real life; and Hope is therefore false if your "arse" (your bodily being) is located aloof from people's pain. "Christian discipleship is like real estate," Ched said: "it's about location, location, location." After all, where did Jesus put himself? Not in the nice places, not with the "nice" people, neither with a sword in his hand, ready to mirror the brutalities of the System which violated the vulnerable, nor behind closed doors, but touching the untouchable, living savingly with "the least". This is what "body politics" is about - where do we put ourselves? - so to be the "body" of Christ today, be where Christ would be. A far cry from the "virtual" worlds we often live in, this is certainly a demanding way to be ... so for now, I'll sit just have a nice sit and a think about how other people should live like that!