Hope Underground

By Donna Woodard Ziegenhorn

Hanging onto hope is not easy. Just when your heart surges with the feeling that life really is as good as your head has tried to convince it, there is another siege on Sarajevo... the kitchen sink backs up... and one of your kids shows up with pin worms. That’s how it is with me and hope. I forget there’s not supposed to be a reason you have it. So the daily barrage of events – from global dilemma to household crisis – often drives my sense that “life is unfolding as it should” underground.

I was suffering with this generalized malaise of spirit recently when my husband, Dallas, and I passed through Chicago some years ago and stopped to spend the night at the Institute with our dear friends Phil and Marge Philbrook. One of the things I’ve always admired about them is that they “live hopeful”. They honestly seem to welcome the very catastrophes and petty annoyances which assault my fragilities.

That evening we went out to dinner together. I was primed for latching on to some of that good Marge and Phil spirit. We would talk of important things. And, of course, they would pull signs of meaning and hope out of the direst scenarios. Coupled with this would be their prevailing good will, common sense and infectious laughter.

They were as I anticipated, but it wasn’t rubbing off on me. First, we talked about the crisis in photosynthesis. Phil said that only 40% of the sun’s power is now available for plant life. The reasons are related to global population... decreasing wetlands and forests and the sheer amount of space used up by cement and highways. If the population doubles as predicted over the next 35 years, the percentage of sun power will shrink to 20%, Phil said. “How do you hang on to hope knowing that fact?” I wanted to ask. But then the conversation turned to the Women’s Conference in – Beijing. Soon we were noting that the plight of women is worsening, not improving, in India. Wife burnings are increasing. “How do you hang onto hope knowing that fact?” I again wanted to ask.

We were side-tracked by a woman entering. A young girl, perhaps eight or nine, followed behind her. The woman was drunk. She crossed the restaurant, berating the waiter in a slurred, loud voice. The girl stood silently, a back pack over her shoulder. The woman careened back to the door. The dark-haired girl trailed her wordlessly with sad eyes, slumped body, and, no doubt, an empty stomach. Again I asked myself the same question.

It was still on my mind when we returned to the Kemper Building. I had asked Marge and Phil to give us a tour of the ICA Archives. Along with Lyn Edwards and volunteers, they were working tirelessly to organize and manage this massive project. We took the stairway down to the basement. It opened on a long darkened, corridor, giving the impression of entering the catacombs. We followed along the musty passage. Pipes hung low over our heads. At a turn in the hall, we came upon a door marked, “The Global Archives” and turned the knob. Inside, it was exceedingly light. (There’s something very Jungian about this!)

Row upon row of ancient painted five drawer file cabinets stood neatly. Posters lined the walls. Their colours of yellow, rust and beige were familiar. The quotations came back to me:

• He who bends shall be made straight (Lao Tzu)

• The perfect Yogin acts unmoved by passion and unbound by deeds, setting results aside (Bhagavad Gita)

• The weakness of many men is that they do not know how to become a stone or a tree. (Aime Cesaire)

Phil sat down at the computer to demonstrate a search. I said “Look up ‘story.’” He did. One at a time in bright green print across the screen crawled... Aboriginal story...Fifth City story...Iron Man story...Local Church Cadre Story.

Scientists say that every cell in the human body carries memory. That’s how I felt as each “story” entry popped into place. Like my entire body was physically waking up to a memory of something I once knew well. But what was it?

I wandered over to those drawers and began my own undirected search. Randomly I pulled open cranky drawers. The smell of old paper rose up. I fingered worn manila folders with pencilled labels like JWM (Joseph Wesley Mathews) Lectures, “Broodings.” I lost myself in a paper on Accountability. I opened a drawer of Betty Pesek’s sheet music and found myself singing out loud the words of “This is All I Ask of You”.

At that moment I was sure I could spend the rest of my life in the Archives. I felt as though I had come home. I’m sure that every wise and good thought and every profound insight into human life – not to mention poems, songs, stories and pictures - can be found in the Archives That’s why I wanted to stay there: to take it all in. Somehow my own life story is held down there in those underground cabinets.

But it was after leaving the depths of the basement that the real message of the Archives hit me. It was the name of the memory that woke up in me down there. Hope. The smell of the memory of hope.

Nearly 20 years ago I spent a year in the Cano Negro Human Development Project in a remote and needy area of Venezuela. Our team was often reminded that the value of living and working with the local people was not in what we accomplished. It was in the fact that we were present in a “hopeless situation.” Our presence itself was hope.

That’s the way I feel about the Archives. Because it exists, there’s hope. Beyond all the good reasons to feel despair today, the Archives reminds me there is a Hope which abides in all things. More than that, it says there is a People of Hope who abide. I open a file folder, and a hundred faces I know come before me. These are my people, my tribe. They have been, are and always will be. No wonder I feel at home down there.

When my sense of hope plummets again, I know where to go. It awaits me. Underground. I’ll find it along that dark subterranean passage at the modest door marked The Global Archives. There – where there literally is a light at the end of the tunnel – I will tease open a stubborn file drawer, pull out an old manila folder. There, in the company of visible and invisible others, I’ll stand silently and take in a stiff whiff of the presence of hope.