Rev. Douglas J. House, M.Div.
Recently, I received a text message from a former colleague from the University of Bridgeport who had retired a few years back. Upon her retirement, she had settled several states away, yet members of her family are still living in the area. She approached me with a concern about her son. Knowing that I was a pastor, she wondered if it would be ok for me to reach out to him. He is a young man who has been looking at life in our time and seems desperately fearful about what he sees. With the termination of jobs on the line, as well as the costs of living always going up, this young man is not alone in his fear for survival. The truth is that we live in times that are more difficult than they used to be…in many ways. The man’s mother had shared with me that her son had considered moving to another country, and she feared what that might mean for him in terms of being an American, a stranger in a strange land.
I shared with my colleague the title of a book by the Rev. Dr. Robert Schuller, that “Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do”. The book is actually about self-help, but it does speak to the changing of perspective when difficult times arrive in life. I recommend it to any who may be wondering how to fathom life in our time. When we look at life today, we have to remember that while challenges may seem difficult, we have lived through hardships before, and we tend to survive.
“I Will Survive” – Gloria Gaynor
Any of us who can recall living through the middle of the last century can remember how difficult life was. Our nation was fighting an unpopular war; social upheaval was ruling the day as people fought for social rights. As a high school student at Hamden Hall, I remember when the word came down from the Headmaster’s office that, until further notice, students were not permitted to go near the lower campus that bordered Whitney Ave. At the time, activities on the New Haven Green necessitated the arrival of the National Guard. For many days, we watched as trucks of soldiers were constantly being shuffled up and down Whitney Ave. Hell’s Angels were running in packs up and down the avenue as well. It was a scary time. Bobby Seal of the Chicago 7 was on trial in New Haven. Yet, somehow despite all of the tension of those days, we survived. We were changed as individuals and as a nation, but we survived. I believe that this was due in no small part because of the music of the time.
Dino Fekaris was a song writer in the early 1970’s who had gotten fired by Motown Records in Detroit. It is recorded that he had worked for Motown for seven years as a staff writer when he was let go. Following that experience, the story goes that he went home and turned on the TV to hear a theme song that he had written months earlier. In the midst of his despair over losing his job, he experienced a moment of encouragement, he knew that he would survive. He wrote a song which came to be sung by Gloria Gaynor, whose own career had been threatened. She had sustained a fall from a stage while performing and had seriously injured her back. Fekaris passed the song, with its encouraging words, on to Gaynor and the rest is history. The song I Will Survive became a landmark expression of hope for all who struggle in any manner, and it even speaks to life in our time.
“Hope is being able to see that there is light, despite all of the darkness”
-The Rt. Rev. Desmond Tutu
I am a guitar player, and lately I’ve been working on a song that was recorded by Josh Groban, although not written by him. It’s a song that expresses hope about life in general but specifically hope in that we come to be raised up, even in the midst of harsh times. The refrain reads:
“You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains, You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas, I am strong, when I am on your shoulders – You raise me up to more than I can be.”
As you can guess, the name of the song is You Raise Me Up and it offers a wonderful message of hope. It speaks to the reality that there is always a source that “raises” us from despair, from disappointment to encouragement. For the truth is that we can be “raised” by people who are our friends, by music that we hear, by words that we read, or even by the presence of the author of life himself. As Bishop Tutu reminds us, hope is more than the lack of despair in any given moment, but rather it is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.
As we move through our days, let us remember that the signs of hope and encouragement remain all around us. Reach out to someone you know and share some conversation along with a cup of tea. Let us continue to listen to one another, to love one another, that at the end, each of us might share in multiplying the light that the world so often seeks in our day.
