We Must Awaken to Hope…

We must awaken to hope, resisting the temptation to despair that history cannot be any different, that another world is not in fact possible. Here we must remember our sisters Shiphrah and Purah [Hebrew midwives who disobeyed the king of Egypt] and all who have danced defiantly in their footsteps through the ages – women like Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day and Guatemalan poet and Presbyterian human rights activist Julia Esquivel, like Methodist pastor Myrna Bethke, who responded to the loss of her brother in the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York by travelling to Afghanistan to stand with civilian victims of U.S. retaliatory bombing; or like Catholic lay woman Marietta Jaeger, who responded to the brutal murder of her daughter by campaigning against the death penalty. -Ched Myers (From Geez Magazine Spring 2012)