Crying tears of hope

A while ago I told you about Joan Oliver Goldsmith’s How Can We Keep from Singing, which relates her relationship with choral music, including its life lessons and powers of healing.

And my mind recently turned to something she said about hope, because it’s something I’ve been trying very hard to embrace. And in light of the events last week, this is more important than ever.

“I have practiced hope. Help me to feel every drop of love and of joy that are here on this Earth for me today. I started saying that years ago, after my last bout of depression. Not asking for the world to change, not always clear who I’m asking. But every day, clearly asking. The day begins. I forget about it. But I notice life differently than I used to.”

And this is one of my go-to pieces—it’s not Bach, but it speaks to me: Alison Krauss’s “Jubilee”. It’s appropriate in and of itself, but also because of its use in the film Paper Clips, which is where this clip came from. Paper Clips is the extremely powerful documentary about middle school kids in Tennessee trying to get their heads around the concept of prejudice and the kinds of horrors it can lead to. This particular clip shows the journey to Tennessee of a railroad boxcar that was used to transport Jews to extermination camps.

As it happens, this part of the film was shot on 11 September 2001, so it, the kids’ project and this song tie in perfectly to the barbarism we witnessed on Friday in Paris—this is what happens when ideology triumphs over reason. This is what happens every time when ideology triumphs over reason.

Only when hope, love and joy turn the tables on the mindset that proclaims mass slaughter as a path to paradise will we really make progress as a civilization.