I began January 2024 as a pessimist. The year ahead held two big decisions and I was fearful of both. When the United Methodist Church voted to rid its Book of Discipline of its harmful and discriminatory language against LGBTQIA+ persons and removed the ban to ministry for gay and lesbian clergy, I started to feel optimistic that my second fear might prove unfounded, too. As November inched closer, even when the polls failed to move, I protected my wishful thinking by avoiding too much of the news cycle and dreaming of a day not filled with dread and fear. Besides, if my church could make the expansive choice, surely the country would as well.
When I climbed into bed, around midnight November 5th, I drew the curtain on optimism. Today, I feel mostly mentally and emotionally weary. Of course I’m not the only one who feels this way; it’s all over my social media feed and in many of my conversations with friends (not with family because they are, unlike me, happy with the Whitehouse bully).
Dare I say it: here we are again. Four years ago we thought that if the COVID crisis was managed and began to fade in our rear mirror and if we had a leader who didn’t fan the flames of division, it was possible to overcome our divisiveness.
We were wrong. Relationships are no better and our country is a tale of two distinctly different realities; the worst of times. I sometimes hear people say that when they are feeling down and distraught, they turn to the Bible for…something. I usually don’t but instead find solace in memoir and fiction. But today I returned to the story of Hagar and there I found not solace per se, but a traveler on the way whose agency and vision reframes the desert experience and points to hopeful transformation.
Hagar, whose story is told in Genesis, was a triple outsider: she was an Egyptian, a slave, and a woman. Her status meant Sarah and Abraham could use her as they saw fit, illustrated when Abraham reminded Sarah, “Your slave-girl is in your power; do to her as you please” (Gen 16:6). And she did! Sarah treated Hagar so harshly that Hagar ran away into the desert. When she was at her most desperate, an angel appeared to her, telling her she would have a son, God’s acknowledgment of her affliction.
But something else happened then, too. This displaced Egyptian slave woman took the initiative to name the Divine presence. Hagar—not Abraham, not Sarah—identified who had met her in her time of abandonment and need. “You are El-roi” (Gen 16:13), she remarked, “the God who sees me.”
Hagar’s desert experience comes into sharper focus when compared with Moses’s desert epiphany. While tending his father-in-law’s sheep, Moses was stopped in his tracks by a burning bush with a voice calling out to him, “Moses, Moses!” When he stepped closer, God said to him, “I am Who I am” (Ex 3: 4, 14). Moses, one of the great patriarchs in Jewish and Christian traditions, was a recipient of revelation in contrast to Hagar who participated in it.
I take heart in Hagar’s desert experience as an illustration that even in our driest deserts, God is moved by our thirst.
In her book, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, Sr. Joan D. Chittister explores the relationship between struggle and hope, suggesting that our struggles will leave their mark, but they are also the place from which transformation—hope—is born. “The great secret of life,” she writes, “is how to survive struggle without succumbing to it, how to bear struggle without being defeated by it, how to come out of great struggle better than when we found ourselves in the midst of it.”
Likewise, New York Times columnist, David Brooks, writes in How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen that people who are permanently damaged by trauma are damaged because they assimilate what has happened to them, making it part of their ongoing narrative of the world. This is in contrast, he says, to the person who accommodates their perspective. They use the struggle to change, to remake their way of understanding the world and themselves.
We can imagine Hagar felt like she wasn’t seen. As a woman, someone valued only for her potential to have children, especially males, she was overlooked, not truly seen by her society. As a slave and as an ethnic minority, she was poor, without autonomy and agency. She relied on the whim of others to stay alive. “She is in your power,” Abraham said to Sarah, “do to her as you please.”
Life doesn’t get much worse than it was at that moment for Hagar. It was then, however, that her invisible life took a radical turn. But it didn’t happen without her courage and tenacity to honor what she knew to be true.
Our national desert is going to be our home for the foreseeable future. Our hope can be that in this struggle we will realize that what worked in the past is no longer a viable roadmap. That we need to listen to those who have not been seen, we need to hear from those whose voices have been silenced, that we must be open to the possibility of transformation.
Like Hagar’s experience, I imagine these changes will be on the micro scale. Still, in our ordinary moments we have, as David Brooks says, “…the simple capacity to make another person feel seen and understood….” It’s a simple aspiration, but one surely birthed by hope.
