Throughout the Advent season, members of the MLP Board of Directors will provide weekly reflections via email and social media. We hope these words will inspire and awaken you to the hope, peace, joy, and love of this season. Today's reflection, "hope(lessness)," is provided by Avery Arden (they/ze): This first Week of Advent centers around hope. I don’t know about you, but I struggle with hope — especially after horrific, hateful events like the shooting at Club Q in Colorado. Thus I was relieved to learn a few years back that when I do experience hopelessness, I don’t need to shove that feeling aside or pretend it’s not happening. It is not sinful, or a failure of faith, to feel hopeless. I learned this from Miguel de la Torre’s book Embracing Hopelessness, which argues that hopelessness can be a “desperation rooted in hope denied” where we have nothing left to lose and therefore we are freed to do whatever it takes to achieve justice. When things feel hopeless, when achieving justice seems impossible, de la Torre recommends an ethics para joder — the Spanish F word — an ethics that “screws with the screwers.” Basically, if we can do nothing else against unjust systems, we can become a massive thorn in their side. A person who embraces this ethics of joder “constantly disrupts the established norm, shouts from the mountaintop what is supposed to be kept silent, and audaciously refuses to stay in [their] assigned place…” Doesn’t that sound quite a bit like Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection? This Advent, will you join me in pondering how we might mess with the powerful who maintain this mess we’re all in? And as we learn to live with the kind of hopelessness that is an urgent desperation, our hope against hope can be in the God who entered the world as an infant to teach us queer, subversive ways of achieving justice and peace for all. CLICK HERE TO VIEW AVERY'S VIDEO RECORDING OF TODAY'S REFLECTION. | 
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