I have been blessed in the course of my life to have been around people who have not given in to Fate, if you will, who have been people of faith, people who have struggled against the odds....people who would not submit to selfishness or hatred or bigotry, but who really did live lives of love and believe in it.

I remember my Aunt Lillian, when I was a kid, used to tell us—and she was quoting Booker T. Washington—I don’t know if she knew it, but she was—she used to say, “Never let anybody drag you so low as to hate them.” I grew up with a father who worked in civil rights, against the odds. Barack Obama wasn’t even on the horizon in 1960, and yet hope goes beyond...the exigencies of the moment and dares to believe in something possible that we can’t even see. It’s like George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are and ask why. We dream things that never were and ask, ‘why not?’” That’s hope. That’s living by the power of love...

There are many people who have loved America in spite of the fact that America often didn’t love them: Native American folk, Black folk, Latinx folk, poor folk—who have not always benefited from this great country—but they’ve loved America. ... Black folk—they fought for this country, ...not necessarily because of what the country was..., but because of what the country, sometimes in spite of its contradictions, stood for: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” That’s true even when our country failed to live up to that. That’s what people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg stood for; in spite of the contradiction. That’s what I mean by hope. Hope doesn’t just accept the way things are. It dares to believe that something can be different and then works to make that happen.

— The Most Reverend Michael Curry, Bishop of the Episcopal Church, in a television interview, January 2021