Dear Drummers, I write this a few moments after President-elect Barak Obama’s magnificent acceptance speech in which he reminded me that change is possible and that hope is the beginning of change. Change is the body in action and all action is impossible without food. Hope is the food. Without the food of hope, the body weakens and actions are made impossible. For as long as there have been humans, it has been tempting to fall into hopelessness and the languor of the body. For far too long our leaders have deliberately, systematically starved us of the food of hope, in order to make us weak so that they may be left free to enact their avaricious visions. Obama’s remarkable victory teaches me many things, but the one I thinking of right now is my embarrassment at how often I have turned away from hope and accepted, in my own way, the processed food of cynicism and the colorless side dishes of complaint and sarcasm. Hope is often seen as a gift of the Holy Spirit, an emergence of Spiri...