Cultivating Resilience in 2026: Drinking from Wisdom Wells of Our Neighbors’ Traditions with Lynn Cooper

As part of FutureChurch’s 2026 Lenten programming, we welcome Lynn Cooper, who offers a reflective talk on cultivating resilience in the face of violence, injustice, and uncertainty in 2026, drawing on spiritual insights from multiple traditions.

Lynn weaves together the diary of Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman documenting life under Nazi occupation, poems from early Buddhist women, and a contemporary devotional rooted in resistance theology to explore how individuals can remain grounded without becoming overwhelmed. Through these voices, she highlights the power of inner life, storytelling, and attentiveness as practices of resistance that allow us to notice beauty and joy even amid suffering. Framing resilience as the ability to stay rooted in one’s values while adapting to hardship, she ultimately invites us all to understand our own lives as “sacred texts” and to engage in reflective practices that sustain hope, freedom, and meaningful action.

Lynn Cooper is the Associate Director of the University Chaplaincy and Catholic Chaplain at Tufts University.  She holds a Doctor of Ministry from Boston University School of Theology and an M.Div from Harvard Divinity School. Working in a multifaith chaplaincy context in higher education has been one of the great gifts of her life. At Tufts, she runs an interfaith friendship for students, faculty, and staff, facilitates the interfaith student council, and directs an intergenerational oral history that magnifies the wisdom and stories of lay folks. Lynn’s first book, Embracing Our Time: The Sacrament of Interfaith Friendship, came out in May 2025 from Fortress Press.

Opening Prayer (as originally developed by Olivia Hastie for Ash Wednesday)

Today we feel the cool trace of ash pressed gently on our skin.

Dust, we are told. Dust and beloved.
We remember we are made of earth and breath, and alive with holy possibility.
This Lent, we fast not to shrink but to awaken.
Nurture our activist spirit, O God,
steady as rivers shaping stone,
persistent as roots finding water in the dark.

Let our repentance be a turning toward justice.
Let our prayers move our feet.
Mark us with ash, but also with vision.
Mark us with dust, but also with resolve.
For we are of the earth – and the earth is aching.
We are of the Spirit- and the Spirit still speaks.

This Lent, may we tend what is holy within us until it rises –
steady, luminous, and brave enough to love the world into change. Amen

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