Hope is the Thing with Feathers

Cold morning in early spring after a freezing night. On the bare branches of an alder, two dozen robins, perfectly still and silent, all face in the same direction, southeast. The tree is adorned with puffed up rusty-gold feathered things, soaking up the morning sun.  

It is not possible to hope in an abstract way, we need particular images.

What is the opposite of despair? Not happiness but vitality. Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval abbess, teacher, doctor, poet -mystic called it veriditas:a theological/ecological connotation; the greening power of the divine. Commentators on cultural malaise bemoan the lethargy and low commitment evident in the present culture especially among youth. Consider this: the cause may be eco-sorrow. As in, there is no hope, only an absence of the particulars that will restore veriditas.

American poet Emily Dickenson, who suffered many disappointments,  wrote, 

   Hope is the thing with feathers -

   That perches in the soul -

   And sings the tune without the words -

   And never stops - at all –

Gales and storms do not abash it. The robins emerged from under frozen undergrowth at morning light and knew where to focus. In Holy Week we made the tenebrous crossing into a new creation but often we cross back and forth over that border. We need images, specific orientation to move further from dark night to morning.

For prosperous Westerners, the Age of Acquisition is over.  It used to be an approved and valued habit: consumer as responsible citizen, all that collecting of stuff, renting storage space, getting more. Now it is an outmoded behaviour, rightly frowned upon like cigarette smoking. The wealth of the super-rich is so ridiculous you want to laugh. It won’t buy veriditas. It does buy power, how often for good? 

Remember those oft-quoted lines from Micah 4: “Beat swords into ploughs, spears into pruning hooks”. Those are some repairs! Biblical theologian, Walter Brueggemann describes Micah’s poem as an act of imaginative hope. Things will not stay as they are. It’s a gift and also a summons, a task for the faithful to undertake. “Don’t absolutize the present tense, don’t freeze the moments of fear”.  Brueggemann points out how Micah’s community lived under grinding conditions (kings and empires came and went, wars and conquests) but “God’s future will endlessly put the present tense at risk.”

We were amused by that old photo, a man carrying a placard: REPENT, the End is near! Our world is so focused on its crisis, no need to name them.  Digital culture puts every disaster on our screens. Who is left to listen into God’s future?  Us. We, the church, profess to be confident that there will be a future different from the now.  That, as Micah, (referring as all prophets do to their historical present concurrently with the future) says, “In the time to come,” each of us will be content with peace and smallness. Our expectations of expanded wealth, continued technological progress, entitlement to excessive consumption of fossil fuels, and more of everything will have abated.  If we really believe that, (do we?) we cannot be doom-sayers.  Awake and aware of what is happening in our present, we also see already the signs of the Kingdom of Christ, expectant of its full revelation.

How to restore vitality? What “feathered things” are in our Hope tool box? We already know what to do. No more lectures required, no abstractions and clichés.

Permit me to endorse a specific tool. Repair something; a useful object, a broken heirloom, a ruptured relationship. Sharpen a shovel.   Not recycling but a good fix.  If not possible, then use it up and do without. Throw out the junk that cannot be recycled and repent. Yes, that placard.   The fear of the “End” is in proportion to the amount of doom saying you ingest. Surprising how an increase in simplicity can enlarge veriditas.

In a poem titled Draftsman, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz asserts the labour of the ones who make good things vanquishes despair.  The poem ends, “Praising, renewing, healing. Grateful because the sun rose for you and will rise for others.” For robins too.

Hannah Main-van der Kamp, birder and poet, darns her good old woolen socks in Powell River.

IMAGE

iStock ID: 187315181 Credit: Losicar