hope

• the thing with feathers

  Hope is the thing with feathers

  That perches in the soul,

  And sings the tune without the words,

  And never stops at all,

  ~~“Hope is the Thing With Feathers” by Emily Dickinson

• maybe not feathers

  I asked folks to share a particular poem (or excerpt of a poem) that they often, or even occasionally, call to mind. Someone quoted that famous Emily Dickinson poem: “Hope is the thing with feathers.” 

  There were murmurs; it’s a well-loved line. 

  However, clearly someone objected a little — in friendliness and fierceness. They said, “Hope may not have feathers / but it’s definitely got claws.” There was laughter, and I loved it.

  ~~Padraig O’Tuama in “Changing the Line.”

• not so frail

  I found the hope I practiced was fundamentally different from the frail little bird I pictured as a seven-year-old. This hope was strength. This hope was endurance. This hope actively clung to the fringe of faith on the threshold of tragedy. Hope, by its very nature, thrives in the liminal places of life—between the promise and the coming true. It’s the hush before the curtain rises, the space between lightning and thunder, the Sabbath between death and life. It’s the quiet spaces in prayer when we wonder if we’re talking to ourselves. Hope is not fragile. It exists to wrestle with our doubts.

  Sometimes it’s tattered, with a bloody nose and a black eye, but it always stands back up. Hope is a practice, a repetition, a habit.

  ~~Dawn Morrow, “The Habit of Hope.”

• bloody but unbowed

  In the fell clutch of circumstance

        I have not winced nor cried aloud.

  Under the bludgeonings of chance

        My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  ~~from “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley

I have a friend who is going through a very hard time in life. I personally hate it when people say to me, “You look tired,” but when this friend sits down, she can hardly stay awake. She looks tired. As she talks about what is going on, she gives some details and then hastily talks about her faith. When I watch her, I keep thinking about the line from the poem “Invictus:”  “My head is bloody, but unbowed.”

What a powerful line that is! What image does it bring up in your mind? I think of a memory from junior high. There was a fight I watched one day from my seat on the bus. A bunch of kids mobbed around a popular, football-quarterback-type of boy—big, blonde, and strong. The fight didn’t last long. Teachers waded in and separated kids, some of them getting struck in the process. In the end, I saw the quarterback kid standing, stooped a bit, his face sweaty and bloody. That’s the first image that comes to my mind when I hear, “My head is bloody, but unbowed.”

The quotes above are all related to hope. I love Emily Dickinson’s poem of hope like a little bird singing a neverending song. But, as someone said in the poet Padraig O’Tuama’s audience, we remember birds have claws. As Dawn Morrow wrote, hope has strength and endurance, it’s not fragile:

It exists to wrestle with our doubts. Sometimes it’s tattered, with a bloody nose and a black eye, but it always stands back up. Hope is a practice, a repetition, a habit.

Another friend told me she often thinks her faith is wrestling. Like Jacob when he wrestled all night with what he thought was a man and he said, “I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared” (Genesis 32:22-32).

I’m not sure exactly where I’m going with this. I don’t have a tidy ending line. I guess I wonder if you might be feeling like it’s hard to hold on to hope, and maybe these quotes and reflections can strengthen you as you endure and wrestle and stand on the precipice between death and life and sit in the quiet spaces in prayer when we wonder if we’re talking to ourselves.