In perhaps one of her most well-known poems, Emily Dickenson wrote of hope:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all …

My mother had a friend named Pauli Murray.  I’ve mentioned her before, and will say again that if you’ve never heard of her, not only are you not alone but you should immediately Google her name.  Her take on hope – as viewed through her experiences as the first African American woman to do a great many things – is a little bit different than Dickenson’s:

Hope is a crushed stalk

Between clenched fingers

Hope is a bird’s wing

Broken by a stone.

Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty —

[…]

Hope is a song in a weary throat.

I have made no secret of the fact that I have long lived with the mental illness of depression.  So there have been times when hope was, for me, merely a concept.  I have often been told that one of the purposes of preaching is to, “give people hope.”  A major purpose of religion, too.  Give people hope.  But what about when you have no hope to give?

No doubt many of you have also experienced times in your lives when hope seemed impossibly far away.  You were, if you will, not only hope-less, but hope-empty.  Like a Hogwarts student whose encounter with one of Azkaban’s dementors has sucked all the joy from their lives, something in your life had sucked out all of the hope.  Not everyone knows this experience, thank God, but many of us do.

Yet even those who don’t know the loss of hope in such depth, have had some sense of it.  When you’re stuck in a financial situation from which no escape seems possible – there is something you can do to change the way things are, but you can’t afford to do that thing, so nothing changes, nor is there any hope of change.  Or you look at the enormity of the many problems facing our country, our world; or maybe you look in great detail at just one of them; and you’re overwhelmed by the feeling that there’s nothing you can do and, maybe, nothing that can be done.  Or you watch a loved one – say, a child or a sibling – making bad choice after bad choice and you know there is simply nothing you can do … you want to hold on to hope, but you’re not quite sure where to find it.

So how do we hope, when all hope seems gone?

This may seem like a leap, but bear with me.  Even folks who’ve never read the Bible probably have at least a passing familiarity with the 23^rd Psalm:  “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want …”  These are clearly the words of a confident person; the affirmation of not just the belief, but the certainty, that things are going to be okay.  In other words, these are the words of someone who knows in their bones that hope “never stops at all.”

So it’s always been interesting to me that the psalm which immediately precedes this is its complete antithesis.  The 22^nd Psalm is not so well known as its near neighbor, yet the people who authored the Gospel stories knew it well enough to use its first line as one of the last things Jesus is supposed to have said as he hung on the cross:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, but I find no rest.

This is a psalm of hope-less-ness.  These words were written by someone who’d seen hope’s “wing broken by a stone.”  These were the words of someone who knew, first-hand, the feeling of hope being “crushed … between clenched fingers.”  This is the song of someone from after the dementors had come through and taken all they could.  This is the song some of us know only too well, and which I’d wager most of us know at least in part.

Yet here’s the thing I find so interesting in the juxtapositions of these two psalms.  The 22^nd Psalm continues with the author essentially saying that even though they have absolutely no reason to have faith, to have hope, they will do so because of the stories their ancestors have told.

 [Y]ou are the one Israel praises.
In you our ancestors put their trust;
they trusted and you delivered them.
To you they cried out and were saved;
in you they trusted and were not put to shame.

In other words, I will continue to hope because I’ve been told that there is something to hope for, and I believe those who have told me this.  And then what happens?  Well, apparently the psalmist experienced the inevitable change from the winter of deep despair (to paraphrase Shakespeare) into the glorious summer of renewed hope.  And we know this because in their very next poem-song they’ve written, essentially, “Well what do you know?  My ancestors were right.  The Lord is my shepherd!”  Having walked through “the valley of the shadow of death,” they were now on the other side, resting on the green pasture beside still water.

And I would say that, perhaps, this is one of the major reasons for religion – to pass on humanity’s stories of hope.  To curate the tales of confidence confirmed so that we can look for them, and to them, when we have none of our own.  Our religious community exists – at least in part – so that none of us need let hopelessness be our only song, so that none of us need give in to the fear that a loss of hope engenders, so that each of us can remember that among all of us there is evidence that hope is not in vain.

Pax tecum,

RevWik