This past Sunday I heard a pastor preach about Hope: because of the story of this day, we can have hope, she said to me. It reminded me that in previous Lenten and Easter seasons, I’m not the one who’s blasting trumpets and waving lilies and shouting for joy about resurrection; I’m quiet and anxious and awash in the mystery of my teacher not being where I left him. His body was right there. It sounds prosaic, like I’ve misplaced my keys or something, but the dissonance of him not being where he was when I saw them close the stone on him is so profound I feel it in my chest. He was just. Right. There. Now he’s gone.
There is a part of me that wonders if it’s a dirty little secret to acknowledge that I am a student of Christ who lacks hope, or at the very least, who doesn’t practice hope like it delivers and overcomes. On days when I feel bleak, when I am discouraged and enraged by the lack of love, the lack of morals, the lack of respect, that my fellow citizens feel for me, and for others with less power than I have, hope feels like an invitation to cruelty. I am supposed to have hope in a system that shows itself to be unbalanced, unfair, and unjust; I am supposed to hope that people with power chosen to represent my views and needs will act according to our shared conscience and shared beliefs; I am supposed to hope that the justice system will protect the ones I love. It feels mean to ask me to hope right now. Hope feels like a luxury for someone at less risk or with more privilege.
I won’t sing a song of victory over death for Easter; that’s a song that I’ve heard plenty of times before, and if I’m honest, it’s not as compelling, nor as challenging, as the songs I hear Christ sing about what it means to follow the Good Road in relationship with one another. Rather than hoping that my sin has been washed away, I hope that I can find or co-create a way to provide client-centered, compassionate, interfaith care for reproducing people as they grapple with the way their faith intersects their family planning choices. I hope that I am given the opportunity to bravely, tenderly chaplain folx while and after they are terminating a pregnancy for whatever reason they choose. I hope that I am brave enough to choose a life with more love today, and tomorrow, and the next day, even (or especially) if it flies in the face of chronos/capitalism/white supremacy/cis-heteronormativity. I hope that even if the path set before me is washed out that I can continue to traverse that which allows me to love others and to love myself. I hope deeply and desperately that the radical love of Creator Sets Free is even now loosing and dissolving chains that are being forged to oppress, deny, and destroy.
When I get confused or sad or scared, one of the saints I turn to is Julian of Norwich. I don’t yet know what she has to say about hope, but I know what she has to say about suffering. (Also, when I read her in old English, I read her out loud and let my tongue get kind of soft, and it’s the closest thing I can get to an imitation of Nicole Kidman. I smell a biopic.)
“… For I telle thee, howsowever thou do, thou shalle have wo. And therefore I wille that thou wisely know thy penance, which thou arte in continually, and that thou mekely take it for they penance. And than shalt thou truly se that alle this living is penance profitable.” This place is prison, this life is penance, and in the remedy he wille that we enjoy. The remedy is that oure lorde is with us, keping us and leding us into fulhed of joy.”
Did you get all that? Or, as the Penguin Classics put it:
“…for I tell you that you will suffer woe whatever you do. And therefore I want you to recognize clearly what your penance is, and then you will truly see that your whole life is a profitable penance.” This place is a prison and this life is a penance and he wants us to find joy in the remedy. The remedy is that our Lord is with us, protecting us and leading us into the fullness of joy; …”
Before I stroll away from the liberation I find so beautiful in Christ’s teachings into apologetics for Christianity as a tool of the enslavement and imperial projects, let me say I’m not positing—nor do I think Julian is positing—that we under the thumb of modern American Fascist Christian Nationalism must endure the suffering of the institution because we are the ones with less power, and to suffer makes us close to God. No. No no no no. I hear Audre Lorde whisper beside her, “I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself… the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak… I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.” If suffering is a part of life, if it is a part of the human experience, then perhaps my hope is that God is with me, protecting me as I center love and beauty and mystery and pleasure even as I work at threshold spaces and on behalf of folks who need or want abortion. My hope is that the God who affirms the right of every person to choose their reproductive present and future also affirms in me the capacity to choose wisely. My hope is that the created plane that I delight in so fully becomes less and less of a distraction from the Oneness beyond all Separation, and that I will learn to love those who would squash me with their vision of fascist, white supremacist, Christian nationalism. I also hope that they will learn to love me, because they have much to learn about love, because they see me as human, and would seek to love me as they love themselves, which is, after all, what white jesus told them to do.
I was sitting down to write, and before Julian, before Audre Lorde, I heard the words of Emily Dickinson, like a chorus: hope is the thing with feathers, the thing with feathers, with feathers, but I didn’t know more than that. The Poetry Foundation races to my rescue
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
A photo of pale feathers of a bird wing. Photo by Pascal Bullan.
Sings and never stops. So even on my bleakest days, which can feel more frequent in our world, the thing with feathers inside me is still singing Hope, because that’s what it’s designed to do. Even on that Sunday morning, when the students of Jesus were exhausted and still traumatized, when the women were gathering their jars and pots, the birds sang: the song came in through their windows and outside their doorways, just like it did in my place this morning. The things with feathers sang, because that’s what they’ve been designed to do.