Hope's Weight
And who can bear it with us?
Dear Friend,
Thinking again about where language (and things) fail us.
We ask more of things than mere things can bear: the Christmas season; Beauty; This particular section of the trail. And by this section, I mean the 100-mile wilderness upon which we have been walking far longer than we ever recognized - the section that links civilizations - this one to the next.
The Christmas Season, language, beauty, and this particular section of the trail, while all marvelous, are what they are, and no more than more than they are. Yet perhaps each points to something other that can, indeed bear the weight of our hope. And hope is a weighty thing - maybe the weightiest of all things.
Maybe we betray our fears and our tenuous faith in words by giving hope feathers and making it fluffy and cloud-like. When we speak of hope like dandelion seeds spreading across fields on gentle breezes, eventually taking root and holding the soil in place through the rainy season, or when we imagine the hope-sprite slipping out of Pandora’s box after its terrors had already been unleashed on the world. We want to hope to be light and airy and easy.
But it’s a daring thing to hope, and more daring still to allow someone or something to carry our hope for us. Far easier to hand our fears off to another. A fear realized is rarely catastrophic, because it is partially expected. That is why it is fear at all. Fear demands almost nothing of us. Fear is safety. A hedge against what we suspect to be an invisible, terrible truth.
But hope is altogether different. Hope demands complete vulnerability and absolute nakedness. Surrender. Especially when we share it with another.
Unrealized hope can undo even the most valiant among us, unless perhaps we reframe our responses to hope’s failures as hard-fought victories over despair for which we - through our own strength and determination - are able to subdue and once defeated, to dress and pack and carry despair’s remains with us for sustenance across the long wilderness, as a talisman of our own is-ness.
I wonder if perhaps, especially recently, I have loaded my hopes onto the shoulders of language. As Abi walked this stretch of trail, she and I began a company called the “outwrite design company.” Abi would make simple cards with a cricut, emboss each by hand, and fulfill via mail order.
And I looked back on it now might that have been my baptism into my faith in words. In my belief that somehow words could bear the weight of my hope. Perhaps I dared to believe that language might be strong enough to sustain me and to sustain others.
And then this week I came across this gift from Nick Cave in my reading to waken me from this fever-dream:
There’s a vegetarian takeaway place in Brighton called Infinity, where I would eat sometimes. I went there the first time I’d gone out in public after Arthur had died. There was a woman who worked there and I was always friendly with her, just the normal pleasantries, but I liked her. I was standing in the queue and she asked me what I wanted and it felt a little strange, because there was no acknowledgement of anything. She treated me like anyone else, matter-of-factly, professionally. She gave me my food and I gave her the money and – ah, sorry, it’s quite hard to talk about this – as she gave me back my change, she squeezed my hand. Purposefully.
It was such a quiet act of kindness. The simplest, most articulate of gestures, at the same time it meant more than all that anybody had tried to tell me - you know, because of the failure of language in the face of catastrophe.
Nick Cave
I wanted him to go further. Much, much further. Because it is not only in the face of spectacular catastrophe that language fails, and fails spectacularly. It fails in the face of beauty and Love at least equally spectacularly, doesn’t it? Language fails in the face of all that is most meaningful. What does language do but shrink what is most meaningful into something that we can wrap up in fine blue linen paper, slip into our heart pockets for later, and take out for courage, especially when we are running out of strength on the last stretch of the wilderness?
Saturday, a package arrived in the mail from an old friend. He and I served aboard a warship out of Norfolk, Virginia. On one hand I don’t recall ever having spoken to him about directly about God - not even once. In retrospect, I think God may have been all we ever talked about, while we schemed and planned and navigated the oceans and noted the sunrises in the North Atlantic and how the stars shape-shifted after we sailed southward past the equator. As is often the case, neither of us necessarily recognized this as God-talk at the time. Yet, today, I wonder how could it have been anything else?
There were two books in the package: the first was Christian Wiman‘s famous essay, My Bright Abyss. (And to call it “famous” is to say that I’d never heard of it until it arrived, yesterday morning. The second was one of his many collections of poems called, “Once in the West.”)
Has there been a theme to this week? Indeed, I think there has been a theme. The Saints continue to orient me and to gently encourage me to loosen my dependence on objective things that I can experience consciously, things that are good but insufficient to rest my hope in, and to trust, instead the one who, alone can bear my hope’s weight.
That is the shift of the week - away from fear and into hope - looking past the things that I once believed might be able to sustain my hope, and daring to consider the foundations upon which these things were constructed - foundations which seem far more trustworthy. Unshakeable.
The shift, perhaps, has been a like a continuing and mercifully gentle blooming of a black lily that is no longer driven by fear but guided by longing. By the unspeakable- unnameable orientation toward God that was planted in each soul in the beginning, toward fulfillment - toward Life and Love - and which I believe is being carefully sustained in each of us by what John O’Donohue calls God’s invisible embrace of beauty.
Then it is not about the Christmas Season or Language or Beauty or the 100-mile wilderness, at all. While each may be hope-filled, they are not the source of their own hope. Rather, and perhaps, it is and has always been about that to which each of them points- to their very source: God who is, and must be - as literally as anything I know - Love, itself, and not merely wound-care or fancy words or even another really good idea. And who/what else could possibly bear the weight of hope?
In the essay Wiman writes:
I have usually known my own mind, feeling through the sounds of words to the forms they make, and through the forms they make to the forms of life that are beyond them. I have always believed in that “beyond,” even during the long years when I would not acknowledge God. I have expected something similar here. I have wanted some image to open for me, to both solidify my wavering faith and ramify beyond it, to say more than I can say.
IN TRUTH, though, what I crave at this point in my life is to speak more clearly what it is I believe. It is not that I am tired of poetic truth, or that I feel it to be somehow weaker or less true than reason. The opposite is the case. Inspiration is to thought what grace is to faith: intrusive, transcendent, transformative, but also evanescent and, all too often, anomalous.
Oremus,
Ć
“LORD, I can approach you only by means of my consciousness, but consciousness can only approach you as an object, which you are not. I have no hope of experiencing you as I experience the world—directly, immediately—yet I have no hunger greater. Indeed, so great is my hunger for you—or is this evidence of your hunger for me?—that I seem to see you in the black flower mourners make beside a grave I do not know, in the ember’s innards like a shining hive, in the bare abundance of a winter tree whose every limb is lit and fraught with snow. Lord, Lord, how bright the abyss inside that ‘seem.’”