This is Hope
This is Hope
Is this hope?
Like many of you, I have a complicated relationship with hope. In some cases it can seem a dismissive, pie in the sky sentiment that triggers the eye-roll reflex quicker than a mansplain. At other times its the thing I desperately search for to give me any reason at all to keep going when the darkness overwhelms.
In a play written in 1991 by a Nobel-Prize-winning Irishman with a penchant for Latin (sanctus fumus, or “holy smoke,” a favorite saying of his), about a Greek warrior who lit the funeral pyre of Hercules, and was then abandoned on an island by his countrymen, until they had need of the Demigod’s bow and arrows to - y’know - defeat the Trojans, for the South African warrior for peace and justice, Nelson Mandela, Seamus Heaney includes a poem called The Cure at Troy. The first stanza goes like this:
Human beings suffer
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The world, Heaney assures us, is a messed up place and it messes us up. Every one of us. It makes us hard. Snatches the hope right out of our hands, throws it crashing to the floor, and then laughs in our face. You can look as far back into our past, or as far distant across the planet as you wish, and you will see the same. People hurting people. History seems to have little hope to offer us that any of this will change. Heaney agrees in stanza three, but then, marvelously… doesn’t.
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave…
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
The longed for tidal wave of justice… Hope and history in sync… can these things even be possible? We tell ourselves we have to believe. We have to hold out – as Heaney does here – hope for the longed-for justice.
Hope can be necessary, it can be the light at the end of the tunnel that we strive toward, it can be the song that pulls us up out of the silent darkness. And yet it can also be cruel. We have hopes that are unrealized, we put our hope and faith in something or someone and are betrayed; or worse yet, we continue to "hold out hope" that "someday things will get better," hope that others will change, that politicians, lawmakers, peacekeepers and justices will keep their promises and make the world a better place for everyone; and that blind, willing trust and hope keeps us inured in systems that exploit, oppress, and make us tacit players in our own undoing. While hopelessness kills our spark, perhaps too much hope can be a sedative. Either is the enemy of whole human beings living out our most vibrant and individual lives.
What you have here in this issue is a syllabus on hope. As we discover here, hope is not a passive emotion. It requires of us. It requires work, grit, and, sometimes, a strength of belief that has within itself the power to engender its own realization.
Hope can look like rage, it can look like fear. It can look like a flare of love in a world of plague and death, like a series of chance encounters with strangers who never even know there has been a chance encounter, like a young boy carrying an old man like a child, a difficult conversation, and a step across a boundary you hoped you would never have to cross. Hope is speaking into your own pain, and creating a space for others to do the same, it is photographs and art pieces that create a larger, more true idea of beauty, and the power to imagine a way forward, no matter the impossible circumstances.
Hope is hard. And to meet hope properly we must not be. We have to remain soft; flexible enough to walk the impossible path; to move and breathe, and keep going. Heaney concludes his poem with this admonition:
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
Once in this lifetime, once and ever after.