The Rhythm of Hope: Poetry, Faith, and God’s Promises
Growing up with a mum and grandmother as English teachers meant that I developed a love for literature and poetry at a young age. This love led to gifts of books, and when I was around 14, both my mum and grandmother gave me classics.
My mum gave me three of the penguin little black books. A Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, Tyger Tyger by William Blake and My life stood a loaded gun by Emily Dickinson. It was here that began my love of Emily Dickinson. At school she was always my first choice for essays and reading responses. My friend recently got a collection of her poetry, and I went through and bookmarked a few of my favorite poems for her to read.
One of Emily Dickinson’s poems (and one I love) feels particularly appropriate for this week of Advent.
“ “Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.”
The poem rolls and flows and gets stuck in my brain. It sings to me just like the unspoken metaphor. The hope she speaks of is one that makes it home inside us, it warms us. Hope is a comfort.
It may be knocked around, but the hope she speaks of is deep—one that keeps singing through storms, wind, cold lands, and strange seas. The hope keeps giving but doesn’t ask of us anything; instead, it carries us through.
The hope that Emily is speaking of here speaks so strongly to me of Christ, of the hope that we have in him. It is grounded in something real and tangible but also miraculous that stands against all odds.
The hope of Christ makes its way into my soul and keeps me going beyond all reason. It carries me through the strangest times, the most unpredictable, and while storms come and go, my heart keeps singing His song, keeps beating to the rhythm of hope.
My hope is based on the miraculous saving act of grace. God came once into human history to redeem and transform and has promised he will again. What he came and did was unexpected, what nobody would have picked or understood. But it is the strange set of circumstances that led to God embodying humanity that my hope is in.
My hope begins at Christmas with the miracle of God becoming human, coming as a baby to an unexpecting mother and father.
It is not a hope of circumstance, it is not a hope that anything in the world around me will make sense. It is not about optimism. It is that there is no evidence that things will get better, yet anyway I chose to hope.
The choice of hope is the precedent set throughout the bible. The hope is never in the world around us, the circumstances before us. Instead, it is always in Christ, always in God and the redeeming miracles he continues to act out for us.
This hope is one of the great scandals of Christianity, it is a hope beyond all sense and sensibility. It is a hope that goes beyond what we can see and know.
“Christianity was accused, at one and the same time, of being too optimistic about the universe and of being too pessimistic about the world.”
Our hope is one that what happened to Jesus, the resurrection hope, is a foretaste of what will be happening to the whole universe. A hope in the transformation and renewal of all things, for creation to be renewed and revived, realigned with God.
The hope comes from what we see around us, we see a world of despair and darkness. “This present evil age” is what Paul calls it. We see a world in desperate need of renewing and reviving. If my hope was in anything of the world I might as well give up now. But it is in God’s plan and vision for the whole cosmos. It is in God himself; he is the foundation and author of all hope I hold.
Hope is sometimes an awful and difficult thing. It keeps us going and moving forward, even when all inside me wants to drop. With the resurrection hope I hold, even when all else feels hopeless, the hope of Christ is there, ever constant and consistent. Hope is what allows me to dream, to think of a future where something might be better than it is now. Hope is what, in the face of all difficulties of life, I think something might change. When everything looks dreary and bleak, still the bird sings in my soul. Its song echoes in the dark caverns and emptiness of my spirit. Even when my spirit is depleted, and I am left on the floor, the hope remains. It is the hope that keeps me praying even when the cries of my heart go unanswered. It is the hope the spirit gives me that lets me see the answered prayer in the midst of all the unanswered ones. It is the hope that allows me to ask God the question, “Why did you answer that prayer out of all of them?”
The hope is a gift, but sometimes it’s a gift that feels like receiving socks. I needed a new pair of socks, but all of mine had holes or blisters. I probably wasn’t going to buy more socks for myself. God gives me really cool socks as well, socks that I will wear until they run into the ground, but they are God socks, so they never do. Yet when you open the present, and all you have are socks, you can’t help but look at them with a fake smile and say, “Thanks.” *
Our Father gives us good gifts, yet sometimes we can’t see how good the gift is. We can’t see how these socks are going to carry us through everything, how they are exactly what we need – for now and in the long haul. We don’t know how to thank God for the things that carries us through because we can’t see how it will carry us through till the end. But one day we will look at our socks of hope and all the places we went because of them and say, “Thanks God, these were really good socks.” And he will say to us, “How much more will you, Father in heaven, give good gifts?”
*Disclaimer: the author actually loves receiving socks, especially cool ones. This is an exaggeration for literary purposes.
