This week I’ve been participating in Hope*Writers five day writing challenge. Today’s theme is HOPE and I decided to write a longer form essay influenced by this prompt. Visit my Instagram page to check out the other four themes from this week, which include QUIET, INTENTION, EXPLORE, and SERENDIPITY.
The other day I voiced something that’s been fermenting in my brain for a while that I hadn’t given words to: 2020 was a wasted year. At least, that’s how it felt. I think back on the slow months of lock down, the lack of work, the loneliness and isolation, the depression and anxiety, and decreased motivation. I remember the beginning of it all, when well-meaning folks posted regularly about making the most of stay-at-home orders. “If you don’t emerge with new life skills you’ve wasted your time,” they said. I have little to show for the days, weeks, and months that passed more slowly than any other season of my life. So much of that period is a blur of chronic apathy and Netflix.
My soul was despondent, bogged down by feelings of overwhelming hopelessness. I’d see tone-deaf Facebook posts positing trust in God should supersede fear and sadness (“we haven’t been given a spirit of fear,” they’d say). There seemed little acknowledgement of the collective grief of a global pandemic, the deaths-by-virus that began increasing, inching closer and closer to our own circles.
My feelings were compounded—and I know I’m far from alone in this—by a fraught and difficult election. On November 2, I trudged across the street to the neighborhood Methodist Church, and dropped off my ballot in the mailbox feeling a particular heaviness. I returned home and read Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of the Wild Things,” which offered the slightest glimmer of hope: “I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
Hope Edelman, a grief and loss coach, wrote in a February Washington Post op-ed, “As the nation mourns more than 500,000 lives lost a year into the coronavirus pandemic, another pandemic wave is building — of grief...For the past century, Americans’ response to grief has been to minimize its impact and suppress the emotional pain. We treat grieving as an individual affair, with mourners responsible for ‘getting over’ their losses, mostly in private. Social isolation during the pandemic has made grieving even more solitary.”
The past 19 months have been filled with many little disappointments adding up. For some, it’s been truly brutal. Some are overworked. Some are out of work. Some have lost loved ones, others have not been able to visit with their loved ones. Some have shuttered their businesses, others were forced to delay grand openings. People are divided, even within the church, debating (sometimes raging) about masks, vaccines, and freedom. And while some things may be better now (thanks to a vaccine and return to some semblance of normalcy) we still carry unhealed wounds from a grief-filled season that’s (unfortunately) not over yet.
Fred Rogers was notorious for holding space for emotions on his children’s show. The first episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” dealt with the topic of assassination as it aired in the aftermath of JFK’s murder. Fred knew kids would be frightened and believed it was best to engage emotions rather than bury them, tell kids not to worry, or “just trust Jesus.”
There is hope in Jesus, hope beyond the veil that cloaks this world. But we don’t know it fully, and sometimes the hardships of life descend in such a way hope seems impossibly out of reach. The way we speak of hope matters, not as an elusive, intangible thing we spew to dispel emotional truth. But a deeply-embedded certainty, sometimes no bigger than a mustard seed, that clings and grows and exists even when we don’t feel it.
Emily Dickinson wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” The Psalmist wrote, “I call as my heart grows faint (hopeless); lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” The Psalmist doesn’t speak of false hope. In fact, he speaks of the reality of hopelessness that cannot be unconvinced or fixed with shame. When our hearts grow faint, we ask for refuge, for the safe haven of the arms of God that envelope like the wings of a mother hen.
A liturgy from “Every Moment Holy” called “Weep Without Knowing Why” reads,
“Is it any wonder we should weep sometimes,
Without knowing why? It might be anything.
And then again, it might be everything…
And yet, there is somewhere in our tears
a hope still kept.
We feel it in this darkness,
like a tiny flame,
when we are told
Jesus also wept…”
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