The Thing with Feathers

When I wrote my first newsletter column – before I even arrived in Bloomsburg – it was from a park on a converted wharf on the Delaware River in Philadelphia.  It was an old structure that had found a new use.  Today, as I write my last newsletter column, I am sitting in the offices of a medical school that welcomed its first students only last summer.  It is a new structure with a very old purpose.

I think what these bookends of my time at St Paul’s share is hope – hope that old things will be made new, and that new things will continue to arise to meet the needs of the world. 

 

Hope is complex.  It can be true or false, but even false hope can have an enlivening power.  It would seem to need a goal – that for which we hope – yet it is also a habit of living that is independent of anything that does or doesn’t actually come to be.  Its power depends partly on us – how much space in our souls we choose to give it, and yet it persists even if we give it almost no attention.  Emily Dickinson wrote about all this in one of her poems:

 

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.

 

For Christians, hope is most importantly a statement about our destiny, an eternal future in the presence of God.  But it is also the conviction that God the Holy Spirit is and will be with us now and always.  The absence of hope – despair – is a letting go of that, an embrace of the assumption that we are going it alone.

 

I belabor this subject because it seems to me that hope is often in short supply, in our part of the world and plenty of other places too.  It manifests in incivility and inaction and, most darkly, in the self-destructive tendencies that touch the lives of so many.

 

It falls to us, as people for whom hope is an article of faith, to be islands of hope, to live our hope and do our hope.  I arrived in Bloomsburg full of hope for what we might become together.  I leave you no less sure that old things will continue to be made new at St Paul’s and that the Holy Spirit will persist in bringing new inspiration, just as She has since long before we first met.

 

Blessings

 

Howie+