Reverend Jennifer Nordstrom

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers — That perches in the soul…”

— Emily Dickinson

 

Hope is both delicate and powerful. It can be salvific. But in the face of deep suffering and despair, where can we find this tender thing with feathers?

 

As Unitarian Universalists we can look to our faith in something larger than ourselves, our belief in some reality that is bigger than the immediate pain of the present moment. For humanists, this might be the innate courage of the human spirit. Martin Luther King expressed his belief that though the arc of the universe is long, it bends towards justice. Buddhists and process theologians express their faith in the oneness of all being. Regardless of the immediate circumstances we face, what do we believe is the ultimate reality that holds the present moment? Against what larger belief are you experiencing the here and now?

 

Hope is also alive in the present moment. The becoming, that larger thing in which we believe, is present even in the moment of pain. The wanting of the larger beauty, the knowing its existence, is the kernel of its being born. The seeds of the dream are present here and now in the form of our imagining that dream. This moment is not separate from the thing we are imagining, because the imagining of that thing is happening now. Our practice is to open ourselves to realizing the wholeness—how now includes the dream—because we are experiencing it in our longing for it. Hope is the feeling-state of that present experience of the dream. We must reveal what already exists and is connected. In that way, hope does not shift reality, but in broadens our understanding and perceiving of reality to include the power of our dreams and belief in the larger good.

 

But there is something else in that present moment: pain. While the feathered thing, the connection to our dream and our larger understanding of reality, is there to give us hope, we are still experiencing difficulty in the present. How do we balance the need for human consolation with the ability to look at the truth of the moment that includes suffering? Can we look at suffering and see something working there, in the midst of it? What might come from facing the worst thing we can imagine and still being able to stand?

 

Hope includes a sense of possibility within mystery. Humility is connected to the not knowing: we can hope because we don’t know what will happen. We return to our faith in the larger reality when we open ourselves to our own humble not-knowing. In trust, we walk towards the horizon beyond which we cannot see. According to Walter Brueggemann, to be utterly hopeless is to be idolatrous, because you reduce the ultimate mystery to a single rational moment in history.

 

— written by  Jennifer Nordstrom, with input from the month’s theme team: Lisa Friedman, K.P. Hong, Pat Haff, and Ruth Palmer