Emily Dickinson sings to us
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.
In general a Zen Buddhist might warn against hope, certainly clinging to hope as if it were a rock in a storm.
That wonderful picture of Ikkyu holding up that skull to the ladies of the court is a nice example.
Often I could be that Zen Buddhist doing the warning.
But some may have noticed my Easter sermon was all about hope.
I think it appropriate to add a bit of an explanatory coda to the sermon. Which is this briefest of meditations…
Just as calling us to this present moment is not a call to cut off memory or thoughts of the future, but rather to find the center of things here, now, the warning against hope and despair, is a pointer to something rather more profound, a larger and more generous encounter with this world out of which we are born, within which we live, and which is our eternal return.
And, again, I find myself thinking of Ikkyu and his skull…
There is, after all, the simple biology of it. There is something in our raw animality that births hope with each breath. As long as we’re alive there is hope. And the loss of hope is the loss of life itself.
Hope and life are inextricably intertwined. One could say they are one.
The problem only happens when we shift the god hope into God itself.
Here clinging consciousness makes lies of truths. Here we spin stories that turn hope into a mirage. Lots of spiritual stories do this.
But here’s the real deal.
Hope asks nothing of us.
Hope promises nothing.
It just is.
And our responsibility to it is simply to allow it to go about its business.
Return here where all things are resolved.
We do this and the words fall away and all that remains
is what we are.
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