Hope, I am grateful to note, has a habit of showing up at my door when I least expect it. Sometimes (not always), on those days when I am overwhelmed by everything not yet done and all that has gone wrong, when the odds against me are stacked as high as the unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink, when my hair is disheveled and I haven’t a prayer of turning things around, it is then that hope has a way of knocking on the door and walking right in. If I’m lucky, it is then, when I need it, that hope comes unbidden, with an energy and determination beyond anything I could imagine.
Of course, there are also times when hope fails to show up, and I need to send out a search party just when I am least equipped to organize one. But for now, we might begin our reflections on hope by considering how surprisingly commonplace it can be when we open our eyes to its many forms. Consider the furry and industrious description from Julie Neraas’s book Apprenticed to Hope:
“[A] fierceness resides in me that exhibits all the busyness and fury of a small, persistent animal. It digs and digs, bites and claws at any corral that threatens to fence it in.”
It’s a description that helps me think of hope as something common, industrious, and tenacious, like the squirrels running across my backyard, burying their nuts for a winter’s day. Noticing hope’s many faces and forms of animation can awaken us to the presence of hope in the most unexpected times and places.
IN YOUR OWN WORDS:
Material needed: For this prompt, you’ll need a magazine or two with interesting photos of varied events and scenes.
Where do you see hope? What does it look like, and what is it doing? From a magazine, choose a photograph of a scene or event that piques your interest. It might work best with a picture that presents some interaction or dynamic element, conflict, or story, rather than a still-life composition or a close-up.
Don’t overanalyze what you select or why. Just pick a photo and look for one thing in it that might represent hope. It can be the main subject of the photo or a very small part of it — anything that, for whatever reason, reminds you of hope and what hope does as you look at that picture.
What is hope, and what does it do? Write about the image of hope you’ve found in the photograph, describing what hope is and what it does using the following prompts. Use them however you like, writing at length on each, or alternating between them:
Hope is the thing with . . .
Hope is the thing that . . .
Borrowing Hope Until Hope Is Restored
That’s what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds us. -- Mark Doty (Heaven's Coast)
Unfortunately, hope doesn’t always show up when you need it. Hope sometimes vanishes when we are facing insurmountable personal difficulties, or it might go running when we try to absorb the daily news of so many tragedies and injustices. We can simply run out of hope.
When this happens, we might need to borrow hope in the same way that we might ask a neighbor for a cup of sugar. Borrow, of course, is a loose term for these exchanges—for neither the sugar nor the hope is typically returned in the same form, but often makes its way back transformed, whether in the form of cookies freshly baked and shared or in the open-hearted presence of one whose hope has been restored.
Symbols of Hope Remind Us Of What Is Possible
Each of us has a storehouse of symbols from which we borrow hope when we need it. We might turn to nature, in the garden outside our door or in the endless forests of a wilderness area. Or we might turn to religious symbols—the rainbow or the dove, the lotus rising out of mud, the Boddhi tree, the Taoist bowl of fruit, the Mesopotamian tree of life, or the Christian cross.
We look to these and other symbols as reminders of what is possible but not visible in the present moment. They provide us with a promise on which to fix our eyes, what the poet and former Czech president Václav Havel described as a wider horizon that reorients the heart.
“[Hope] is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.” [The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times by Paul Loeb]
Havel knew something about borrowing hope in dire circumstances. As a dissident during his country’s occupation, he was imprisoned numerous times, once for almost five years. From his prison cell, he wrote repeatedly about that wider horizon, “the outer rim of the discernible, intelligible, or imaginable world,” as his source of hope. [Letters to Olga, by Václav Havel.]
Finding Hope In Your Surroundings
Michèle Najlis, a writer I met in Nicaragua almost thirty years after the Sandinista revolution shared her own story of borrowed hope. She was a former Sandinista who had been heavily involved in the struggle that overthrew Nicaragua’s longtime brutal dictator in the late 1970s, and she described the victory of the revolution that occurred in her youthful years as seeming like a fairy tale. By the 1990s, though, when the revolution’s short-lived victory had already given way to the combined forces of a major hurricane, corruption, and international interference, Najlis lost all hope and fell into a severe two-year depression.
She described how a friend helped her by suggesting that she focus on living just one day at a time. For two years, she struggled to live this way, hour by hour, day by day, with the care of gentle friends and family, until finally what saved her was a basic act of resistance she learned from a story told by Viktor Frankl. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl described how a dying woman he knew in the concentration camps took hope—and joy—from a single branch of a chestnut tree with just two blossoms visible through her window.
Recalling this, Najlis looked around her room and began to focus on a plant—the one thing alive in the room—as the only act of resistance she had left in her. The plant’s green promise, resisting despair and insisting on life, was eventually enough to call her back from her long depression.
The power of symbols is strong, both in the moment and on the page as we pass them on to others. Just as Frankl’s story about the branch of the chestnut tree helped Najlis to find hope, perhaps her story about the plant in her room extends that hope to others as well.
IN YOUR OWN WORDS:
Materials needed:For this prompt, you’ll need some colored markers or pencils or crayons and a plain unlined piece of paper (although you can do this in a journal if you like).
Where do you go to borrow hope? What objects, symbols, scriptures, places, people, rituals, and other practices lend you hope when you need to borrow it? Make a list. It might be a tree or a plant, a loved one, or maybe a religious symbol—a statue of Kwan Yin, a crucifix, or a set of prayer beads. Or it might be something practical like a cane that helps you walk, or a computer that helps you talk. But it should be something that “happifies” you, as the universalist Hosea Ballou would have put it in the 1800s, as it leads you back to hope.
Now, write the names of these sources of hope on your page, recording some in large type and others smaller, in any arrangement or direction and using different kinds of writing, if you want. Choose different colors for each source of hope and spin the page as you work to record the words in different directions, outlining them in bubbles or squares or any shape that comes to mind. Or turn the whole thing into a word picture, if you like.
When you’re finished with your cluster of words, notice which words are prominent and which might seem to whisper more softly, and how the words might be related or where they stand alone. Then consider where you might keep this page for easy retrieval when you need it. You might want to paste it in your journal or post it near your desk. Or, if you want to make your own Pandora’s jar, take a bowl or any container you like and fold the page to store it in the bottom, where you can reach for it when needed.
If you wish to write more after making your word cluster, you might begin with the following prompt:
It was there when I needed it . . .
©2013 by Karen Hering.
All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission from
Atria Books/Beyond Words Publishing. beyondword.com
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Writing to Wake the Soul: Opening the Sacred Conversation Within
by Karen Hering.
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About the Author
Karen Hering is a writer and ordained Unitarian minister. Her emerging ministry of poetry and story, Faithful Words, offers programs that engage writing as a spiritual practice and a tool for social action. Her writing has been published in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including the Amoskeag literary journal, the Star Tribune (Minneapolis), and Creative Transformation. She serves as a consulting literary minister in St. Paul, Minnesota. Visit her website at http://karenhering.com/
