Hopeful Words in a Hard Time

photo by Indraneel Biswas / flikr

Frederick Buechner writes that if St. Paul was writing today he would not say: Faith, Hope, Love but the greatest of these is love. Buechner says in this strange time if Paul was writing today he would say: Faith, Hope, Love--but the greatest of these is Hope.  

Seems to me that with everything is disarray we could all use a bucketful of hope. Well, maybe even just a third of a bucket. Even though things are beginning to open up many of us are not sure at all. Especially we golden agers (but a mite tarnished) still sorta under house arrest except for a few trips to the grocery store, etc. But not much etc. 

Once in another hard time John Updike wrote: "Fear is the mood. People are bringing the shutters down from their attics and putting them back on their windows. Fences are appearing where children used to stray freely from back yard to back yard...Locksmiths are working overtime. Once we parked our cars with the keys dangling from the dashboards, and a dog could sleep undisturbed in the middle of the street. No more. Fear reigns."

I don 't know if he was referring to the depression in the thirties, the Second World War when there were gold stars in many sad windows. It could have beem when so many were scared of the Atomic Bomb when we hid under our desks at school or blacked out our windows, or maybe even built bomb shelters. And many of us had nightmares of the dreaded Hitler. Maybe Updike thought of the Viet Nam war and that sad sculpture in Washing reminding us of over 50,000 dead. He could have had in mind the dreaded PTSD or the AIDS crisis. Or the opiod epidemic. Or September 11th or Afganistan. Maybe he thought of his Mother and Father's death and a friend's miscarriage and Grief piled on top of Grief. If he was here today he would know that fear walks down most of our streets or the wailing of more than 90,000 of our brothers and sisters dead many much, much too soon.

And in every terrible time we somehow made it though. And we will this time if we don't kill each other off first. Forgetting our past we still need a bucket of hope.

And this is why I sat down one day and calligraphed this piece. I remembered troubled churches, friends I had lost or the AIDS funerals I had--or just grief over someone or something that took the stars out of their skies. Dostoyevsky said it. That marvelous Russian writer who must have written in a very dark time. I give his words to myself and to you hoping may that feathered bird of hope just might sing again to me and to us all.

Not just God bless America but God bless us all. All. ALL.

--Roger Lovette/ rogerlovette.blogspot.com