The Thing With Feathers

How to betray the world

Whenever I am in Houghton on Easter, I rise at 12:55 AM, wipe the sleep from my eyes, make a cup of coffee, and drive to celebrate the Easter Vigil with the monks at the Abbey of the Genesee. It is a wild and prodigal thing to do, the kind of thing that makes sense when you consider that there is a Resurrection and that it is absolutely worth turning night into day to celebrate it. (And then, on Easter afternoon, to turn day into night for a long nap.)

Fr. Gerard, the abbot, preached a homily. A monk’s life is suffused with enough silence that they are keenly aware of what actually needs to be said, way more than those of us who talk all the time and are surrounded by noise. In seven minutes he spoke with depth and clarity about the times we are in and the possibility of hope. (Seven minutes in, I am often just finishing up my opening joke.)

Here is a bit of what Fr. Gerard said:

“We are living in the middle of a tsunami. All the pillars are shaking and coming down. The global chessboard is overturned. Fires in every place and which one will be the great conflagration? These are not times of optimism, but times of increasing despondency.

These are times when we will be sorely tempted to batten down the hatches and look for the living among the dead. We will take refuge in the past, as if hanging on to some imagined past glory or going back to it will slow the bullet train down. Or we imagine some glorious future just around the corner that God will do for us….We might be tempted to ignore the present as some aberration, some bad dream we will wake from soon. To condemn the present as if God were not invested in it. This is to look for the living one among the dead.

The Living One, the Lord Jesus, is the Lord of all time. Even the present that seems fearful and chaotic. The end of time, the Kingdom of God, is not out there lost in some future time. It is here right now in His resurrected presence. I am with you always. This is our hope. To look for the living among the living is to ask ourselves - what is God asking us today? What is He saying through the circumstances of today? Where is He leading us?

To keep our eyes open with hope is not to have some blueprint for optimism. That is the hope of the worldly. To have hope is to hope when it is impossible to have optimism. Then hope becomes real.”

Fr. Gerard helped me to realize how easy it is to look for the living among the dead: how easy it is to wish to go back to a past that was not as good as I remember, or to race ahead to a future that is not going to be as good as I romanticize that it will be. Instead, I have to look for God here, now, among the living. This is, after all, the life that I have. And so to have hope is to acknowledge that God will act in this life—today, now—even when that seems impossible.

Strangely, today, hope sometimes seems like a vice—and anger somehow seems like a virtue. We feel righteous when we are angry, we feel that we have really taken hold of a situation and grasp its horror or depravity when we are angry. Anger gives us the illusion that we are right, and distracts us from seeing ourselves as we are. But having hope somehow seems wrong, like having hope diminishes the reality of what is going on. “If you aren’t OUTRAGED, then you’re NOT PAYING ATTENTION,” reads the bumper sticker, and hope can feel limp and laughable compared with the energy generated by outrage.

But here’s the thing: a life without hope is not a life I want to live. It’s not a good life. It’s not the kind of life envisioned by a God who is grieved with us by the world but wants us not to grieve as those who have no hope.

As Fr. Gerard said, hope is not mere optimism. Having hope means believing that God can really act, now, today. So we bravely keep living the kind of life that is ready for God’s action, recognizing what God is doing and ready to join that work. We keep tuning our hearts to God’s work by growing in prayer, by worshiping, by reading. We keep speaking truthfully to others, trusting that brave speaking and brave listening in the Body can really bring growth. We keep trying, we push ahead, sometimes with tears, sometimes venting with a friend, but always attentive to that flicker of hope which is the thing that tells the principalities and powers that they will never be the boss of me.