December 1, 2024

Poetry for Advent “To mingle with the Universe” On Hope

This morning I begin a four-part series for Advent in which I am bouncing off of not only scripture but poetry.  I have chosen poems that I feel help us look more deeply into the traditional Advent themes of Hope, Peace, Love, and Joy.  For today I have chosen two poems (you’ll find them printed on your bulletin insert).  One of them is very familiar to many of you, I’m sure.  It is from Emily Dickinson:

 

“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.

 

I love this poem.  An old dear friend of mine once said that you can tell a poem by whether it “flies” or not.  I think this one has sufficient wings.  I think what grabs me most about it is the punch line: this hope – this “thing with feathers” – “. . . never, in Extremity, It asked a crumb – of Me.”  That brings me to my first observation: hope is not an achievement; it is not earned or acquired with any amount of effort of meditative discipline; it is a divine grace; it is an absolutely free gift.  Nonetheless, it seems at times elusive.  When the trials and traumas of life mount up, hope can seem to be hiding somewhere – or, according to another poet, bottled up somewhere.

 

We’ve all heard of Pandora’s box.  In our popular culture Pandora’s box is the mishmash of problems mistakenly opened up by some unsuspecting soul.  But in the ancient poem from which this notion is taken, Pandora doesn’t actually have a box; it’s a jar.  The poem is “Works and Days” by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod.  In this epic work Hesiod doesn’t reveal a very high view of women.  Pandora is sort of the archetype of all women, and an unflattering one at that.  He writes:

 

The gods’ herald then gave her voice and called this woman

Pandora because all the gods who dwell on Olympos

gave her as a gift – a scourge for toiling men.¹

 

At any rate, Zeus gives a jar full of woes to Epimetheus – which Pandora then opens, apparently on secret orders from Zeus, to release all the evils it contained: hardship, numberless sorrows, and diseases.  But for some reason, Pandora was under orders from Zeus to put the lid on before Hope could escape.  Hesiod writes:

 

but the woman with her hands removed the great lid of the jar

and scattered its contents, bringing grief and cares to men.

Only Hope stayed under the rim of the jar

and did not fly away from her secure stronghold,

for in compliance with the wishes of cloud-gathering Zeus

Pandora put the lid on the jar before she could come out.²

 

Hesiod never explains why Zeus wants Hope to remain trapped in the jar, but the implied assumption is that, with the lid on the jar, men will have only trouble and sorrow with no access to hope.  It feels like that sometimes.  But I personally like Thomas Bullfinch’s take on the ancient story.  He writes, “The whole contents of the jar had escaped, one thing only excepted, which lay at the bottom, and that was hope.  So we see at this day, whatever evils are abroad, hope never entirely leaves us; and while we have that, no amount of other ills can make us completely wretched.³

 

With apologies to Hesiod (and Zeus) Hope is not bottled away from humanity for all time.  But it is hard to get a handle on and at times elusive.  In truth, I’m preaching an entire sermon about something I don’t entirely understand.  I know when Hope – that “thing with feathers” – alights in my soul and makes me mindful of the inexplicable gift it is (that it “never asked a crumb of me”).  But I’m not entirely sure from whence it came or wither it goes.

 

The prophet Jeremiah spoke of a very specific Hope.  He writes, “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land . . . .”  And we in the Christian Church hear those words as a prophetic hope that was fulfilled in the person of a baby born in a cow stall.  And that specific object of Hope – Jeremiah’s Hope and mine – does indeed offer guidance and a light (however diffuse and flickering) with which to see through this world’s often dark path to the justice and righteousness that the Branch of David would execute.  But even that light which we celebrate in this season does not entirely illumine the shadowy corners of our experience or fill our hearts with the constant glow of Hope.

 

What Jeremiah’s affirmation does suggest, however, is that whatever Hope is, it seems to be allied with that other inexplicable and elusive commodity, Faith.  I know I’ve tried at least a dozen times in sermons here to offer words that give some metaphorical shape to this thing called Faith (perhaps also something “with feathers”).  One of the finest expressions of Faith is offered in our other poem for this morning from Byron.

 

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

 

“Mingling with the Universe” is for me a most elegant expression of the essence of Faith.  Indescribable as the experience of it may be, it is most palpable in those moments “in the pathless woods,” or when “There is a rapture on the lonely shore.”  It is a sense of not merely knowing, but feeling down to the heart of one’s soul, a participation in the ageless, timeless, boundless Life of all Being.  Byron has an equally hard time describing it.  He speaks of what it is to, “feel What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.”

 

For me, the great goal of life is to take those indescribable moments in the woods or at the shore and make them a constant awareness in the depth of my heart – to feel myself mingling with the Universe in every minute of every day: at home in the living room, out at the grocery store, or driving in the car.  That’s the closest I can come to telling you what Faith is to me.  And it reveals quite a bit about what Hope is to me.  Hope is the free gift that comes with Faith – that unshakeable connection with the Heart of Being that in Byron’s words is “the Universe”.  When such Faith takes up residence in our hearts, Hope, like a precious bird, alights in our world as a wondrous gift.

 

But you and I don’t live from day to day and hour to hour in that place of wonder.  Instead, we are often like the victims of Zeus’s pranks, living as though Hope were bottled in a jar somewhere with the lid firmly closed while trouble and sorrow harass us like the flying monkeys in the Land of Oz.  Worries about our world and its fate, distress about our families, and embarrassment over our failures swirl in our heads and hearts.  And the maddening part of it all is that so many of our fears, worries, and troubles are of our own making.  It is as though we are frequently stuck in life-draining patterns from which we don’t even know how to think about escaping.  Rick Barger writes that, “The hold of the ‘rat race’ is that it works like an addiction.  We know we are on a merry-go-round and do not know how to get off of it.  Instead of jumping off, we keep buying more tickets.  As Saint Paul writes, ‘I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate’ (Romans 7:15).”⁴

 

Barger’s image is perfect: we keep buying tickets on the merry-go-round.  But I know there is a way off of it.  I can’t give you a simple prescription this morning, because indeed what we seek is as elusive as “a thing with feathers”, and is something we might “feel What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.”  But the Apostle Paul in his letter to the church at Rome gives us a hint that perhaps even our struggles and woes comprise a good starting point.  He writes, “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”  Maybe he’s right.  Maybe one has to be on the merry-go-round for a time before one knows enough to get off.  I have a feeling that a good jumping off place may be discovered “in the pathless woods” where a certain pleasure might be found, or “on the lonely shore” where one might experience rapture.  Or, perhaps it may be as simple as opening one’s heart to make it a kind of perch for “a thing with feathers.”  In any case, my prayer and my Hope for you and for me in this season of lights is that we may by the miracle of grace approach the manger of Bethlehem and find ourselves mingling with the Universe, and our souls visited by Hope.

¹ “Works and Days” in Hesiod, Second Edition, Translation by Apostolos N. Athanassakis, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, P.67, lines 81-83.

² Ibid. Lines 95-100.

³ Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch’s Mythology , Dell Publishing, 1966, p. 96.

⁴ Rick Barger, A New and Right Spirit: Creating an Authentic Church in a Consumer Culture, The Alban Institute, 2005, pp. 21-22.