The thing with feathers (Migrated from PostHope)

It was said to me recently that there are "no words" for what I am going through.  My immediate reply: "Oh, there ARE words." I was a little surprised at myself having just recently shared here about feeling "tongue-tied", having grown weary of the asking and the answering of the question "How are you doing?"

Though there are certainly unspeakable horrors in this world, often the words that do exist are just too hard to utter for fear of reinforcing their reality.  Sometimes, however, saying the scary part out loud actually dissipates the fear-invoking power of the reality we are facing. 

I realized last week that there is a word scarier than the "c-word" when it comes to cancer.  In reading through CT scan reports the words "no sign of metastatic disease" is always a huge relief.  The "m-word" in all of it's forms can be devastating as we learned with news of metastasized prostate cancer in a friend recently. There is more heaviness than hope as our friend faces into this next phase of his journey and treatments, and yet that is the very nature of hope. Is it not?  Hope is not heavy. Emily Dickinson writes:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

When there are "no words," hope remains, like a birdsong. 

Hebrews tells us that faith is the SUBSTANCE of things HOPED for which brings me to another, more substancey "m-word" that God has given me to contemplate in this season. MANNA. The following is from a collection of Thought Seeds for Every Day of the Year, a book sent to me by friends from the Brüderhof and publishers of "Plough" magazine. 

"Manna - strength from above - is given us only for one day at a time. You only need faith for today. So don't allow yourself to worry about whether you'll have strength for what might come after that. No day is alike, and you yourself change from day to day. Joy in life and courage are not constant either, but come and go. Thank God, his mercy is new every morning, and his manna - the dew of the Holy Spirit - falls and refreshes our souls again and again."  - Walter Hümmer (co-founder of the Christusbruderschaft Community in Selbitz, Germany)

I've always thought of manna as a light and airy substance. As a little girl, I imagined manna to look exactly like the tiny little square communion bread offered once a month at our evangelical church.  CANCER and METASTASIS are indeed heavy words when weighed against "hope" and "manna". These latter words cannot outweigh the unspeakable horrors of this world as their very nature is not to "weigh in" but to lift up and to give us strength to rise above. HOPE and MANNA can lift us up and out and above our circumstances - like a rainbow in between the gales of the storm. The remainder of Dickinson's poem may resonate strongly with other Californians in light of recent storms we have experienced here on the west coast.  I've included the whole poem below, along with a picture (3 actually) of the rainbow God sent my way this week - truly the brightest I had ever seen. 

“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.