Prisoners of Hope

Tomorrow begins finals week. The tree limbs are now bare. The wind blows interminably, spinning tumbleweeds of trash across the open squares. It rains most days and nights. The sun rises by 9, sets by 5. There is a dusting of snow.

These, as Anne Lammott says, are “desert days.” The darkness, the coldness, the never-shining sun. These are the days through which we trudge with a transcendent sense of purpose, if not joy and hope. These are the days when we look around and are amazed that somehow we are still moving forward.

In the mornings, I rise at 5 and boil water for coffee, read and pray and write, then sit in the darkness for a while and try my best to simply breathe in and out and feel my feet on the cold, wood floor. In the mornings, the storm of the day is just outside the door, and I am inside, wrapping myself in layers, preparing myself as well as I can for opening that door and being whisked off in a stream of movement from which I cannot stand apart. I pray to God that I will be able to find my feet as I am carried along.

People say that the season of Advent is a season of anticipation, of expectation, which to me has always sounded strange. How are we supposed to anticipate something that has already happened? Are we to manufacture feelings that, in effect, place us in a different time? Are we to trick ourselves? Or to pretend? Are we to expect something that, despite two thousand years of regurgitated expectation, has still not happened? Mary, in the Magnificat, sings, “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” My initial reaction is simply, “No, God hasn’t.” At least not that I can see.

In spite of my doubts, these past few weeks have overflowed with preparation for the birth of our Lord and, of course, for the end of our semester. My dear students have finished their final essays, which I will grade this afternoon with much disquieted concern. They have performed their final interviews and taken their major English proficiency examination. Next week they will take their final exams, after which most of them will hop on trains and buses and planes that take them, finally, home. Some of them have soared and some have faltered, but each of them has earnestly tried and improved and each of them, however wayward, has burrowed their way into my heart.

This month also saw the production of LCC’s annual Christmas play. It ended with a chorus of staff and faculty singing, with high-pitched uncertainty (especially for me, a reluctantly recruited soprano), the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s “Messiah”. At the end, we led the crowd out both doors to the entrance of the center, where the sounds of our voices bounced like points of light, singing an old spiritual that bears new relevance in Eastern Europe, “Freedom, oh freedom, Freedom, freedom is coming, Oh yes I know…” We clapped, and we danced, and we sang until our voices were tired. When we had finished, I couldn’t help but feel a sense that returns to me often despite myself, an almost giddy joy for which I have always been grateful but which I have never been able to pin down with logic.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in response to a comment once that he sounded like an optimist, said “No, no. I am not an optimist, I am a prisoner of hope – it is quite different, because, you see, [for an] optimist when things don’t go well, they want to give up. But I and other people who are prisoners of hope are able to say that this is a world where ultimately justice will prevail.”

On the way home from the Christmas play, Scott pointed out the window of the bus. “Look,” he said. “They turned the Christmas lights on.” All down the central street, the lamp posts sparkled. From some of them, trumpets erupted into cornucopias of stars. I was reminded, as I always am when I see Christmas lights strung along the streets of a city, of the nights in the hospital when I was fifteen, after the car accident, when I would sneak over to the window with my IV tree and look out onto the town below. In Jackson, there were not stars, but angels with their trumpets, angels leaning out and up, ready to announce something good to anyone who cared to listen. And here in Lithuania, just as when I was fifteen, I had that uncanny sense of joy and peace and hope moving in the darkness: joy that I was simply alive, and peace and hope that, in all of the darkest currents, God is molding something beautiful.