Where Hope Sings

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

—Wendell Berry

Hope is so often written about or portrayed as a light that dispels a darkness that seems overwhelming, overpowering. In the depths of despair, a little spark is kindled that enables one to go one: a little warmth is thrown out as a bulwark against the cold. There is, ofcourse, truth and power to this image, and yet also, it can be a little thin, casting hope as just a sort of feeling that one resurrects from the ashes to keep going. Ask “what is hope?” and the answer can be wispy: it’s a feeling, a belief that not all is lost, a sense that one can keep going, that the trials will end. 

I find this unsatisfying. Feelings are all very well and good, but there isn’t always a lot of agency or action involved in these answers. Perhaps this dissatisfaction is why I love Wendell Berry’s little poem about the darkness, which refuses to throw back or dispel the dark, but commands, “To know the dark, go dark.” Embrace it. Breathe it. 

This can be hard when we think of the dark as all the bad things: our despair, our fear, our doubt, our suffering. Why embrace that? Why seek to know it? Why not kindle the light and banish the shadows? 

Well, because hope lives there in the darkness, not as a feeling, but as a conviction, a belief, that the darkness teaches us something. If, as Berry commands, we go without sight, then we might find indeed that it blooms and sings, and it is this blossoming, this song, that is hope. As Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Darkness, “Authentic hope requires clarity—seeing the troubles in this world—and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.” To know the dark, go dark: then find whatever in it that is not dead, or leaden, or despondent. Hope lives not in the light, but in the darkness: Berry’s final line that the dark “is traveled by dark feet and dark wings,” considered in this way, can intersect surprisingly with Emily Dickinson’s claim that “Hope is the thing with feathers”: indeed it is, and this little bird lives and sings in the darkness, calling us not out of it but into it. 

The verbs in this poem are also so telling: know, find, bloom, sing, travel. These are not airy, wispy concepts: they have agency and movement to them, and this is what hope call us to: it’s not just a little light outside us beckoning us onward, but a fire within us that motivates us to act. We should not sit still, looking at our little candle: hope ought to crack us open so that something new can emerge. While Denise Levertov’s “On the Mystery of the Incarnation” never mentions the word hope once, her invocation of awe that only emerges when we have faced the worst of ourselves is, I think, what hope through the Incarnation looks like: 

It's when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.

Prayer: 

Whenever we find ourselves in darkness, remind us that this is a place to know, and not merely to escape. Let us recognize this darkness not as a barren, forsaken place, but where hope makes its home. And upon meeting hope in this place, may we be kindled not only towards feeling, but towards action, so that whoever or whatever may be suffering in this darkness may also come to bloom and sing. 

Amen.