I've always liked Emily Dickinson's definition of hope as "the thing with feathers that perches in the soul." Have you ever walked a wooded path and in the surrounding silence suddenly sensed the thump of wings as if they were right upon you, or even emanating from you?
And it occurs a mere second before you see some large fowl sweeping off above you, some hawk or huge owl making its way further up the path. It's an almost enchanted moment, a signal from another world. Those wings and their might make something known before the other senses take over. Perhaps this near mystical type of experience can be closely identified with hope. It is more than anticipation; it is, rather, the first part of a continuing action. But before full flight the creature with wings doesn't just sit. It readies itself – that is, it perches.
Is this too poetic a version of Advent? After all, the season calls us to penance just like Lent, except with different images and expectations. If I think about it, though, I'm not so sure there can be too poetic a version of Advent. I've never viewed penance as self-flagellation, but instead as some kind of discipline leading to right or corrected direction, to getting back on the path.
In this penitential Advent season, all we are doing is riding with Joseph and Mary along the rough path to Bethlehem.
Fathers: Remember the last days of your wife's pregnancy? Recall the worry in the deepest places of your heart about how you were going to feed, clothe, educate and care for the child to come?
Don't forget to call to mind that the Blessed Mother was, on that rough road, a tabernacle of the Blessed Sacrament – and His Presence lit up the night. That's our Advent. The journey of the Holy Family is our journey – the growing sense that something takes flight in human history, in the history of each of our souls.
To those of you new to the liturgical seasons of the Church, explore the devotions, deepen your prayer life, and cultivate some of the lovely traditions of the holidays as we anticipate the event that changed the world. If you are new to the Catholic faith, you will see that Bethlehem is getting ready to be ubiquitous for us, hopefully as pervasive as the secular season's rampant consumerism and denial even of the Name of Christ. You will see it in the liturgical readings, where we hear of St. John the Baptist, a "voice crying in the wilderness," telling us that our "...winding ways will be made straight and the rough roads made smooth," and St. Paul telling us that the Lord is near and to make our requests known to Him.
You will see Bethlehem in the Advent wreaths that symbolize victory and the candles within them that, when lit, remind us all of the glory of the Christ Child's birth. And you'll see it in the Advent calendars and the accompanying prayers and the opening of the windows of our souls. While frenetic Black Fridays abound in stores and cyberspace, our Christ Child awaits patiently in another room, for a little while apart from the intricately carved and painted Mary and Joseph and the glued manger and the animated shepherds and the cloth snow and the painted wooden star.
And we wait in this season of Advent, for the children to hold Him delicately and bring Him to His manger of straw on Nochebuena or on the morning of His birth. And we wait in this season of Advent for the sorrow for our sins to turn to joy. And we wait, in this most beautiful of seasons, for the Christ Child to come once again in perpetual innocence and love and wonder. And we feel Him, peaceful and sure winged, perching in our souls.
Fred Gallagher is an author, book editor and former addictions counselor. He and his wife Kim are members of St. Patrick Cathedral in Charlotte.
Hope
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.— Emily Dickenson