What's with the name?
In a recent conversation with Joseph Pearce on my podcast (you can listen here it’s about homeschooling) he described poetry as the music of language. I loved that. I’ve always loved poetry. I read it often, coming back to some favorites very often, trying new things. I have a bunch of poetry memorized, although as I get older I find myself forgetting a lot of what I had known, and I’ve written a few poems some pretty good, most quite terrible.
Emily Dickinson is a longtime favorite which makes me pretty ordinary in my poetry reading and her Hope is the Thing with Feathers is probably her best known poem that most people have, at least, a nodding acquaintance with. It’s a simple verse but the powerful message that hope survives the harshest of conditions and asks nothing in return always resonates.
It is a very Catholic thing to have hope. As a Catholic I live in joyful hope. Hope of eternal life, hope to meet my Savior. Hope to again see my son who left this world for the next before I was ready to say good bye. I live in hope to someday see all of my children grow into their grown up lives and I hope to someday have some grandchildren. I live in joyful hope of many things. I hope for good for the world, for peace for all people. It is why I decided to name this newsletter “The Thing With Feathers”, because I choose to always hope.
It is also a very human thing to hope, even if you are not a person of faith. People need to have hope, but from what I see in the news lately people seem to be losing that capacity.
The opposite of hope is despair.
Spend five minutes on Twitter and despair is largely the feeling you get. It’s a special kind of hell people are creating for themselves there.
We can be part of the despair that is shattering our world or we can hope. I am choosing hope. Hope that people come to know they are wonderfully made in the image and likeness of their creator. Hope that people will realize all life is precious and valuable. Hope that it dawns on humanity that what divides us less important than what unites us. Culture can be built upon the simplest things, faith, family, food, beauty, music, art, those things that elevate humanity. Those things that have feathers.