Our theme for December selected by our KCUUC Council on Worship is “Hope”. As she usually does, Mary Oliver finds the most elegant ways to access abstract topics. Let me share a prose-poem by her titled Maybe hope, maybe faith:
In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness.
Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit.
The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason.
I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of———.
But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures.
But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be.
Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words.
Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.