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COMMENTARY
March 1, 2008
On hope
Saint David’s Day! I like to proclaim this whenever it falls on a day when my column appears. And the saint’s day delayed by a day in a leap year must be especially lucky. So break out the leeks. Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant!Not that I am Welsh. Indeed I could go to some length to demonstrate that I have no Welsh ancestry whatever, and carry an hereditary allergy to Celtic Consciousness in any modern form, that is specifically “Scotch” (Canadianism! no smug emails please). St David, St Andrew, St Patrick -- these were fine men, such as Christianized our heathen ancestors in the very distant past. Let us celebrate what those heathens became, and not revert to that from which they were saved. If I correctly construe the life of St David (6th century) by the 11th-century bishop, Rhigyfarch, he was born on a cliff overlooking the sea, during a thunderstorm, to a nun who had been violently raped. Felix culpa: the bringing of great good out of great evil is the central theme of Christian teaching, and I would recommend this saint -- if and only if I have the story right -- as a symbol for those opposed e.g. to abortion in pretty much any circumstances. In life, there is hope: a joyful hope written into the human spirit from the moment it is conceived. This is a truth to which I am recalled daily, by someone very near and dear to me, reduced again to wearing the very diapers that Ontario’s health minister was recently mocking -- and after an interval of more than eighty years. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; but while the light remains in an old man’s eyes, the hope remains, of the world’s redemption. Verily: there is new light, as the poet, Edmund Waller wrote, about “the soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed.” Which, “lets in new light through chinks that time has made.” Hope, in an old man’s eyes, or in the eyes of the old woman he lives with, is a hope in its nature nearly free of delusion, for it cannot be hope for worldly things, beyond such little favours as an hour without pain, without humiliation, without fear of the unknown. St David himself died, from the report, Tuesday, March 1st, 589, in the monastery he’d founded, amid a flourish of angels, having preached to his folk the previous Sunday: “Be joyful, and keep your faith and your creed. Do the little things that you have seen me do, and heard about. And I will walk the path that our fathers have trod before us.” He is therefore the cause of that so wonderfully characteristic Welsh phrase, “Do the little things.” For as I was taught, from a child, by the same old man mentioned above, “God is in the details.” Hope is in the details. And how often in the midst of large, the hope emerges from a small place, and the world turns on an Archimedean hinge. For those reading with the eyes of hope, history is full of such moments, and our lives are full, and nature herself emerged from a singularity. The cynical will never see this, for they have darkened that part of their vision, and put their hope in the wrong things: in wealth, and luxury, in sexual conquest, in control and power, in honours and fame, in sweet revenge and the myriad self-satisfactions. We have enough, without such extras. And against them we pose the mysterious instruction of St David and all other saints: “Be joyful.” For faith, hope, and charity are compassed in that joy. I am, if there is a political insinuation buried in this column, intentionally setting that hope and that joy against the false hope offered by politicians -- such as Barack Obama, the current “charismatic phenomenon” in the USA -- selling “hope” like bottled water, and pitching “belief” in a new, untested brand. It is the old snake-oil act, as old as the world: empty promises and delusions of an easy cure. And to the end of the world, there will be people to fall for it. Hope cannot be bought with any currency, including ballots: it does not work in that way. It is a spiritual substance, not a material commodity. For true hope, founded in faith and expressed in charity, is forged in a soul under real trials. It is not the wand of some Welsh wizard. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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