A little hope

WHY IS THE cheerfulness gone from your columns? some readers have asked. They think I've been sounding "edgy" or "down" lately. It is clear that optimism is no instrument for responding to the world these days. The alternative--hope--is harder to seize and sustain, but perhaps for that reason more urgent and promising than ever.

I have welcomed the challenge of hope implied by a poem by Charles Peguy, "The Mystery of the Holy Innocents." He audaciously but properly imagines God speaking upon the deaths of the innocent children at Bethlehem after Jesus was born, as described in Matthew's Gospel. The poem may seem strange, but after a while one gets accustomed to its mix of the playful and the serious.

Here are a few lines, ending with the poet's reflection on the "innocents" and then a naive vision of the Paradise in which the children are now playing hoops:

   I am, God says, Master of the Three
      Virtues.
   Faith is a loyal wife.
   Charity is a fervent mother.
   But hope is a very little girl.

   I am, God says, the Master of the
      Virtues.

   It is Faith who holds fast through
      century upon century.

   It is Charity who gives herself
      through centuries of centuries.

   But it is my little hope
   Who gets up every morning.
   Says good-day to us ...
   I am, God says, the Lord of the
      Virtues.

   It is Faith who resists through century
      upon century.
   It is Charity who yields through
      century upon century.
   But it is my little hope

   Who every
      morning
   Says good-day to
      us ...

   It is my little
      hope
   who goes to sleep every evening
   In her child's bed,
   after having said a good prayer,
   and who wakes every morning and
     gets up
   and says her prayers with new attention...

   You believe that children know
      nothing,
   And that parents and grown-up
      people know something.
   Well, I tell you it is the contrary
      (It is always the contrary).
   It is the parents, it is the grown-up
      people who know nothing.
   And it is the children who know
   Everything.

   For they know first innocence,
   Which is everything.

   The world is always inside out, God
      says.
   And in the contrary sense.
   Happy is he who remains like a child
   And who like a child keeps
   His first innocence ...

COPYRIGHT 2006 The Christian Century Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning