Sunday
Hope lets us literally see the presence and action of the holy in our everyday lives. This is not an imaginary desire viewed through rose-colored glasses. It is the solid evidence of the power of love made visible in abundance.
—Steven Charleston
Monday
Hope is a quality of aliveness. It does not come at the end, as the feeling that results from a happy outcome. Rather, it lies at the beginning, as a pulse of truth that sends us forth.
—Cynthia Bourgeault
Tuesday
Hope is the language of the invisible. It transcends circumstances because it transcends physicality. It’s spiritual. It’s the language of the invisible realm, which is just as real, if not more real, than the things we can see and touch.
—Jon Batiste
Wednesday
Hope is a participation in the very life of God. It has nothing to do with circumstances or events going well. It can even thrive in the midst of adversity and trial.
—Richard Rohr
Thursday
The idea of hope being a discipline is something I heard from a nun many years ago who was talking about it in conjunction with making sure we were of the world and in the world. The hope that she was talking about was this grounded hope that was practiced every day.
—Mariame Kaba
Friday
If we can see a likely path to our desired outcome, we have hope; if we can see no possible path to our desired outcome, we have despair. When our prime motive is love, a different logic comes into play. We find courage and confidence, not in the likelihood of a good outcome, but in our commitment to love.
—Brian McLaren
Week Twenty-Five Practice
Singing a New Song
Dr. Luther E. Smith Jr. describes how singing as a spiritual practice can enable us to embody hope:
Howard Thurman’s meditation “I Will Sing a New Song” builds on the Psalm 40 phrase “He [God] put a new song in my mouth,” which describes the creative response persons “must” make when previous understandings and efforts have proven deficient. In part it reads:
I will sing a new song
I must learn the new song for the new needs.
I must fashion new words born of all the new growth
of my life—of my mind—of my spirit. [1]
The meditation names a faithful response to hope—a response that births faithful hopefulness. Singing a new song is both a means to and a sign of personal transformation. Transformation to God-centered hopefulness and beloved community is hope’s enlivening purpose….
Singing that enlivens our spirits to endure, persist, rest assured, and rejoice is a spiritual practice for hopefulness and becoming a people of justice and beloved community. What songs do you sing through joyful and troubling times? The question is not asking, “Can you carry a tune?” but “Do you have a tune that carries you?” Hope feeds our insatiable hunger to sing a new song!
Singing, in addition to being a literal spiritual practice, has figurative significance. Singing can also refer to how the body is being given to harmonizing with what is vital in life. Like music, life is lived with a sense of tempos, tonalities, rhythms, and improvisations. Every day we compose our lives by how we live. Moods of happiness and despair, eagerness and boredom, love and indifference, courage and fear, celebration and grief inform how our whole bodies voice our dedication to “the art of living.” Singing a new song is not just about the song. Primarily, the singing expresses that we are becoming new!
References:
[1] Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas (Friends United Press, 1985), 24.
Luther E. Smith Jr., Hope Is Here! Spiritual Practices for Pursuing Justice and Beloved Community (Westminster John Knox Press, 2023), 17–19.
Image credit and inspiration: Dyu Ha, untitled (detail), 2019, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. We reach out with a deep desire to connect to hope and a sense of timing beyond our own.
