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Hope isn’t a Hallmark card

Painting of white shoe with a red background
“expressionist painting of a shoe with a red background” by Nancy Ross and DALL-E from https://labs.openai.com/

I was never gifted a Hallmark card
That offered hope as something
I could hold on to.
Hope has not appeared as
Feathers or soft beautiful things
Hidden in away during difficult times.

The Hallmark version of this theological virtue
Lead me to misunderstand hope as
Comfort-without-substance,
As a ruse trying to distract me from despair.

But I am no stranger to hope,
Which takes an unexpected form.
It feels like
A pebble in my shoe I cannot reach
That will not let go when I shake it on the sidewalk.
Hope threatens blisters and,
With ongoing irritation,
Reminds me that
I am alive,
I am living,
My story is not done yet.
My living humanity is
Divinely gifted,
Wonderful and complicated,
A thing worth pursuing.
This message doesn’t arrive as the
Expected comfort and calm I long for
But as as a wound that insists on my full attention.
Unlike cards of empty promises,
This hope is a constant disruption
Emerging from lament
With all of the joy and attractiveness
Of nagging voice from cranky relatives
I am trying to ignore.
It is not a diversion from sorrow
But the transformation of
Grief fully formed and felt.
Hope emerges as our livingness
Our aliveness
Our humanity
Not yet completed.

Nancy Ross
Nancy Rosshttps://contemplativeheretic.com/
Nancy Ross is an associate professor Utah Tech University, where she has been teaching for 16 years. Her Ph D is in art history, but her current research focuses on the history and sociology of religion. She recently co-edited a book with Sara K.S. Hanks titled "Where We Must Stand: Ten Years of Feminist Mormon Housewives" (2018) and has just co-edited “Shades of Becoming: Poems of Transition” with Kristen R. Shill. She is an ordained elder in Community of Christ and pastor of the Southern Utah congregation and works for the Pacific Southwest International Mission Center as an Emerging Church Practitioner.

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