In her traditional Christmas message this week, the Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally, turned to a much-loved work by the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson. In “Hope” Is the Thing With Feathers, Dickinson imagines hope as a small bird that “perches in the soul”, never ceasing to sing and sounding sweetest in the eye of life’s storms. As Dame Sarah says, the metaphor is a beautiful one that can both console and inspire.
Christian tradition has long seen hope as a virtue to be practised, theologically grounded in the narrative of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem and the redemptive meaning of his life and death. In Britain and across the west, Christmas is, of course, a mainly secularised affair these days. But as much of the world prepares to spend time with family and friends, the cultivation of a kind of committed faith in the future seems particularly needed in what are undeniably dark times.
