Hope Is the Thing With Oxen

Hope is the Jan Brady of the theological virtues–the sober, responsible middle-child stuck between the mountain moving urgency of Faith and the flashy  never-failething of Charity. Hope does its essential work much more quietly. But it is nonetheless essential work.

If we aren’t careful, we can confuse hope for a sort of lesser faith. Some people know that certain things are true, and the rest of us just hope they are. If we nourish this seed of hope carefully, we are told, it will eventually grow into faith and we will know things too.

Well, I’m not there, and I don’t think that I will ever be. Hope is as much as I can muster, even on a good day. I hope that there is a God. I hope that there is some kind of existence after this life. I hope that my Redeemer lives. And I hope that the universe is organized around principles of goodness and meaningful justice far superior to those I have seen on earth.

I do not necessarily believe any of these things. And I certainly don’t know them. But I hope them with all of my heart–and that has become enough to organize my life around–the hope and the memory of a time when I believed differently.

It was Thomas Hardy who first taught me about the power of hope and memory in what has become one of my favorite poems for the Christmas season. Hardy wrote “The Oxen” in 1915, as the world was embroiled in its first modern mega-war. It has become a Christmas classic, not because of what it says about Christ, but because of what it says about Hope. Here is the full poem:

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

“The Oxen” perfectly captures a common, but poorly understood, faith transition–the movement from faith to hope as an organizing principle of one’s spiritual life. In the first two stanzas, Hardy speaks from the perspective of a child who, upon hearing that the oxen knelt in the presence of the Christ Child, simply accept on faith that of course such a thing happened.

The next two stanzas come from the perspective of the adult who knows that oxen don’t normally kneel but who desperately wants to believe that we live in a world where animals can see and recognize the Son of God and know to kneel before him in a manger. This is a preposterous world, but a beautiful one. And everything seemed better and safer when we simply accepted it as the truth.

And this is why the final stanza is so crucial. Despite his doubts, his rationalism, his and his outright disbelief, the narrator tells us, he would still take a trip to look if someone claimed to see a few oxen kneeling in a nearby farmhouse (a barton in yonder coomb).No matter how much he doesn’t believe that such a thing can be true, he hopes that it might be. And that hope is enough to spur him to action.

And such is the virtue of hope. When it comes right down to it, hope–rather than knowledge or belief–is what motivates our spiritual life. Hope can be irrational, illogical, and even vain. But it is also strongest human response to be both beauty and justice. Hope can lead us to actions that can, in turn, create the very world we hope for. This is why even as confirmed a skeptic as Thomas Hardy refused to ever let it go.