“She must have hated that,” my companion said, horrified.

He seemed to know a lot about Emily Dickinson, though not
the particular poem which he apparently heard for the first time from my lips.
His response astonished me.

She must have hated that? What’s to hate about hope, I
questioned as I walked away.

Though I met this guy only briefly, his comment has stuck
for decades. Clearly, he understood much more than I about Emily Dickinson and
hope.

Let’s just say, I have learned. About hope, that is. There
are days when I hate it, too.

Do you know that Dickinson poem? The one about “the thing
with feathers” that lives in the soul and “sings the tune without the words” –
and never stops – never-ever? Thus Ms. Dickinson defines hope as a kind of
unavoidable ear worm. That is what elicited my temporary colleague’s dread when
I blithely quoted it. He understood what I did not at the time: hope is not for
the faint of heart.

Hope really can be annoying. Especially when one is tempted
toward despair. We speak, sometimes, of being “hopeful but not optimistic,”
don’t we? This is true hope, which I’ve discovered often rises in me – unbidden
and bothersome – the thing with feathers that never stops singing.

What’s causing “hope against hope” for me these days is a
message sent by Pope Francis to a gathering of scientists in early March. The
title of the conference he was addressing was “The end of the world? Crises,
responsibilities, hopes.”

In his message to the scientists, signed off on from his
hospital bed, Francis named what he called a “polycrisis” of “authoritarianism,
climate changes, human migration and the failing of democracies around the
globe.” It all sounded rather grim.

But the pope suggests that the way forward out of this
polycrisis is examining how we understand the world and the cosmos. “If we do
not do this, and we do not seriously analyze our profound resistance to change,
both as people and as a society,” he wrote, we will waste this moment of crisis
and the opportunity it provides us to transform our “consciences and social
practices.”

The next thing he says we must do is something he saw
operative during the most recent synod: “In the encounter with people and their
stories, and in listening to scientific knowledge, we realize that our
parameters regarding anthropology and culture require profound revision.”

Do you see that? Our parameters regarding anthropology and
culture require profound revision.

Francis is calling us toward a profound shift in our
understanding of who we humans are in relationship with one another, our
universe, and God. There are many who have intuited this in the past of course,
and many who understand it now as a “no brainer.” But those of us who persist
in hope for our church know it does not change quickly. So, we hold out “hope
against hope.”

The pope acknowledges this need for change in the context of
some thoughts about his fellow Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin, whose 75th
anniversary of death approaches in April.

This long-dead Jesuit, whom I’ve mentioned here before, was
a paleontologist, anthropologist and mystic whose writing was censured by the
Vatican in 1925. Though he has still not been officially rehabilitated, neither
can the attraction of his thought be snuffed out. The five most recent popes
have all drawn on his work.

Teilhard was, Pope Francis noted in this letter, the first
to “throw a stone into the water” and be “in a sense – killed” for opening a
dialogue that only, maybe, right now the Church is ready to engage.

Maybe. Perhaps. At this moment. When it appears to be almost
too late.

The point Francis leans toward but does not quite say fully
has been taken up by other, still-living, still-breathing theologians who are
doing what Vatican censure prevented from happening in Teilhard’s lifetime. By
silencing him a century ago, Rome prevented Teilhard from refining his thought
in dialogue with other scientists and theologians. Today, this dialogue is
underway, not a moment too soon.

Among those scientist-theologians is Sister Ilia Delio,
whose own writing prompted by Pope Francis’ letter is what brought it to my
attention in the first place. In hoping against her own kind of hope, Ilia
wrote: “We are such a deeply fearful people that reconstructing religion in the
21st century may be more threatening than a nuclear war.” But, she adds, “It is
precisely the deep disconnect between religion and evolution … that lies at the
heart of our contemporary moral confusion. Unless we acknowledge religion as a
phenomenon within evolution, we face annihilation. Without the vital
transcendent energy of religion, we will perish.”

Maybe? Perhaps? At this moment? When it appears to be almost
too late?

O sing, you thing with feathers!

Sister Beth Murphy is communications director for the
Dominican Sisters of Springfield and a member of the anchor community at Cor
Unum House.