Hope

She wasn’t walking into the food bank. She was tiptoeing. Embarrassment all over. Embarrassment that came across as rudeness. Luckily for me, heaven dictated that at that very same moment the supervisor happened to drop by. Otherwise I would have jumped right away to the quick conclusion that this lady was just someone looking for trouble.

Our hospitality volunteer brought her a steamy cup of freshly brewed coffee and invited her to take a seat. I showed her a chair next to my desk. It was when she sat down that I was able to see that what I had in my office was a world that was crumbling down, coming apart, shattering to pieces. Her deep sigh spoke volumes of a life overburdened by despair. As she started to unfold her story between careful sips of boiling coffee it became evident that she was entering into the darkest night of her life.

There is a centuries old narrative that tells a story of darkness being defeated by a tiny ray of light. It goes on saying that out of this struggle life came into being. Only because darkness was put down we can now speak of beauty, and joy, and all those wonderful things that make life worth living. The way I read this story out of an ancient book makes me imagine a bird hovering over a dark abyss.

That old story also speaks of what I was seeing right in front of my eyes listening to this woman over a cup of coffee. Hope happens whenever there is darkness. Do not think that just because there is no light then there’s no way forward. No siree! (oops! No madame!!).

Darkness comes in different shapes. It is usually associated to despair, or to the end of some kind of road we have been traveling. Darkness is a no exit alleyway; a dream that refuses to come true. Darkness has the ability to engulf us. Its arms seem to multiply around us as they embrace us tight as if it were an unwelcome lover. It is an unwelcome lover, for sure.

What does it take for us to shake us free from such an invasive embrace? For the woman of my story, it meant to take her embarrassment with her and bring it along to have a cup of coffee with me. As we were ready for a second cup, her story gave place to another one full of initiatives that would enable her to walk across the valley of dark shadows she was going through.

Now, I’m having here a problem with language. Well, another problem on top of my thick accent. I say this because in my mother tongue, hope is a feminine word. Hope is never associated to a masculine world. On top of that, history and reality insist on showing us that this business of sending darkness to the back seat so that hope should lead the way has been done mostly by women.

Whenever darkness is being pierced by some warm ray of light it’s because a woman is deciding to dust herself off, pick up the pieces and put on her shoulders the task to craft a new beginning for her and those close to her. The Greek from of old they imagined that the world rested on the powerful shoulders of a male god. This deity was Atlas. Perhaps we should forgive them because they were talking from a point of history in which not many things had happened yet. Thus, they never knew that actually that Atlas must be a woman.

And so, the woman in my story found in the midst of her own darkness the she had within herself a heart strong enough to conceive hope. Darkness, her unwelcome lover was sent packing.

(Oswaldo Guayasamin, Manos de la esperanza - The Hands of Hope)