Bob Neal

The longed-for solstice was Tuesday, and the longed-for brightening is apace.

In these first three days of winter, we’ve added just a minute between sunrise and sunset, but we’ve added. Hope glimmers in every bleak mid-winter, even if faintly.

As far back as we can trace, humans have counted the days until the sunlight begins to lengthen. The Hopis observe Soyal, when Hopi women welcome the kachina spirits down from the mountains. (A kachina, knocked over by my cats, lies at my elbow as I write.)

Ancient Iranians observed Yaldi, the birthday of the sun god.

Romans celebrated Saturnalia with games, feasts and gifts. More than a few historians believe we appropriated Saturnalia to mark the birth of Jesus.

Many Christian churches, on the first Sunday in Advent, light a Hope candle. In this second year (and counting) of COVID-19, hope may be our strongest emotion.

Whether or not you believe in Christianity or any other faith, this is a season when things start to change. We can only hope that this time, they change for the better. At last.

Hope surrounds us always, it seems. My mother and her parents and brother lie in the best-ever-named graveyard, Hope Cemetery in Kennebunk. What better name for the resting place of those who hope for an afterlife?

Hope may be what draws many of us to sports. As Yogi Berra may have said, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” To wit, I might have given up on the UMaine women’s basketball team Sunday when it trailed Dartmouth by 19 points. Then Coach Amy Vachon put the team into a three-quarter-court zone defense — sorry for the sports lingo — and the Black Bears outscored the Green 28-8 in the last quarter to win, 65-53. It ain’t over ’til it’s over.

Let’s put aside the quotidian and look at hope in larger contexts.

Hope springs eternal, but not everywhere. Depression photos taken for the Farm Security Administration show despair drowning out hope. The story of “Okies” beside the road, in a shot taken by Dorothea Lange, is told in its caption: “Broke, baby sick and car trouble.”

The despair that grows into the loss of hope has no greater expression than suicide. Take it from one who knows. Today is 71 years and 35 days since my father killed himself. I talked for an hour on Monday with my “baby” sister about what he did and why. We still don’t know, though the theories fly whenever we discuss it.

We do know that his shooting himself made hope harder for his widow and five children (now three). Still, we hoped. And strove. We find many reasons for that, from good genes to our mother’s strong will to dumb luck. I’ll go with the first two, if you don’t mind.

One surprise of the pandemic is that, despite what may seem like hopelessness, the U.S. suicide rate fell by 3% last year, following a 2% decline in 2019.

Horatio Spafford was a lawyer whose four daughters drowned when the ship carrying them and their mother to England sank in the mid-Atlantic. The story is that Spafford, en route to England to unite in grief with his wife, wrote perhaps the most hopeful hymn ever, “It Is Well With My Soul,” right after passing the spot where his daughters had drowned.

Many, including my late wife and I, ask for “It is Well” at their funerals. We see it as a hymn of hope. Despite losing everything, the Spaffords hoped that something better was to come. Then they worked to make that something better, moving to Jerusalem in 1881 to help found the American Colony.

The Colony assists locals without regard to nationality or faith. Those founding the Colony believed humans are judged on their works, so they set out to do good works.

Perhaps no one has related hope to other phenomena better than Leonard Cohen, the late Quebec poet and musician, in his song “Hallelujah.” In it, we find the hope we express through faith, the hope we seek in love, the hope of and for sexuality, the hope of learning over time.

Yet Cohen wrote that he knew less at 80 than he had known early in life. I can relate.

In “Hallelujah,” the loss of hope comes sadly. In the final stanza, these words:

“And even though it all went wrong

I’ll stand right here before the Lord of song

With nothing, nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”

Hope and despair entwine through the song, yet he ends with “Hallelujah.”

There, I feel better already.

Although usually hopeful, Bob Neal worries about Leonard Cohen’s words to his rabbi, Mordecai Finley: “One more thing. You won’t like what comes next after America.” Neal can be reached at turkeyfarm@myfairpoint.net.