There is an ancient tradition in the land of my ancestors of tending sacred flames (including the home hearth). This isn’t a unique practice to be sure, many cultures and religions have a version of it. There is something powerful about keeping alive something as ephemeral and powerful as fire.
Legends say that for a thousand years priestesses devoted to the goddess Brigid tended her sacred flame, some even say that when St. Brigid founded her monastery on the site of the old pagan temple her nuns kept the same flame alive until the abbey was destroyed and the flame extinguished during the 16th century.
Whether any of those legends is literally true isn’t of course the point. The story and the power of belief, devotion, and practice behind it is what has kept the flame burning in the hearts of devotees to the goddess or saint all these years.
Tending hope is a little like tending a flame; it too is equal parts ephemeral and dangerous. In the old Brigid tradition the sisters took turns tending the flame for nineteen days, on the 20th day it was said Brigid tended the flame herself. When I first read about that tradition I felt a little thrill of over achiever panic. But what if without anyone around tending it on that 20th day the flame went out?
And of course the truth is the flame could just as easily go out on days one through nineteen while a well meaning flame tender was fussing about. There is always something that can go wrong, always. And yet, perhaps there is an important truth in that 20th day, that things worth doing are not perhaps all in our hands.
I have been thinking about hope lately. It is a tenuous thing. So utterly necessary and yet so hard to hold onto. Sometimes it might even feel foolish. After all, the planet is burning, heat is spiraling out of control, drought grips half my country, a virus that damages almost every system in the body is raging out of control and mostly ignored, inequality grows ever greater by the day, food prices force more and more into hunger, homelessness is accelerating. It would be all too easy to give up.
Some of us have. I have heard my fair share of “climate change is inevitable, it is too late” or “there’s nothing I can do.” And I understand that feeling. This is where flame tending connects to hope. Because hope, like love, is often thought about as a feeling, something warm and fuzzy. Something you either feel or you don’t.
But there is another way to understand things like hope, or love: as verbs. To love doesn’t have to mean to have a warm and fuzzy feeling about someone, it can be a way to behave toward them. The famous Christian command to love your neighbor as yourself isn’t about how you feel about your neighbor (or yourself) but how you act (verb) toward them (and yourself). Love is something you do.
Hope is similar. Sure hope can be a feeling, we can feel hopeful, we can be filled with anticipation. But that isn’t the only, or even best definition of the word. Hope is also a verb, to hope is to take responsibility for making something real. When we hope for a better world we act to bring it closer.
Tending a flame doesn’t light up the world, it would be easy to ask what the point is of one person sitting up all night making sure a little flame doesn’t go out. It seems like a drop in a bucket. But if the legends are to be believed those nights and days of care strung together to create something that went on for perhaps a thousand years, that was so central to a people that it gave them hope, courage, and a will to fight for hundreds of years af the literal flame was gone.
When we tend hope this is what we are doing. One little spark, added to the conflagration of sparks from a billion other human beings. Imagine. Not just a thousand years of one little flame, but potentially a thousand years of a few million proverbial flames. And the realization that we are not tending hope alone. That there are moments when we will need to rest and our fellow humans, and even the Divine will take their own turn.
It is a radical departure from the way we are conditioned by capitalism in two ways: first it claims that our worth has nothing to do with our ability to keep going indefinitely. Flame tending reminds us that life is a relay, not a marathon. But it also makes a radical claim, much like the Jewish Sabbath practice that the other than human can get along without us for a bit. That there is that which is other from us that is also intimately involved in the world.
The blackberries are ripening as I type this without my input or effort, the towering cottonwood, the little apple and cherry tree, the young oak, and the mature maple behind my home are making oxygen while I think with you about hope. And they breathe it out gently into the sunshine without any thought of whether or not their gift is futile, or appreciated. They (or their very ancient ancestors) did it before there were animals to breathe in oxygen.
I once heard an interview with a woman who championed the idea that human technology should mimick nature. There was a fancy term for it, but what mattered was this simple difference: processes in the natural world have as their outputs a world more hospitable to life. Those ancient plants created an atmosphere were land animals could exist for the first time by breathing out oxygen nothing was using, yet. When a tree dies the “waste” product nurtures new trees, fungi, insects, animal dens, saplings, and more. Even volcanoes, which might seem all destruction, actually create the conditions for new life, building up islands where none existed, or simply bringing rich minerals to the surface that (as the new rock weathers away) become fuel for new life. Death itself enables new life. Human technology on the other hand tends to have as its outputs a world less hospitable to life. The unending damage of plastics for example, the polluting exhaust from motor vehicles, even the toxic waste that is a used battery.
She pointed out that for much of human history this wasn’t true. The side products of our technology were no more harmful than that of the rest of the natural world, and would when they were used up foster new life as they decayed. She argued that we could design our technological world to create life, not death. But it would require a conscious choice for different priorities from us all. We do not have to be an engineer trying to solve a complex technical problem to shift our focus from despair to hope, from destruction to more life.
But we do have to shift our thinking. From the immediate to the long term. From the quick to that which will foster life, instead of death. We have to give up on the quick fix, on the idea that we are the center of the world, that we make it spin. This too is tending hope.
When I take up my match and light my candle when it is my turn I am under no illusion that what I do will change the world immediately, that it will fix anything tomorrow. Those things aren’t the point. When I tend flame I strike a match and let the little flame be my reminder that for a few moments in time I have been given a trust, one I will fulfill imperfectly, but that I do not fulfill alone. And I know that it is slowly, slowly, changing me.
I know what I can do, and I do it as well as I can.
I also know that when I fail (which I will, I am human) the world will not end.
Tending hope requires the same. That we are realistic about what we can and cannot do, and about what our efforts can and cannot accomplish. And that we do not give in to the false despair that what we can accomplish isn’t enough. Will planting native flower species in my ever expanding garden prevent native pollinators from going extinct? It will not, but it helps. In a myriad of ways I will never even know.
I invite you into a practice: tend hope. Find a way, a single simple thing, that will make the world more hospitable to life. Volunteer somewhere, take the subway, plant something, pickup trash, write your senator, march, cook good food for hungry people. Make hope your way of being, make it your verb. Hope with a vengeance. Be annoying about it. And especially this: find others who are tending hope and do it together, no matter how loosely, because we need each other after all.
Remember this. We do not remember the names of even one of those ancient flame tenders in Kildare, but we remember the flame and today, all over the world, pagans and Christians alike tend their own small flames in that great one’s honor.
You cannot know what your own small hope tending will spark, and perhaps that is for the best. For who among us could bear such knowledge? Instead we are simply called to enact joy, hope, love today in whatever small way we can. Tending the small flames of our lives and knowing we do not tend them alone.
