Lent day 36, a short (musical) history of hope

Increasingly I talk to people who describe themselves as avoiding consuming news of the kind that comes to us through the media. Lots of strategies are employed, from screen switch-offs to choosing entertainment sources that focus on something kinder and more affirming. My own version of this is to skim-read my news outlet of choice, and to limit my exposure to those things that seem corrosive. I hear a version of this thought constantly…

It is all so bleak. Things just seem to be getting worse and worse. It all seems so hopeless.

In this place of national/international despair, hope (in the words of this song by Foy Vance) can deal the hardest blows.

… If there's one thing that I know
It is the two shades of hope
One, the enlightening soul
And the other is more like a hangman's rope
Well it's true, you may reap what you sow
But note that despair is the all-time low
Baby, hope deals the hardest blows

… There was once someone I loved
Whose heart overflowed his cup
And his shoes got covered in blood
Oh, but he never knew 'cause he only looked up
Well he was in trouble and so
Who'd known pain more than most, I know
Yet it was hope that dealt the hardest blows

… And the girl that holds the hand
Of her somewhat distant man
Though she did everything she can
Still his heart set sail for distant lands
And she wonders, sometimes, if he knows
How she feels like a trampled rose
Baby, hope deals the hardest blows

… Well, some people think their sin
Caused the cancer that's eating into them
And the only way that they can win
Is by the healing of somebody's hands on their skin and prayin'
But when the cancer does not go
Baby, hope dealt the hardest blows

… And now all these truths are so
With foundations below them
They were dug out in a winter's cold
When the world stole our young and preyed on the old
Well, hope deals in the hardest blows
Yet I cannot help myself but hope
… I guess that's why love hurts
And heartache stings
And despair is never worse
Then the despair that death brings
But hope deals the hardest blows
Dear, the hardest
Hope deals the hardest blows

To see this performance, to a packed hall in Belfast, a place in which so much hope for peace was thwarted for so long, is to remember that hope has history.

Our parents parents lived through world wars. Their parents knew faced a world of injustice and inequality beyond what we can imagine.

Go back again, we come into the ways of the British Empire, the colonial injustices that still stain our world hundreds of years later. The Industriual wealth machines that made this world locked British people off the land, smashed communities and reshaped them as servile masses drafted into mills and foundaries.

But there were always those who resisted, who cried out into the hopelessness of their situations. Most of these voices were lost, but we see traces surviving not just in history books (despite the best efforts to obscure them) but also in art, in song, in poetry.

Here is just one of these remnants- the Chartist’s Anthem. The Chartists were a 19th-century British working-class movement (1838–1848) campaigning for political democracy and rights. Driven by discontent with the 1832 Reform Act, they demanded six key reforms in the People’s Charter, including universal (male only at this stage!) suffrage, secret ballots, and abolition of property qualifications for MPs. They were brutally suppressed. This song was written by Ben Boucher (1769-1851) a Dudley miner who turned to making a living by writing and selleing his poems at a penny each in the streets. He died in Dudley workhouse.

Chartist Anthem
A Song by Ben Boucher©1847

A hundred years, a thousand years,
We're marching on the road
The going isn't easy
Yet we've got a heavy load,
We've got a heavy load

The way is blind with blood and sweat,
And death sings in our ears
But time is marching on our side,
We will defeat the years,
We will defeat the years

We men of bone of shrunken shank,
Our only treasure dearth,
Women who carry at their breast
Heirs to the hungry earth,
Heirs to the hungry earth

Speak with one voice, we march we rest,
And march again upon the years
Sons of our sons are listening,
To hear the Chartist cheers
Oh, to hear the Chartists cheers