Driving Out the Hag
A Beltane Homily prepared for the Spiritual Feast May 3, 2026
There is a Scottish custom at Beltane. When Rowan described it to me I felt the good kind of chills.
In the ritual, before the May Queen arrives, before the maypole dancing begins — first, you drive out the hag of winter. The Cailleach. The one who has held the cold in place. You drive her out with noise and fire and sheer communal insistence. Not gently. Not apologetically. You make it clear: your season is over. Something else is trying to get through this door.
I love this ritual because it is honest about something we often skip in our spiritual lives. It names that arrival and departure are not the same moment. Something has to leave before something can enter. The threshold is real. And sometimes, the work of the threshold is not children and laughter.
Sometimes the work is driving something out.
I spent my childhood with people who changed reality. Some might say my mom was a really good author of fiction, writing books for publication, but she also rewrote our experiences. I learned to hoard truth, defend it, and constantly question others' statements. I have spent my life undoing that habit and while the work is never done. I now can relax and allow people to be wrong or right. to have their persepctive and disagree with me, without my safety feeling threatened. I can trust that it will be OK. eventually. I had to exhale that hypervigilant, anxious habit in order to inhale love and trust and freedom to be fully myself.
Today I want to suggest that one of the things we might drive out this Beltane — or at least examine carefully at the threshold — is a word.
The word is hope.
Now — before you panic, or before you relax too quickly — let me be precise.
I am not saying hope is worthless. I am saying hope has been weaponized. And I am saying that for some of us, the word itself has become a kind of hag — something that sits in the doorway and prevents us from doing the actual work of spring.
Miguel de la Torre, in Embracing Hopelessness, puts it starkly. Hope, he argues, can function as a Ponzi scheme — a way of trusting the future to resolve what we refuse to address in the present. We hope. We wait. We trust that it will work out. And in the meantime, the structures that are grinding people up keep grinding.
Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism makes a related argument: that hope, for those whose bodies the system was designed to consume, is not a spiritual resource. It is a demand made by those with more cushion — just hold on, just keep hoping, the arc is long. And researchers have actually confirmed this. A 2019 study found that for people in disadvantaged social positions, hope — specifically the harmony-focused kind, the it’ll work out kind — actually suppressed motivation for collective action. Hope, in those conditions, made people less likely to fight.
The hag has many faces. One of them looks like optimism. One of them looks like trust. One of them looks like hope.
But I want to slow down and stay honest. Because this is a room of many people, and we do not all have the same relationship to this word.
The K-pop demonhunter Movie has a character — Jinu — who announces plainly that he is hopeless. And the main character says to him: that’s the thing about hope. Nobody gets to tell you if you feel it or not.
Nobody gets to tell you if you feel it or not.
The main character in that movie, Rumi, also is experiencing her own kind of hopelessness because she's holding onto a story that does no serve her. The song Golden is her moment of releasing, breathing out that story and then she breathes in friendship, commitment, faith in her purpose, and this amazing song comes out.
Some of us need the word hope. It is a lifeline. It is what gets us up. It is cellular and real and we are not performing it. That is true, and it is not naive, and I will not drive it out of you.
Some of us need to redefine the word before we can claim it — need to strip it of its pastel coating and find something fiercer underneath. Need to know that hope is allowed to be angry, uncertain, unresolved, a sewer rat.
And some of us need a different word altogether. Not because we have given up, but because the old container doesn’t hold what we carry.
There is even a name now, from researchers in Turkey, for the state between hope and hopelessness: hope fatigue. Not despair. Not optimism. The exhausted middle, where you still believe something good might happen, but you are tired of waiting for it to show up on its own. You are not hopeless. You are tired of hoping. And you need to know that is a real place, with a real name, and it is not a failure.
Different places. All of them legitimate. None of them requiring your performance.
For me, there came a day, I think it was shortly after November, when I'd say "I Hope... blah blah blah." and I realized I didn't believe it. It had no meaning for me. I was bereft, and so many sentences didn't make sense any more. I'd lost it. But wasn't sure what came next.
So what comes through the door, once we’ve been honest about all of this?
Cornel West — and I’m paraphrasing from memory, so stay with the spirit of it — drew a distinction between optimism and hope that I have never forgotten. Optimism, he said, looks at a bad situation and says: everything will be fine. Hope looks at the same situation and says: this is bad — and then goes about working to change it.
That second thing? That’s not passive. That is not a feeling you sit with until it grows. That is a practice. A commitment. A refusal.
Rebecca Solnit said it differently, just recently: if the word hope doesn’t work for you, try ‘never fucking surrender.’ And then she clarified what she means at the heart of it: we make the future in the present, if we show up.
The future is unwritten. This is not comfort. This is responsibility. Optimism says the future will be good. Pessimism says the future will be bad. Hope — real hope, or whatever you call it when it lives in your bones — says: the future is not yet written, and therefore I will show up to write it, with no guarantee that it works.
Viktor Orbán’s party just lost in Hungary. A single local election. A small crack. The kind of thing that could be nothing, or could be the first green shoot that comes after a long winter. We don’t know yet. And we act anyway.
We remain faithful, Charlie Murphy sings, to the work that must be done.
Not faithful because we know it will work. Faithful because the work is ours. Faithful because the alternative is to let the hag stay.
And this is where I want to hand you a phrase that I think does something important.
Trust and believe.
In the passive sense, trust is something you extend to the future and then wait. You hope. You trust. You see what happens. That version of trust is the hag.
But trust and believe, the way it lives in Black vernacular, the way it lives in our song today — that is not passive. That is: I am going to make this happen. Watch me. Trust and believe. It is not a surrender to outcomes. It is a fierce declaration of intention.
This is the May Queen arriving. Not as a feeling. Not as a guarantee. But as a commitment, a fire you light with your own hands, a dance you do on cold ground because you refuse to let winter be permanent.
Friends, the hag is real. The winter has been long. And some of what has kept us waiting — some of what has told us to be patient, to trust the arc, to keep hoping — some of that is worth driving out.
Not because we have given up. But because something truer is trying to get through the door.
Not optimism. But faithfulness.
Not passive trust. But trust and believe.
Not the promise of spring. But the fire we light to call it.
May you know which relationship to hope is yours, and be free to claim it without apology.
May you drive out what has overstayed its welcome — gently or with noise, whatever the season requires.
May you find the word, or the wordless thing, that actually gets you out of bed and back to the work.
And may you remain faithful — to the work that must be done, to the people you love, to the future that is not yet written but is waiting for you.
Welcome, May. We have made room.
This Spiritual Feast series is ©2026 Amy Beltaine, all rights reserved. You may freely reprint any blog post, website, or print resource. Simply include the following attribution, and if you print online, make the link at the end live:
Article ©2026 Amy Beltaine, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. This article and hundreds of others, along with other free resources are available at http://www.AmyBeltaine.com