A Fresh Poem: "Because I Thought that Hope Was Not for Me"

On the Strange Resilience of Hope.

Dear friend,

This will be a light week at The Rose Fire, as I am off into the Mt. Hood Wilderness for a nice, long walk. But so that you are not left completely desolate, here is a short fresh poem for your week, with commentary below for my (very kind) paid subscribers. I hope you enjoy it, along with the short audio here of me reading it for you.

Cheers,

-Paul

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Because I Thought that Hope Was Not for Me
By Paul J. Pastor

Because I thought that hope was not for me,
I missed it in the gutters of the street,
and in the dyings of the compost heap.

But hope nests drowsy in dark soil and peeks
rat-like from out brown broken glass and squeaks
its echoes in the hollows of the meek.

So now I wait for it, and sometimes shriek,
and I shall laugh at secrets like a freak,
and I shall learn to bless my eyes and see.
And I shall let hope nest and nuzzle me.

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Hope was “the thing with feathers” for dear Emily Dickinson; for me, it is the thing with matted fur. I do not intend that image as any subversion or deconstruction of the virtue. In fact, I believe in all all the upward, lofty, and winged elements of hope, and am sincere in my belief in its reality and goodness. Hope flies, without a doubt, and flies strong and pure. As she rises, she takes us with her, carrying our yearning. But is that all there is to hope?

No. It is the toughness and resilience of hope that I explore in this poem. While hope flies like an angel or a bird, surely, hope is also the consummate survivor, able to be abased, to be disadvantaged, to thrive under conditions that would starve more fragile virtues. In this, I arrived at the surprising image of the rat.

Our prejudice against the rat is not entirely misplaced. The rat can be a vector of pest and plague. It can make itself a nusiance in every imaginable way, and our revulsion at its motion or habits makes good sense. But our revulsion is not because of the rat’s weaknesses, but rather its strengths. It is too good at what it does. It competes with us. It annoys us by its competency.

The common rat is as intelligent as most dogs. It demonstrates the ability to plan, to memorize situations using multiple senses, to conjecture multiple possible outcomes of actions, and many other advance qualities of intelligence. The peers of the rat in the animal kingdom are not the mice, squirrels, fleas, or snakes. They are the dogs, the ravens, the great apes, and the elephants.

The rat is tough, cunning, agile, strong for its size, and patient. It will remember your face, and the faces of each member of your family. It will learn your habits. It is utterly omnivorous. A large rat can squeeze through a hole smaller than a quarter. It can chew or find that hole in nearly anything. It relishes mating and reproduction and bears litters of 12-20+ pups, each one completely and brilliantly redundant. In one year, a single pair of rats can produce 1,250 offspring. In three years that single pair, theoretically, could have half a billion descendants.

This is all so much like hope. What better image than the rat for the adaptability and irrepressibility of our good yearning? Hope may, in its individual instances, be caught and killed. It may be trapped, accidentally or intentionally exterminated at vast scale. But the thing of hope, its core hope-ness is like nothing as much as it is like a rat. It lives despite all, it will live despite all. It will eat what seems impossible to eat. It will live where it seems impossible to live. It will breed where it seems like nothing whatever could multiply. And all the time, it will be learning. It will be waiting. It will be living.

This poem, constructed of two three-line stanzas and a concluding four-line stanza, is all in iambic pentameter. The movement of the poem is very simple. It has no hidden meaning. Hope is like a rat. That is all I am trying to say. You need to learn to see it and to love it. When you do, you will become a little more strange and strong like the rat, having been let in on the secret of the rat’s world, of the rat’s life. You will become a little more strange and strong, like hope. You will be a little more wild, a little more able to live.

Hope, in my Christian tradition, has been associated with toughness for thousands of years. It is a thing of weight, to the degree that in the Letter to the Hebrews, hope serves as “an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast…” (6:19). It is not a wish. It is not a fantasy. It is heavy; a good heavy.

St. Thomas Aquinas saw this resilient quality of hope as well, writing

Therefore, a person who has hope, hopes to attain God, and hopes to obtain through him all necessities, however difficult, and to repel through him all harms, however difficult¹.

“However difficult.” These are easy things to say or to write. But to preserve the capacity for hope—which manifests as a sincere desire-expectation for what is good—is tremendously difficult. We exist throughout our lives in conditions of difficulty and disappointment. No matter what beauty or richness may exist in one portion of our lives, conditions of desolation are frequent and to be expected. Particularly for people who are faced with a long journey in the presence of an unfixable problem—chronic pain, the illness of a loved one, unending disappointments in love or in vocation, or whatever common or exotic form your suffering may take—hope is often the first thing to go.

At earlier points in my life, I thought of hope only as a thing that flew. I opened the windows, so to speak, and was greatly disheartened that nothing flew in to sing. To move me past this took an experience of chronic and unfixable suffering in the life of a loved one which was deep, personal, and inexpressible to those who did not “know” the shape of this particular grief. At the worst points, often while talking to a friend, I would hear myself saying something like this: “It’s really ok. We’re learning to live with it. I’ve stopped hoping that things will change or be different…”

Eventually, I had to stop saying this. I came to realize that I was indulging in a perfectly understandable exhaustion that I was calibrating to desperately avoid future disappointment. Hope, after all, is terrifying. What if all you have is hope—and it does not come to pass? What then? Might it not be better to limit your hope to small, attainable things? Things which your rationality may accept, and which will leave you, like Job, scraping your boils with a potsherd if they do not come to you?

I am glad to say that I am, slowly, moving out from that (understandable) immaturity to once again regain my sense of the audacity of old-fashioned, genuine, absolutely absurd hope. But mine has become a hope whose strength, for now, looks small and strange and clever. It sneaks and squeaks. It is a hope that has learned how to be tough. To eat anything. To multiply. As always, this is a process of learning to see what is already there. To go down, that one may be lifted up. To descend, that one may go upward.

And this, as odd as it sounds, is the great secret of the humble and maligned rat². This is the great secret of hope. They are the same secret. That secret is quiet and small, and part of the Great Good Joke that I believe God might be telling through the riot and mess of creation.

What I think it might be telling us is that life, for those who can see, is lying about everywhere, waiting for us to nose around³ to find it, like a coin that has been lost, or a treasure buried in a field, or a pearl of great price that has rolled, somehow, down into this joyous, mysterious, oil-anointed gutter. What I think it might be telling us is that hope is for us.

1. In III Sent. D. 26, Q. 2, A. 2, ad 2, as quoted here: https://www.aquinasinstitute.org/post/aquinas-on-hope

2. Here at the end of this piece I might as well declare that as a child I owned pet rats, for some reason that I have never fully clarified with my mother, having simply taken it for granted that pet rats were a thing which children owned. The first of these, who I named Zipper, was a wondrous animal, who would come when called and had free run of the house for much of the day. Until he got a taste for my sister’s blood, and was subsequently “donated” to the Birds of Prey exhibit at the Oregon Zoo, he was the best pet a five-year-old Paul could imagine.

3. This “nosing” I am told, is one possible source of the excellent word nuzzle, as used in the poem. Interested readers would do well to spend a few minutes exploring the history of this word, which is by no means quite clear, but is delightful.