Forty Chickens

Hope builds a bridge across the abyss into which reason cannot look. It can hear an undertone to which reason is deaf. Reason does not recognize the signs of what is coming, what is not yet born.

— Byung-Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope

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We were talking about hope out at the jail yesterday. A few guys had shared about how they desperately needed hope, to believe that there could be something different in their future, something besides the same old habits, the endless tired returning to the same endlessly tired dead-ends. One guy looked up with a half-grin that was somewhere between cynical, mischievous, and dejected. “I don’t got no hope anymore. I stole forty chickens and there’s no future for me.”

You hear a lot of bleak, miserable, strange stories in jail. Plenty of stories that make you want to weep or rage. I’ll confess that I did not see forty chickens coming. What a strange crime, I thought. What a strange thing to lose hope over. Earlier in the day, I had to deliver a death notification to a guy roughly my age who had lost a daughter roughly my daughter’s age over the weekend to a depressingly preventable accident. To call these conversations agonizing doesn’t really do them justice. I could imagine losing hope over something like that. But forty chickens?

Of course, there’s a story that precedes the forty chickens. Almost certainly, it is one of desperation and wrong turns and familial breakdown and addiction and poverty and God knows what else. It’s not hard to imagine this being the latest catastrophic decision in a long series of catastrophes in this man’s life. Sometimes hope is destroyed in a shattering instant, sometimes it leaks away in sad increments over long years. Sometimes we are the architects of hope’s demise in our lives. Sometimes the final push comes from the things life throws at us that we can’t control. Whatever the source, whatever the story, hope can be hard to hold on to.

Speaking of livestock, we read the story of the prodigal son around the circle yesterday. Incredibly, most of the guys had never heard it before. We read about a young man who makes a bunch of terrible decisions, who found himself slumming it with the pigs (who knows, maybe forty?) in a foreign land, at the end of his rope, out of options, out of hope. We read about a father who waited at a gate, who had no interest in a well-rehearsed speech about no longer being a son, who seemed more interested in throwing a party than itemizing and litigating the all the bad decisions. We read about a young man who went from lost to found, from dead to alive. We read a story about a hope that seemed gone being resuscitated by grace.

It was fascinating to watch the guys around the circle respond to the guy who said he had no hope. “Naw, man, you can’t give up on hope. You gotta have faith. Better days are coming, just got to keep going. God’s got ya.” Some of these men would call themselves Christians, some wouldn’t. Some probably don’t even know what the word means. But none of them seemed to find it tolerable to give up on hope. They weren’t just going to sit by while someone said they had nothing to hope for, whether for forty chickens or any other reason.

I suppose they could, to borrow the language of Byung-Chul Han above, hear an undertone to which reason is deaf. Reason can often make a pretty compelling case for hopelessness whether in the jail or anywhere else. Hope often feels wildly irrational. Sometimes the bad news piles up, and good news seems a long way off. Sometimes it can feel like we have ruined too much to be redeemed, that we have forgotten what hope feels like or even how to do it.

It is then when we must choose to look and to listen differently. We must pay attention to that undertone of hope that reason doesn’t recognize. Some things have yet to be born in our world and in our lives. Some things are deeper and truer than reason. Thanks be to God.