DW's Blog

Hope Minus The E

by DW Green — August 5, 2026

“On the Difference Between a Wish and a Hope.”

Professor Tracey

In the fall of 1968 I was a freshman, and I was not at all sure I belonged there. My English professor was a woman named Ann Tracey, a University of Wisconsin graduate, and for reasons I did not understand at the time, she decided to believe in me before I had given her much evidence to work with. She handed me a confidence I had not arrived with. And she did one small thing I had not thought about in more

than fifty years, until this week: she kept putting the word receive on my spelling tests. On my account, I am sure of it now — a private little campaign, slipped in among the other words.

I before e, except after c. Receive is the word that obeys the rule by breaking the simpler one. You cannot spell it by ear. You have to learn it on purpose, hold the rule in mind, and place the letters

deliberately, or you will get it wrong every time. I learned to spell receive correctly in 1968. I have spent the fifty-eight years since learning to do the far harder thing, which is to live it.

I see now what Professor Tracey was teaching underneath the spelling. She was receiving me — an

unsure young man — and in being received, I began to be able to hope. That is the first thing I want to

say about hope, and it took an old teacher surfacing in my memory to say it: hope is almost always given to us before we can manufacture it ourselves. Someone hopes in you first. Then, slowly, you learn to

spell it on your own.

The Word I Had Wrong

Here is a confession. For most of my life I considered hope a weakness.

Listen to the way we use it. Gee, I hope I get a good grade. I hope she likes me. I hope they publish

the essay. I hope the house sells. Every one of those leans away from the present and out toward an outcome I do not control, with the fingers crossed. It sounded to me like a soft thing, a passive thing, the thing you reach for when you have run out of stronger things. And I was not entirely wrong. I was only using the wrong word. Because what I was describing was not hope. It was wish.

I had fused the two so long ago that I could no longer tell them apart. A wish is idle by nature. It is pinned to the visible, aimed at a result, and it does no work and takes no stance; it leans its whole

weight on a thing it cannot move. No wonder it felt weak to me. A wish is weak. What I distrusted my entire life was never hope at all. It was a wish wearing hope’s coat.

The Language of the Invisible

Real hope, I am learning late, is the opposite of grasping.

I read it best this week in the daily meditations of Richard Rohr, who calls hope “the language of the

invisible.” That phrase undid something in me. A wish is rooted in the visible — the grade, the sale, the answer that has not come. Hope is rooted in what cannot be seen, and so it does not rise and fall with the news. Rohr puts it about as plainly as it can be put: the house could flood and the roof could be on fire, and a person can still choose to stay in the boat. That is not denial. The water is real and the fire

is real. It is that the boat is realer — the invisible foundation more solid than the burning circumstance, and hope is the knowing that lives down there.

A wish wants the fire put out. Hope says I am staying in the boat either way. One is a feeling about the future. The other is a foundation under the present. They are not two strengths of the same thing. They are opposites.

A Contact Sport

And here is the part that turns hope from a mood into a practice, which is the part I can actually use.

Rohr likens hope to a sport — something you work at and grow stronger at. You do not simply have it; you train it. That landed on my own ground at once, because the last of our company’s core values is intentionality: all work has a purpose and should be meaningfully expressed. I had just been learning the same lesson about receiving — that it stays weak and accidental until it becomes intentional, and

that the moment you receive on purpose, it becomes a blessing. Hope is exactly the same. You cannot control the outcome; that is the wish’s doomed errand, forever trying to push a result it has no hands on. But you can control your intentionality. You can choose the stance, and take it, and train it, and take it again tomorrow.

That is the whole turn. Hope is intentionality aimed at the invisible. It is not waiting to see how things go; it is a thing you do, on purpose, in the dark, before the evidence arrives. Professor Tracey knew this. You do not spell receive by ear; you spell it on purpose. You do not hope by ear either.

Minus the E

There is one more thing, and it is hiding in the letters, the way these things always are. Take the e off the end of hope, and you are left with hop.

I think the e stands for expectation — the demanded outcome, the particular result the wish insists upon. Strip that away, and what remains is not less than hope. It is hope in motion. A hop is a small thing, light and present and unworried, a little leap that trusts the ground will be there. You cannot hop toward a far-off result; you can only hop now, from where your feet actually are. So there is the

practice, in a single word. Stop wishing toward the fire going out. Take the hop into the boat, before it does. Minus the expectation, hope becomes a leap you can take this very moment.

The House and the Boat

I am writing this in a season when the lesson refuses to stay theoretical. We are selling our home of twenty-five years. The visible house — the beautiful one beside the road I have long since made my

peace with — is going to belong to someone else. And in the same weeks, I find I am being asked to

learn which home was ever truly mine. The house sells. The boat holds. The roof that matters was never the one over the kitchen.

Rohr sets all of this inside what he calls a positive vision, a place the soul can live safely — what Jesus named the reign of God, and notably not against anybody, not expelling anything. That is my own warm field said in a different dialect: out beyond the wishing and the fretting there is a field, and it is warm,

and there is room in it for everyone. The book of Proverbs says that without a vision the people perish. I believe that now in a way I did not before. A wish has no vision; it has only a want. Hope has a vision, and the vision is what holds when the visible gives way.

Soften the Heart, Open the Mind

So I will let an old word teach me one last time. Soften the heart, open the mind. The heart can always soften more, and the mind can always open wider, and hope lives wherever both of those are happening at once — the soft heart that can receive what is coming, the open mind that does not insist on which

shape it must take. That is not weakness. That is the bravest stance a person can hold. It takes far more strength to stay soft and open in a burning house than to harden and demand the fire stop.

Thank you, Professor Tracey, fifty-eight years late, for slipping receive onto my spelling tests until I got

it right. You were teaching me the word I would need for everything. I can spell it now. I am still learning to live it. And I am learning, at last, its quiet cousin — the word I had wrong my whole life, and have only