If we’re honest with ourselves, many of us are very, very tired. After more than a year of ups and downs, all of it has again begun to feel like too much. Some start to speak of the pandemic in past tense, but in Canada where I live, as in Brazil and India and parts of the United States, new Covid variants fuel exponential infection while vaccine supplies follow lines of global inequity. Ethiopia is mired in intractable conflict, with refugees caught in the fray. Another Black person has been killed by police; another mother mourns her precious child. The list goes on and on, a wilderness of sorrow.

What can lead us back to the sustaining energy of hope?